Council Post: The CFO’s Guide To Adopting AI
Gregg Mojica is Co-Founder & CEO at Kinter.ai, AI Accountants that execute the expense close.gettyMany CFOs and controllers are feeling pressure from their CEO or board to go all in on AI. The problem is t...
Gregg Mojica is Co-Founder & CEO at Kinter.ai, AI Accountants that execute the expense close.
getty
Many CFOs and controllers are feeling pressure from their CEO or board to go all in on AI. The problem is that most finance leaders have no idea where to start. I keep hearing the same thing: Teams just bought Gemini or Claude, and now they’re trying to figure out what to do next.
Finance is a conservative industry by nature, governed by compliance requirements and regulatory obligations. And there are not many AI-native tools built specifically for finance, as opposed to legacy tools that simply tacked AI onto their existing product. Nonetheless, the AI adoption gap is real, and it’s important to talk about how we can close it.
The Case For AI
Two forces are colliding in ways that are already putting pressure on finance teams. The first is a shrinking workforce. There is a well-documented CPA shortage in this country, and it's accelerating. Fewer young people are entering the profession, and the current generation of CPAs, primarily Baby Boomers, is heading toward retirement.
The second force is rising demand. Look at the capital flowing into new companies, data centers and investments right now. There is a genuine boom in economic activity, and every dollar has to be accounted for. It has also never been easier to start a business, which means more transactions and more compliance work across the board. The result: overworked finance teams carrying heavier client loads, as well as rising error rates. When people are stretched too thin, they make mistakes.
Most in-house finance teams are organized around two kinds of work: preparation and review. Preparers, which include staff accountants, AP and AR specialists and bookkeepers, do the hands-on work like entering data, generating reports and journal entries and closing the books. Reviewers, typically controllers and CFOs, then evaluate that work and give it their stamp of approval.
Preparer work is largely manual and routine, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that AI does well. What we're seeing now is that agentic AI is stepping into the preparer role, which means the person who once held that role can move into a reviewer seat. Instead of one or two reviewers overseeing a large team of preparers, you can now have AI do the preparation and more people do the reviewing. Done right, this is more efficient and cost-effective, without any sacrifices in accuracy.
Guidelines For Finance Leaders
So, where should a CFO or controller actually begin with AI? Some vendors will pitch you to rip out your entire ERP system and rebuild from scratch. Think hard before taking such a risky approach. Instead, look at your close process, the month-end checklist your team runs every month to close the books. Pick one or two subcomponents and automate those first.
Starting small lets you prove the concept in a contained, auditable way without shocking your system or starting over completely. Your employees won't feel like AI is coming for their jobs because you're introducing it gradually. Once you show that it works and is compliant, you can move forward with confidence.
When it comes to tools, think in two layers. Horizontal platforms like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are powerful for tasks such as drafting and research. If your team isn't using one of these today, you're already behind. But these tools have real limitations as finance workflow solutions. The workflow lives with the person who built it. That means if I set up a custom prompt and leave the company next week, the context I created leaves with me, and there's usually no audit trail. In accounting, where everything has to be traceable, that’s a serious problem.
Fortunately, a new generation of companies is building finance-specific, verticalized AI tools with the compliance controls the industry requires built in. The right strategy is to use horizontal tools for general productivity and specialized tools for work that has to stand up to auditors.
Finance leaders are being squeezed between boards pushing for AI adoption, growing client loads and a shrinking talent pool. The good news is that the entry point doesn't have to be dramatic: start carefully, start small and go from there.
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