Riya Grover
10 ways AI is transforming the CFO Suite
At our recent New York Tech Week event with Ramp, Rillet and Taxwire, we had an honest discussion about where AI is driving the highest impact across the CFO suite.
Here were the highlight takeaways:
🧠 1. Automating journal entries and accruals
- AI agents are being used to book journal entries directly into ledgers, including debits, credits, and reversal dates.
- Unlike NetSuite, some platforms allow these entries to be saved and reviewed live, offering transparency and auditability.
📩 2. Intelligent document processing (IDP)
- A VP of Finance with no technical background used OpenAI to build an agent that reads check PDFs, extracts payment data, and outputs CSVs — saving hours weekly.
🧠 3. Autonomous research and market scanning
- Strategic finance teams are using AI (OpenAI + Perplexity) to analyze 120+ companies from a market map for M&A, partnerships, and competition, a task that previously required weeks of analyst work, done in 15 minutes.
📊 4. Revenue recognition checks
- Controllers are using GPT to check revenue recognition logic, uploading contracts and even Deloitte’s 700-page rev rec guide to verify their own logic.
- Even when automation is in place, teams value “trust but verify” capabilities using AI as a second opinion tool.
🧮 5. Model drafting from founder notes
- AI is used to convert founder emails and conversations into financial models, offering a 70-80% head start before refining manually.
🔄 6. Transaction classification & coding
- AI mimics how a junior finance hire would learn by observing past GL code patterns, department tagging, and expense policies.
- It can classify transactions, suggest 2 or 3 coding options, and learn from human selection to improve next time.
💸 7. Cash collection & dunning optimization
- Instead of rigid rule based workflows, AI adapts based on Slack discussions or context ("don’t chase this customer yet"), enabling context aware dunning sequences.
🔗 8. Multi-step agentic workflows
- Teams are experimenting with multi-step agents that:
- Research unknown bank transactions
- Lookup GL coding options
- Suggest accounting treatments based on past behaviors
📅 9. AI in month-end close
- Agents are being deployed across checklist items (e.g. “what did I miss?”, “what accruals should I add?”), helping catch audit issues before they happen.
🧬 10. Toward the AI-first finance team
- The vision: one person orchestrating a network of AI agents + fractional support, handling a $100M business.
- Challenges:
- Human context switching
- Edge case handling
- Key-person risk if one person holds too much domain knowledge
- Ideal candidates: curious, technical tinkerers, not necessarily AI experts
Riya Grover
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