Cynthia Stephens joined Templafy as CFO in October 2020, just about two years before the launch of ChatGPT and the ensuing AI hype that followed.
The company, which was founded in Denmark back in 2014, creates software that’s designed to automate the creation of routine corporate documents, such as presentations and requests for proposals. Over the years, it has raised $200 million from investors to date.
Now, at a time when chatbots have found their way into nearly every user interface and word processor, Templafy’s offerings may seem like a quaint piece of tech from the past. But Stephens maintains that the mainstreaming of artificial intelligence tools has, instead, been helpful for the company. Per Templafy’s website, the 200-employee company has managed to land and retain a host of big-name customers like Humana, KPMG and Cisco, among others.
“We’ve been pleased to see that AI has come a long way,” says Stephens, who’s spent much of her financial career in the tech industry. “We have been doing document generation and creation from the beginning, so this is nothing new for us.”
In an interview with CFO.com, Stephens talks through differentiating her company in the era of chatbots, lessons learned from her days at Amazon and how she approaches financial leadership in tech.
Cynthia Stephens
CFO, Templafy
First CFO position: 1999
Notable recent employers:
- Amazon Web Services
- Walt Disney Company
- OpenView Venture Partners
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
DAN NIEPOW: Your company recently earned a shout-out from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on LinkedIn, landing on his list of “partners changing how work gets done.” Did that come as a surprise?
CYNTHIA STEPHENS: We have a great relationship with Microsoft. Actually, we’re in the Microsoft Azure market, or the Microsoft marketplace. We have been one of the top-performing European companies there. So, we’ve been having a lot of conversations with them and have been helping with Copilot implementations and such. But it was a surprise to get the shout-out from the CEO of Microsoft. We’re incredibly delighted about it and did not see that coming.
You previously worked at Amazon Web Services for four years, including as a divisional CFO. What led you to Templafy?
I’ve spent most of my career, with a couple of exceptions, in tech. And I’ve always gravitated towards companies or situations that have been transformative. Templafy was at the stage where they were going from early startup to scale-up, and that, in itself, was interesting. Plus, my work at AWS was supporting the productivity applications product portfolio, so it’s definitely in the same realm. The opportunity to move over to Templafy and do something earlier stage, but in the same realm, was exciting to me. It’s a different way of working, with different challenges and opportunities. Different size and scale.
I will say that working for productivity applications, it’s just become so clear to me that knowledge workers can benefit so much from these improved ways of working.
What would you say were the biggest learnings you took from your time at Amazon?
The primary takeaway was just the focus on customer experience. We led by solving pain points rather than just pushing technology for its own sake, which is something we’re seeing a lot of in the market now. There are a lot of AI applications or investments that have been hyped up instead of being grounded in real applications that solve challenges.
The other piece from my time at AWS is the importance of data-driven decision-making. Every decision at Amazon was and is still driven by data, which is something that can be applied anywhere.
It was definitely a huge learning experience to work there. It’s probably fairly unique to be an environment where there’s so much massive growth in so many different areas, yet it still maintains a very entrepreneurial culture.
What have you learned from leading finance in tech, generally?
Probably not to take anything for granted, and to not be surprised. Especially in this day and age, customers are moving very quickly. The broader market is moving very quickly, and things are changing constantly.
To be an effective finance leader in tech, you really have to be able to stay flexible and pivot, and you need to stay abreast of what’s happening, both in the macro economy as well as within your own company and with your customers. That’s always been the case, but right now, with the explosion of AI, it’s happening even more quickly. You really have to be able to adjust within a matter of a day now, where it used to be within a matter of maybe a month.
Templafy has been around for more than a decade now, well before the advent of ChatGPT and other large language models. How do you communicate the company’s offerings in an increasingly crowded AI marketplace?
We’ve been doing this for a long time, and so that has become a strength for us. Long before AI kind of entered the mainstream, we’d been working with blue-chip customers. Our customer retention rate has been very high. Our differentiation now is how we’ve integrated AI into what we’ve been doing for so long. We’re still maintaining the security and scalability that we’ve always been able to provide. It’s kind of the added cherry on top of everything they’ve had before.
The other thing is that we’re really transparent about how we use AI with our customers. If we find that the right approach may not be to even use some of the AI tools, we’ll tell them that. That’s how we’ve been able to cut through a lot of the noise and retain their trust. It is crowded, but we’re able to maintain quality and the security of our product.
