The Trial Balance is CFO.com’s weekly preview of stories, stats and events to help you prepare.
Part 1 — Finance chiefs at PE-backed firms face mounting pressure to adopt artificial intelligence.
Private equity firms are ramping up pressure on CFOs of portfolio companies to adopt artificial intelligence tools, but many finance leaders aren’t sure exactly where to start.
That’s according to a survey released last week by New York consulting firm Accordion. The April survey of 200 private equity senior leaders and 200 finance chiefs showed that 98% of those on the private equity side “have told their portfolio company CFOs to prioritize the use of AI in the finance function.”
On the CFO side, though, 68% of respondents said they’re taking their time to adopt the emerging technology because they “simply do not know where to begin or who to turn to for help,” according to the survey.
One in 10 respondents think AI is “all hype and not ready to be practically leveraged,” the survey said.
Complicating the matter is the fact that private equity leaders haven’t spelled out which kinds of artificial intelligence tools they want their CFOs to use. The blanket term “AI” is often thrown around to refer to large language models like ChatGPT, as well as many other generative AI tools and so-called “agentic” AI tools that are designed to run with little or no human interference.
In Accordion’s survey, 84% of CFO respondents said they haven’t been given guidance on the types of AI to adopt. Nick Leopard, founder and CEO of Accordion, said that the lack of specificity is strategic.
“Ninety-three percent of sponsors said they are not providing specific AI tool guidance because they want their CFOs to work with outside experts who can better identify and then help implement the right combination of technologies to address the finance workflows they are trying to improve,” he said in an email.
Generative AI tools have their own downsides, too: “Hallucinations,” false or misleading responses from chatbots, are a persistent issue in the current set of tools. But Leopard said they’re handled like “any operational risk: evidence first, separation of duties and continuous monitoring.”
“Hallucinations haven’t disappeared, but they’re rarer than a year ago,” he said. “On numbers, modern agent workflows now call dedicated tools (calculators, spreadsheets, finance APIs), so the math is computed deterministically, meaning performance on arithmetic and roll-ups is markedly better than six months ago. Material items still get human review. We log citations and corrections and re-test routinely. With these controls, AI speeds drafting and search while unverified output never reaches official P&Ls or operational processes.”
Part 2 — This week
Here’s a list of important market events slated for the week ahead.
Monday, Aug. 18
Tuesday, Aug. 19
- Housing starts, July
- Building permits, July
Wednesday, Aug. 20
Thursday, Aug. 21
- Initial jobless claims, Aug. 16
- Philadelphia Fed manufacturing survey, Aug.
- S&P flash U.S. services PMI, Aug.
- S&P flash U.S. manufacturing PMI, Aug.
- U.S. leading economic indicators, July
Friday, Aug. 22 — None scheduled.
Part 3 — Weekly listen: Cisco CFO Mark Patterson on Opening Bid
Mark Patterson, who became executive vice president and CFO of Cisco on July 27, joined Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid to discuss tariff mitigation, how its $28 billion Splunk acquisition is performing and AI infrastructure opportunities with executive editor Brian Sozzi.
Patterson, a 25-year veteran of the company, expressed optimism about Cisco’s future growth opportunities.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the kind of opportunities that we have ahead of us. When you think about the AI infrastructure space… between the hyperscale space on down into the enterprise and all the preparing that enterprises need to do in terms of upgrading their security and network posture, the way networking and security are really coming together as we move into agenetic AI,” Patterson said.
He continued: “This combination of AI infrastructure, security, the way we’ve upgraded our hand in the Splunk acquisition… and then this overall sort of campus refresh… We rolled out probably the biggest innovation payload since I can remember while being at Cisco across all of our portfolio, and so [I’m] pretty excited about the opportunity ahead.”
