Connect with us

Business

CFOs say AI is transforming finance—but only when strategy leads the way

Published

3 weeks ago

on



Good morning. On Thursday, during the Fortune Emerging CFO virtual event in partnership with Workday, leaders discussed how AI is reshaping finance and the evolving responsibilities of CFOs.

James Glover, principal and finance transformation AI leader at Deloitte, emphasized that AI must align with a company’s core strategy. CFOs should first define their objective—efficiency, control, effectiveness, or engagement—then target the finance areas that best support that goal. Companies deploying AI one use case at a time, without a broader plan, are struggling to capture meaningful enterprise value, Glover said.

CFOs are also assessing agentic AI platforms to drive efficiency. “But you actually have to train your people to use it, otherwise they’re going to sort of treat it like a Google search,” Glover commented. That means AI prompting skills are crucial. Implementations for these platforms often take six to 12 months. He advised companies to introduce simple AI productivity tools early to build comfort while planning more ambitious initiatives.

CFOs typically ask Deloitte three questions: What’s the ROI for AI? Where should they begin? And should they buy or build? Early adopters are starting to see “green shoots” of ROI, Glover said.

Developing use cases for AI

A panel of CFOs shared their experiences, emphasizing AI’s impact on accuracy, forecasting, productivity, and the importance of iterative learning and cross-functional collaboration.

Craig Mestel, CFO of Webflow, a website platform for marketing, design, and development teams, said his finance team spent significant time answering routine policy questions. Webflow now uses large language model applications to automate those queries, freeing his team for higher-value work. The company has also built chat-based access to its data. “Non-technical analysts on my team can use natural language to chat with the data and start to get insights,” Mestel said.

He added that Webflow’s CEO has mandated clear expectations around AI use. “We’ve partnered with HR to create a framework that ties into performance reviews,” Mestel said.

Thadd Stricker, CFO of INRIX, which specializes in transportation analytics and location-based data services, said AI is transforming the business in two major ways. It enables analysis of massive mobility datasets—more than 50 petabytes (a unit of digital storage equal to one quadrillion bytes) and 45 billion daily data points—allowing clients to draw actionable insights. And within finance, AI tools have significantly improved reporting and forecasting accuracy, including ARR, reaching up to 95% accuracy with greater transparency and less manual input. He expects those capabilities to expand as similar tools are integrated into platforms like Workday.

Michelle Cheung, CFO and COO of Greenlight, a consumer subscription fintech focused on family finance and safety, said AI strengthens risk management by analyzing transaction data, streamlines operations by automating contract reviews, powers educational content in the app, and improves collaboration by reducing siloed work. The company also conducts hackathons for a better understanding of AI, Cheung said.

‘Don’t give up’

The CFOs noted that not every AI use case succeeds, highlighting the importance of keeping human oversight in the process. Stricker shared that early attempts to use ChatGPT for legal research produced confident but incorrect case citations, underscoring the need to verify AI-generated information and prompt models to acknowledge uncertainty.

Mestel said early experiments using ChatGPT as a junior analyst also fell short. “It’s not ready for that yet; it’s not great at math,” he said. His team also struggled with automating variance analysis due to inconsistent results, but after iterating and testing, they achieved greater reliability and impact.

“The point I would share with CFOs is: if you fail the first time, that’s okay,” Mestel said. “Don’t give up—keep going.” 

Have a good weekend.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Fortune 500 Power Moves

Hugh F. Johnston, senior EVP and CFO of The Walt Disney Company (No. 46), had his tenure extended through Jan. 31, 2029, according to an SEC filing. Johnston, a longtime PepsiCo executive, originally joined Disney on Dec. 4, 2023, for a term ending Dec. 31, 2026. The company raised his target annual long-term equity award to $16.5 million, while his base salary and bonus targets remain unchanged.

Brody Merrill was appointed CFO of Mutual of Omaha (No. 299), effective Dec. 1. Merrill recently served as CFO and treasurer for American National Group. With more than 24 years of financial leadership across the insurance, technology and asset management industries, he has experience in capital management, risk oversight and optimizing business performance. Merrill is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran.

Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition. 

More notable moves this week:

Steve Fieler was appointed CFO of Waymo, an autonomous ride-hailing company. Fieler brings nearly 30 years of financial experience to Waymo, an Alphabet company. Most recently, he was a key member of Google’s CFO leadership team, where he served as VP of planning, BizOps, investments, and investor relations. He also previously held the role of business finance officer for Google’s platforms and ecosystems unit, responsible for products including Android and Chrome. Before his time at Google,  Fieler served as CFO at HP. 

Michael Nofi was appointed CFO of Edgewise Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: EWTX), a muscle disease biopharmaceutical company, effective Nov. 10. Nofi joins Edgewise after serving as chief accounting officer (CAO) at SpringWorks Therapeutics, Inc. He will succeed Edgewise CFO, R. Michael Carruthers, who is retiring. Nofi brings over 30 years of leadership experience. Before joining Edgewise, he served as CAO of SpringWorks Therapeutics. Before that, Nofi was CAO and VP of global accounting and corporate FP&A at The Nature’s Bounty Co.

James G. Mackey was promoted to CFO of BankUnited, Inc. (NYSE: BKU), effective Nov. 10. Mackey was hired on July 23 and served as the senior EVP of finance from Aug. 15 to Nov. 10. Leslie N. Lunak, who has served as the CFO of the company since 2013, will continue as an executive advisor through January 2026.

Martino Cadoni was appointed CFO of DeepL, a global AI product and research company. Cadoni brings more than 15 years of international finance and technology leadership experience. He joins DeepL from Klarna, where he held senior leadership roles including head of strategic finance and investor relations, and led the divestment of Klarna Checkout. Cadoni previously also held senior finance roles at HSBC and GE.

Big Deal

AuditBoard has released the findings of its 2026 Focus on the Future report. The internal audit profession is navigating an environment of hypervolatility defined by accelerating, interconnected risks. The profession is being challenged by three converging forces: persistently tight resources, the rise of AI, and a demand for role redefinition.

For example, only 28% of leaders express confidence in their teams’ ability to effectively audit AI risks, and 63% of organizations have not yet defined a formal risk appetite or governance framework for AI use, leaving internal auditors with little structure for oversight, according to the report.

The findings are based on a survey of 213 global internal audit leaders.

Going deeper

Here are four Fortune weekend reads:

“Ford CEO says he has 5,000 open mechanic jobs with 6-figure salaries from the shortage of manually skilled workers: ‘We are in trouble in our country’” by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

“After Elon Musk’s Boring Co. was cited for serious safety violations, the Nevada governor’s office stepped in. Then someone deleted evidence of that meeting” by Jessica Mathews and Leo Schwartz

“OnlyFans CEO will not tolerate ‘that squidgy layer of middle management’ and refuses to hire them” by Jim Edwards

“The rise of Yann LeCun, the 65-year-old NYU professor who is planning to leave Mark Zuckerberg’s highly paid team at Meta to launch his own AI startup” by Dave Smith

 

 

Overheard

“Replacing entry-level workers with AI is not an option — not unless business and society are willing to accept, as the older generation retires, that AI agents will be the sole practitioners in these crucial professions. Few people would  settle for that future.”

—Steve Hasker, president and CEO of Thomson Reuters, writes in a Fortune opinion piece.



Source link

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Business

Senate Dems’ plan to fix Obamacare premiums adds nearly $300 billion to deficit, CRFB says

Published

8 hours ago

on

December 5, 2025

By



The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is a nonpartisan watchdog that regularly estimates how much the U.S. Congress is adding to the $38 trillion national debt.

With enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies due to expire within days, some Senate Democrats are scrambling to protect millions of Americans from getting the unpleasant holiday gift of spiking health insurance premiums. The CRFB says there’s just one problem with the plan: It’s not funded.

“With the national debt as large as the economy and interest payments costing $1 trillion annually, it is absurd to suggest adding hundreds of billions more to the debt,” CRFB President Maya MacGuineas wrote in a statement on Friday afternoon.

The proposal, backed by members of the Senate Democratic caucus, would fully extend the enhanced ACA subsidies for three years, from 2026 through 2028, with no additional income limits on who can qualify. Those subsidies, originally boosted during the pandemic and later renewed, were designed to lower premiums and prevent coverage losses for middle‑ and lower‑income households purchasing insurance on the ACA exchanges.

CRFB estimated that even this three‑year extension alone would add roughly $300 billion to federal deficits over the next decade, largely because the federal government would continue to shoulder a larger share of premium costs while enrollment and subsidy amounts remain elevated. If Congress ultimately moves to make the enhanced subsidies permanent—as many advocates have urged—the total cost could swell to nearly $550 billion in additional borrowing over the next decade.

Reversing recent guardrails

MacGuineas called the Senate bill “far worse than even a debt-financed extension” as it would roll back several “program integrity” measures that were enacted as part of a 2025 reconciliation law and were intended to tighten oversight of ACA subsidies. On top of that, it would be funded by borrowing even more. “This is a bad idea made worse,” MacGuineas added.

The watchdog group’s central critique is that the new Senate plan does not attempt to offset its costs through spending cuts or new revenue and, in their view, goes beyond a simple extension by expanding the underlying subsidy structure.

The legislation would permanently repeal restrictions that eliminated subsidies for certain groups enrolling during special enrollment periods and would scrap rules requiring full repayment of excess advance subsidies and stricter verification of eligibility and tax reconciliation. The bill would also nullify portions of a 2025 federal regulation that loosened limits on the actuarial value of exchange plans and altered how subsidies are calculated, effectively reshaping how generous plans can be and how federal support is determined. CRFB warned these reversals would increase costs further while weakening safeguards designed to reduce misuse and error in the subsidy system.

MacGuineas said that any subsidy extension should be paired with broader reforms to curb health spending and reduce overall borrowing. In her view, lawmakers are missing a chance to redesign ACA support in a way that lowers premiums while also improving the long‑term budget outlook.

The debate over ACA subsidies recently contributed to a government funding standoff, and CRFB argued that the new Senate bill reflects a political compromise that prioritizes short‑term relief over long‑term fiscal responsibility.

“After a pointless government shutdown over this issue, it is beyond disappointing that this is the preferred solution to such an important issue,” MacGuineas wrote.

The off-year elections cast the government shutdown and cost-of-living arguments in a different light. Democrats made stunning gains and almost flipped a deep-red district in Tennessee as politicians from the far left and center coalesced around “affordability.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly smelling blood in the water and doubling down on the theme heading into the pivotal midterm elections of 2026. President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Pennsylvania soon to discuss pocketbook anxieties. But he is repeating predecessor Joe Biden’s habit of dismissing inflation, despite widespread evidence to the contrary.

“We fixed inflation, and we fixed almost everything,” Trump said in a Tuesday cabinet meeting, in which he also dismissed affordability as a “hoax” pushed by Democrats.​

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle now face a politically fraught choice: allow premiums to jump sharply—including in swing states like Pennsylvania where ACA enrollees face double‑digit increases—or pass an expensive subsidy extension that would, as CRFB calculates, explode the deficit without addressing underlying health care costs.



Source link

Continue Reading

Business

Netflix–Warner Bros. deal sets up $72 billion antitrust test

Published

8 hours ago

on

December 5, 2025

By



Netflix Inc. has won the heated takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Now it must convince global antitrust regulators that the deal won’t give it an illegal advantage in the streaming market. 

The $72 billion tie-up joins the world’s dominant paid streaming service with one of Hollywood’s most iconic movie studios. It would reshape the market for online video content by combining the No. 1 streaming player with the No. 4 service HBO Max and its blockbuster hits such as Game Of Thrones, Friends, and the DC Universe comics characters franchise.  

That could raise red flags for global antitrust regulators over concerns that Netflix would have too much control over the streaming market. The company faces a lengthy Justice Department review and a possible US lawsuit seeking to block the deal if it doesn’t adopt some remedies to get it cleared, analysts said.

“Netflix will have an uphill climb unless it agrees to divest HBO Max as well as additional behavioral commitments — particularly on licensing content,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Rie. “The streaming overlap is significant,” she added, saying the argument that “the market should be viewed more broadly is a tough one to win.”

By choosing Netflix, Warner Bros. has jilted another bidder, Paramount Skydance Corp., a move that risks touching off a political battle in Washington. Paramount is backed by the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison, and his son, David Ellison, and the company has touted their longstanding close ties to President Donald Trump. Their acquisition of Paramount, which closed in August, has won public praise from Trump. 

Comcast Corp. also made a bid for Warner Bros., looking to merge it with its NBCUniversal division.

The Justice Department’s antitrust division, which would review the transaction in the US, could argue that the deal is illegal on its face because the combined market share would put Netflix well over a 30% threshold.

The White House, the Justice Department and Comcast didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. 

US lawmakers from both parties, including Republican Representative Darrell Issa and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren have already faulted the transaction — which would create a global streaming giant with 450 million users — as harmful to consumers.

“This deal looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare,” Warren said after the Netflix announcement. Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, said in a social media post earlier this week that a Warner Bros.-Netflix tie-up would raise more serious competition questions “than any transaction I’ve seen in about a decade.”

European Union regulators are also likely to subject the Netflix proposal to an intensive review amid pressure from legislators. In the UK, the deal has already drawn scrutiny before the announcement, with House of Lords member Baroness Luciana Berger pressing the government on how the transaction would impact competition and consumer prices.

The combined company could raise prices and broadly impact “culture, film, cinemas and theater releases,”said Andreas Schwab, a leading member of the European Parliament on competition issues, after the announcement.

Paramount has sought to frame the Netflix deal as a non-starter. “The simple truth is that a deal with Netflix as the buyer likely will never close, due to antitrust and regulatory challenges in the United States and in most jurisdictions abroad,” Paramount’s antitrust lawyers wrote to their counterparts at Warner Bros. on Dec. 1.

Appealing directly to Trump could help Netflix avoid intense antitrust scrutiny, New Street Research’s Blair Levin wrote in a note on Friday. Levin said it’s possible that Trump could come to see the benefit of switching from a pro-Paramount position to a pro-Netflix position. “And if he does so, we believe the DOJ will follow suit,” Levin wrote.

Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos had dinner with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last December, a move other CEOs made after the election in order to win over the administration. In a call with investors Friday morning, Sarandos said that he’s “highly confident in the regulatory process,” contending the deal favors consumers, workers and innovation. 

“Our plans here are to work really closely with all the appropriate governments and regulators, but really confident that we’re going to get all the necessary approvals that we need,” he said.

Netflix will likely argue to regulators that other video services such as Google’s YouTube and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok should be included in any analysis of the market, which would dramatically shrink the company’s perceived dominance.

The US Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the transfer of broadcast-TV licenses, isn’t expected to play a role in the deal, as neither hold such licenses. Warner Bros. plans to spin off its cable TV division, which includes channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT, before the sale.

Even if antitrust reviews just focus on streaming, Netflix believes it will ultimately prevail, pointing to Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime and Walt Disney Co. as other major competitors, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. 

Netflix is expected to argue that more than 75% of HBO Max subscribers already subscribe to Netflix, making them complementary offerings rather than competitors, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing confidential deliberations. The company is expected to make the case that reducing its content costs through owning Warner Bros., eliminating redundant back-end technology and bundling Netflix with Max will yield lower prices.



Source link

Continue Reading

Business

The rise of AI reasoning models comes with a big energy tradeoff

Published

9 hours ago

on

December 5, 2025

By



Nearly all leading artificial intelligence developers are focused on building AI models that mimic the way humans reason, but new research shows these cutting-edge systems can be far more energy intensive, adding to concerns about AI’s strain on power grids.

AI reasoning models used 30 times more power on average to respond to 1,000 written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability or which had it disabled, according to a study released Thursday. The work was carried out by the AI Energy Score project, led by Hugging Face research scientist Sasha Luccioni and Salesforce Inc. head of AI sustainability Boris Gamazaychikov.

The researchers evaluated 40 open, freely available AI models, including software from OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp. Some models were found to have a much wider disparity in energy consumption, including one from Chinese upstart DeepSeek. A slimmed-down version of DeepSeek’s R1 model used just 50 watt hours to respond to the prompts when reasoning was turned off, or about as much power as is needed to run a 50 watt lightbulb for an hour. With the reasoning feature enabled, the same model required 7,626 watt hours to complete the tasks.

The soaring energy needs of AI have increasingly come under scrutiny. As tech companies race to build more and bigger data centers to support AI, industry watchers have raised concerns about straining power grids and raising energy costs for consumers. A Bloomberg investigation in September found that wholesale electricity prices rose as much as 267% over the past five years in areas near data centers. There are also environmental drawbacks, as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc. have previously acknowledged the data center buildout could complicate their long-term climate objectives. 

More than a year ago, OpenAI released its first reasoning model, called o1. Where its prior software replied almost instantly to queries, o1 spent more time computing an answer before responding. Many other AI companies have since released similar systems, with the goal of solving more complex multistep problems for fields like science, math and coding.

Though reasoning systems have quickly become the industry norm for carrying out more complicated tasks, there has been little research into their energy demands. Much of the increase in power consumption is due to reasoning models generating much more text when responding, the researchers said. 

The new report aims to better understand how AI energy needs are evolving, Luccioni said. She also hopes it helps people better understand that there are different types of AI models suited to different actions. Not every query requires tapping the most computationally intensive AI reasoning systems.

“We should be smarter about the way that we use AI,” Luccioni said. “Choosing the right model for the right task is important.”

To test the difference in power use, the researchers ran all the models on the same computer hardware. They used the same prompts for each, ranging from simple questions — such as asking which team won the Super Bowl in a particular year — to more complex math problems. They also used a software tool called CodeCarbon to track how much energy was being consumed in real time.

The results varied considerably. The researchers found one of Microsoft’s Phi 4 reasoning models used 9,462 watt hours with reasoning turned on, compared with about 18 watt hours with it off. OpenAI’s largest gpt-oss model, meanwhile, had a less stark difference. It used 8,504 watt hours with reasoning on the most computationally intensive “high” setting and 5,313 watt hours with the setting turned down to “low.” 

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google released internal research in August that estimated the median text prompt for its Gemini AI service used 0.24 watt-hours of energy, roughly equal to watching TV for less than nine seconds. Google said that figure was “substantially lower than many public estimates.” 

Much of the discussion about AI power consumption has focused on large-scale facilities set up to train artificial intelligence systems. Increasingly, however, tech firms are shifting more resources to inference, or the process of running AI systems after they’ve been trained. The push toward reasoning models is a big piece of that as these systems are more reliant on inference.

Recently, some tech leaders have acknowledged that AI’s power draw needs to be reckoned with. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the industry must earn the “social permission to consume energy” for AI data centers in a November interview. To do that, he argued tech must use AI to do good and foster broad economic growth.



Source link

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © Miami Select.