On Tuesday, CFO.com hosted the Future of Finance virtual conference to discuss the transformative leadership role of CFOs today. Finance leaders — including Dr. Tim Naddy of the Savannah Bananas, Amy Butte of Navan and John Cappadona of EverSmith Brands — joined the CFO editorial team to offer insights into how the finance role of the future will take shape.
The sessions covered several hot topics important to today’s chief financial officers, including the use of AI in finance, finding talent for your finance team and how to help fuel business growth and innovation.
Read on for a recap of the top five takeaways from our event, which we encourage you to watch on-demand to get the complete picture.
1. AI’s future in finance operations
As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves, CFOs are assessing its impact on their finance teams and organizations and exploring ways to harness the new opportunities the technology presents. So what does the future of AI look like for finance? Glenn Hopper, CFO and head of AI research at Eventus and John Cappadona, CFO at EverSmith Brands, offered their predictions on the intersection of AI technology and finance in the next three to five years.
‘It’s going to be into the modeling. Into being able to take the data we have to generate a forecast — three, five-year models — and hone that to then doing the analytics and the reason checking, as opposed to the data collection and building the model, that’s really where I see it. It’s just there’s so much opportunity out there,” Cappadona said.
“Moonshot prediction would be artificial general intelligence in the next five years,” Hopper said. “More realistic would be that we have reliable, trustworthy, generative AI built into the software that we already use today. And that’s the most likely and realistic forecast.”
2. Leadership in a flat organization
Both Eric Mason, CFO of the City of Quincy, Massachusetts, and Amy Butte, CFO of Navan, said they maintain a flat organizational structure — meaning there are no hierarchy levels between employees on their finance teams and leadership. Fostering relationships in this manner has proven incredibly valuable over time for the two finance leaders and helps them improve their abilities to manage and make good decisions.
Butte shared, “When I think about the collaboration with my team, people hear it all the time. Our goal within finance today is to be a strategic partner and not just tell them what the numbers are, but help offer insight with the data and what we do as a team. So I’ve tried to bring in a much flatter structure, a lot more collaboration, a lot more transparency and what’s going on across the organization, and I wouldn’t be here without my team.”
Mason added: “If [I’m] talking to my director of accounts about an accounting question, I always make sure I come in there understanding that person does that job every single day, and I’m maybe a small snippet of his day, and that’s okay that he knows more than me. And I often try and accentuate the strengths of my team and cover the weaknesses.”
Butte also noted that one of her first hires, when she took the top finance spot at Navan, was Anne Giviskos, someone she worked with at the New York Stock Exchange over 20 years ago. “She makes me better, and I’d like to think I may do the same for her. And it is, we say this all the time. It’s a team sport,” Butte said.
3. Innovate creatively and connect purposely
Dr. Tim Naddy of the Savannah Bananas explained that finance teams and their leaders need to be able to work together to innovate and build momentum, which can’t happen if you aren’t working on building relationships within your team.
“We need to be able to innovate and to keep that momentum to be relevant. We connect purposely. What does that mean? You get your coffee cup and you walk around. And I know some of you hate people like this, but we’re CFOs. We got to set the tone,” Naddy said. “Get that coffee cup, swish it around like Office Space, and walk around and talk to your people. They want to know who you are, just as much as you want to know who your team is.”
4. Proprietary data protection in AI models
Finance leaders should be cautious about the data they upload to AI tools — such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude — and are advised against using proprietary data in any off-the-shelf versions of these models, according to Hopper.
“They tell you right up front that your data could be used or will be used to train the model,” Hopper said. “The chances of your data bubbling through the entire internet to come up to the surface are small, but they’re not zero. If somebody asked the right question, because the model’s been trained on all the data it’s given, your proprietary information could come to the top.”
Hopper said there are ways to protect proprietary information from being public as long as you are using the paid AI models, which offer closed environments that make data as safe as anything you put on the web.
“If you trust Amazon, Google and the big tech giants to protect your other data, this is going to be the same as that, as long as you’re in that system that protects it,” said Hopper.
5. Expand your search radius for finance team talent
As CFOs turn to outsource accounting functions due to the talent shortage, they should consider looking outside of their regular talent pool applicants to fill open spots on their finance teams.
“If you’re looking for people right now to come and fill some roles for you, take a chance and go talk to the math departments. These kids are brilliant,” Naddy said. “The last two people I’ve had in my finance department who have been absolutely stellar individuals didn’t have a finance or an accounting degree. They had a math and stats background.”
”As far as the accounting kids, what I would tell students is get a Bachelor’s [degree] in some kind of technical discipline, whether it be finance or accounting … to set you up for success,” said Naddy who is also an adjunct professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
