The Trial Balance is CFO.com’s weekly preview of stories, stats and events to help you prepare.
Part 1 — As the PCAOB turns over, internal dissent may fade
The Securities and Exchange Commission has named a new leadership slate for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, appointing Jim Logothetis as chair and adding Mark Calabria, Kyle Hauptman and Steven Laughton as board members. George Botic will remain on the board and continue serving as acting chair until Logothetis is sworn in.
In announcing the appointments, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins emphasized the importance of investor protection, efficiency and a renewed focus on the board’s statutory mission. The leadership transition occurs at a time when the PCAOB’s own existence has been questioned.
Recent CFO.com reporting provides context for how current and former PCAOB leaders have articulated those priorities. Speaking at a CFO Brew event in New York last fall, former PCAOB chair Erica Williams cautioned against assuming that changes in the regulatory environment translate into reduced scrutiny.
“A lot of people think that it is [a deregulatory environment], but I actually think that it’s deregulatory for some and it could be hyper-regulatory for others,” she said. When markets are expected to self-regulate, Williams added, “that puts even more pressure on your CFOs and your audit committees now than ever before.”
Williams also stressed the persistence of legal and compliance risk beyond enforcement cycles. “The statute of limitations is longer than any political winds,” she said. “The constant is shareholder litigation continues.” She urged organizations to treat control assessments as ongoing rather than episodic, warning that “you can’t use old tools when you have things like spoofing of emails and people doing deepfakes of those voices … used to conduct financial fraud.”
Williams further emphasized the importance of holding external auditors to clear expectations, encouraging pointed questions such as, “How much partner and manager time is actually going into my engagement?”
Technology oversight has been another recurring theme in PCAOB-related coverage. Board member Christina Ho, who chairs the PCAOB’s Technology Innovation Alliance Working Group, spoke candidly in an interview with CFO.com last year about internal challenges around the pace of change, communication and execution.
“I actually have been an advocate for technology since the day I became a board member,” Ho said, recalling early calls for audit oversight to evolve alongside advances in data analytics and artificial intelligence. Ho pointed directly to leadership when discussing why her working group’s recommendations, completed in 2023 and 2024, were not released publicly until late last year.
“It wasn’t anything I changed; it was the fact that Erica Williams left,” she said, adding that Williams’ departure played a big role in the PCAOB’s greater openness to innovation. “Under the new leadership, we will move forward with it.”
Ho has described AI as rapidly becoming foundational to the audit profession and argued the PCAOB’s standards were falling behind. “I believe that AI is evolving from an emerging technology to a real infrastructure that requires governing,” she said. While emphasizing the need for responsibility and caution, she warned against delay driven by fear, saying, “It is not good to let our fear hold us back from a regulator perspective.”
That perspective now carries added weight given Ho’s impending departure. She formally notified the SEC of her intention to resign from the PCAOB effective the earlier of Jan. 31, 2026, or the appointment of a successor to her seat. Her term expired in October 2025, and she chose not to seek reappointment, describing herself as a “credible lone dissenter” who helped block potentially harmful standards and pushed for greater focus on emerging technologies. “Now is the time to make way for a new Board,” she wrote in her resignation notice.
With new members being installed and Ho preparing to exit, the composition of the reconstituted board offers insight into how internal discussion may take shape. Based on the backgrounds of the incoming members, which include senior audit firm leadership, economic policy experience and long-tenured financial regulation, the PCAOB appears less likely to feature a standing public dissenter, the position Ho said she felt compelled to occupy.
Most CFOs recognize that every organization benefits from a skeptic in the room, often playing the part themselves. As the board turns over at the PCAOB, it remains to be seen whether any of the board members will take up that role.
Part 2 — This week
Here’s a list of important market events slated for the week ahead.
Monday, Feb. 2
- S&P Global U.S. Manufacturing PMI – Final, Jan.
- ISM Manufacturing Index, Jan.
Tuesday, Feb. 3
- Job openings, Dec.
- ISM services, Jan.
Wednesday, Feb. 4
- ADP employment, Jan.
- S&P Global U.S. Services PMI — final, Jan.
Thursday, Feb. 5
Friday, Feb. 6
- U.S. employment report, Jan.
- U.S. unemployment rate, Jan.
- U.S. hourly wages, Jan.
- University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment, Feb.
- Consumer credit, Dec.
Part 3 — Weekly listen: Intercom CFO Dan Griggs
On this week’s “Run the Numbers”, host CJ Gustafson speaks with Dan Griggs about how Intercom is building and pricing AI-powered customer service and how finance supports that shift.
Griggs describes generative AI as a technology that changes how customer support work is performed, prompting Intercom to move quickly from experimentation to product development. That decision shaped how the company approached forecasting in an environment where outcomes were not yet fully measurable. Griggs points to an early-career lesson he calls “it’s not zero,” meaning emerging factors belong in the model even when their impact is uncertain. The goal, he says, is to establish a reasonable range of outcomes and refine assumptions as data becomes available.
Operational understanding is another theme Griggs returns to. He argues that finance leaders benefit from learning how work actually happens across the organization, including sales workflows and system friction that affects productivity. That grounding helps connect financial targets to execution realities.
On pricing, Griggs explains why Intercom moved away from seat-based models for its AI agent. Because the product performs work directly, the company adopted outcome-based pricing tied to resolved customer conversations. The approach was designed to align price with value and lower barriers to adoption.
Throughout the discussion, Griggs emphasizes the importance of keeping a core set of metrics top of mind. Having those numbers readily available allows finance leaders to do quick mental math, sanity-check forecasts and stay engaged as strategy and execution continue to evolve.
