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From DataRails, this is FPNA Today.
This week, we have a very special episode of FPNA Today, recorded live at the historic Harvard Club of Boston in front of CFOs and FPNA professionals.
This was a very exciting episode for us, as it's the first time ever that FPNA Today has on the road in the nearly three years of this podcast. We had a truly all -star panel talking about the mood in the US among CFOs and FP &A professionals and how to navigate the daily fluctuations.
We were joined by Jack McCullough of the CFO Leadership Council, Michael Baer, CFO of Wasabi Technologies, and Kathy Yang, the CFO of TreksOn.
Jack actually agreed to take over hosting duties to let me be on the other side of the microphone for a change.
And we covered so much ground.
I got a lot of value from it and I hope you do, too." Thank you all for coming out.
So for those of you who haven't met, I'm Glenn.
I'm the host of FPNA Today.
Jonathan, our producer of the show said, hey, we want to we want to take FPNA Today on the road.
What do you think about going on the road?
And I thought I'm not like Harry Styles.
I can't just go sell out, you know, book a room in another city.
But I did like the idea of coming on road and I always loved to come to Boston.
So Jack was the first person I called because I knew that if anyone could fill a room it would not be me it would be Jack in the context that he made here.
So thank you very much all of you for coming and thank you Jack for helping bring everyone.
So the other interesting part of this is this is recording a podcast here and I think we're going to double, it's going to be an FPNA Today podcast and the rockstar CFOs.
So we had originally envisioned Jack and I both being moderators and then interviewing people, but then it felt like a really weird like crossfire situation with Jack and I, you know, having two people interviewing two people.
So Jack volunteered to take over the panel because he's much better at this public speaking kind of stuff than I am and coordinating and all that, and is going to let me just hide out and answer a few questions here and there on the panel.
So special episode of FPNA Today hosted by Jack McCullough and I'll introduce Jack who will introduce our other speakers as well.
For anyone who doesn't know, Jack, he's the founder of the CFO leadership council and has been a CFO for 26 companies.
I don't even know how that's possible.
Is that right? Jack, I'll let you take it from here.
Good afternoon, everybody.
Go on, thank you for that introduction.
By a show of hands, how many people like to lead their companies during a time of global uncertainty?
Wow, a few of you actually do.
Wow, that's impressive.
Well, this is the panel for you, but we wanted to put this panel together because I think for a long time we've lived in volatile times but never more so than now with the unrelenting pace of changes in technology, challenges with the talent pool and now with the possibility of a global trade war looming, it is just a lot of uncertainty facing CFOs and the organizations that they lead.
So that's why we wanted to do this.
Before we begin, I do want to thank the nice people from DataRills.
Thank you for putting this together and for my seven figure speaking fee.
I'm very grateful. I thought for sure you'd haggle on that.
Hey, you're getting paid for this?
No, seriously. Thank you for putting this together.
I think these are such important topics and I'm grateful that we're able to get some great speakers to talk about them a little bit.
By my way back, I'm going to introduce me briefly.
My name is Jack McCulloch. By day, I run a professional association called the CFO Leadership Council.
We are a group of about 2 ,600 CFOs.
It's a global group, although about 90 % of us are in the U .S. and Canada.
We have our founding member right there, Joe Falcao, and you're probably a top five member, Michael.
So a lot of members are in the room today.
Before we get into it, I do want to allow our speakers to introduce themselves.
So, Michael, do you want to start?
Sure. Michael Baer, I'm CFO of Wasabi Technologies, or Boston -based provider of cloud object storage solutions for commercial, educational and government purposes.
Sure, Kathy Yang, CFO of Treks on Global.
We're interconnection services for engineering solutions for all kinds of industries, and we're based in Boston but global manufacturing facilities.
And I'm Glenn. I'm the host of FPNA today, but my day job, I'm a consultant.
I'm a former CFO. when I first moved into consulting, I was doing fractional CFO work.
Now I'm doing data engineering for the Office of the CFO basically.
So helping CFOs to whether they're, you know, a size company that would use somebody like data rails, or, you know, bigger data projects, but it's a this time, you know, in 2025, we're starting to see more and more CFOs leaning into, okay, we're getting pressure from our boards and from management.
And, know what can we do with AI.
So I'm working now on helping companies implement AI and specifically in the Office of Finance.
We're going to start the first part of the tease with technology.
And just a question for all of you, just kind of an easy one to get you going and we'll start with Kathy I think.
Kathy so what are the emerging technologies should CFOs be paying close attention to in 2025 and beyond and more importantly, what are the potential implications to the finance So, everyone is very hot and chasing all the AI technologies.
So, I think this is not new.
I come from a lot of P &A background, M &A.
Any printed data, any analytical system that help us do our job.
And I think that the usability to really take our system information into usable information that gives insight.
That's what we are looking after.
Um, as a company we're, also because we're a manufacturing company, I'm also very mindful of all the capital investment that we can use to make our factories smarter.
And that is where we could have either machines that could have sensor or elements to help our production floor to know what we're doing, to track, but then also to, on a timely fashion, to bring that into dashboard reports, analyze, analysis so we could do real time assessment of how we're doing and improve upon.
And to really provide the finance community something that we could work with so that we could use for trend analysis predictions as well as further information that we could broaden.
One of the things that we are also mindful of is use data to know where we have a gap so that we are super inquisitive and where we could really fill in the vault toward a gap where we get to have product that can really serve our customers, or we could have things that we could take the customers and then really make new product introduction that are also beneficial.
So those are the things that we are looking after in terms of our technology.
I think, you know, everybody's talking about generative AI right now.
And everybody wants to have this AI magic wand that they can wave over their data and make it do things.
But really, most of the companies that I'm talking to right now, you know, we need to nail down your be before we even look at A .I.
and talking with Michael and from what you're talking about.
It sounds like you guys are in a pretty good space and using data.
But I work with a lot of SMB size businesses that are, you know, with them.
We're having to start with let's get your chart of accounts cleaned up.
Let's figure out, you know, your data dictionary, your source of truth for all of your information and start there and then kind of move them through the phases of analytics.
At the very end of that, you could use generative AI for some additional insights and maybe some automations and a way to talk to your data.
But really in technology now, we've been talking about digital transformation for 30 years and I think if you haven't digitally transformed at this point, then, you're probably a little behind the time but this is like the last call for companies to get their data ready because now what we're going to see on the tech side is not all companies building their own AI solutions but the software that we use, DataRails already and NetSuite and Salesforce and all these tools that we already use are going to start integrating technology into the system.
So when you have your data in the database, you're able to use it and access it that way without having to have your own kind of machine learning engineers and all that with the data.
So it's really for me, that the technology, there's several different ways you can get there, but it's really about getting your data in order and having it all ready to if you haven't already gotten to that sort of data driven decision making, move into that step now.
Michael, what else should they be thinking of?
So it's hard to add to that list. It's pretty comprehensive.
I guess, my view on it is, automation today, as Glenn was alluding to, is table stakes.
It starts off with having the right data model in place and getting good systems and processes that tie together.
Then the next step is making sure that you've got good data hygiene.
It's really easy to just pile systems on top of one another.
But if you don't have good data, well thought through data models, understand the relationships of all the data, then it's all for not.
You got automation and data hygiene in place.
Then you can start figuring out how do you add meaningful business intelligence on top of that?
And that's where the tech stack doesn't matter.
You're going to come up with the tech stack that works for you as a company.
But then figuring out how do you drive inference from the data that you're getting.
I often wonder why we in the financial profession don't put any value on the data that the company has.
Does it show up on a balance sheet?
It's not an expense, it's nothing we track, and yet it's probably the most valuable thing that we have in the company and so, as the ultimate steward of that value in the organization, that's the office of the CFO, we constantly have to think about how do we leverage that to drive the business forward and that's all in inference.
And, again, hearkening back to what both the panelists said, it's easy to talk about and it's really hard to figure out.
You can get the right people with the right kind of mindset with the right systems in place, and then you could start learning about the business and finding the growth vectors and capitalizing on them.
Michael, I want to say it with you.
And Michael works for Wasabi Technologies, which if you're a CFO and you're not familiar with them, maybe check them out.
One of the real hot companies in the data storage industry.
that's an issue that is just absolutely continues to be rapidly involving.
So how do you as CFO of that company assess the financial implications of integrating these emerging technologies, AI and machine learning being two obvious ones, into your overall business model?
And I'll take a step back to do my shameless pitch for the company.
How many of you have data?
How many of you are using Wasabi to store that data?
Okay, the rest of you are paying too much. And that's basically what we do, is we deliver Cloud object storage solutions to companies.
The reason I mention that here is all of this stuff that we're talking about around data, around systems, around tech starts off with having the data in place.
And as I look to the future, it's not clear to me what the winning technology will be.
Is there gonna be LLMs or small models or inference engines or who knows what technology is gonna win.
something will win, many things will win their AI models, and they're all gonna make our data more valuable.
And what we do, our core mission, is to make it really inexpensive to store all that data so that later on when you find ways to drive inference from it or drive intelligence from it, you have the data stored.
Now, that's really responsive to the question that you're asking, how do we assess the value of systems that we've put in place or capabilities we've put in place.
it's no different from any other investment that we make.
There's gotta be an ROI, there's gotta be thought as to what's the investment in both dollars and people that we're gonna make in putting systems in place and have some sense of what the return will be.
Although it's a lot of his guesswork because we just don't know.
I think the question we all should be asking ourselves is, what's the cost of not doing it?
And so you have to figure out how to get investments into the budget one way or another, but it's really about what happens if we don't do this.
We're scaling at an incredibly rapid rate.
We're a hyper -growth company, and I look out a year or two from now and we'll be twice our size or more.
And I think about any system we put in place and say, how's that gonna work when we're twice the size, four times the size, 10 times the size?
And if we don't automate, if we don't think about how to put systems in place, whether they be just the Core Systems or ML or AI or whatever the systems are.
How are we gonna operate a couple of years later?
And Cathy, I wanna shift it over to you, a very different business model, global manufacturing, but specialize in if I have my notes, if they're correct, connectivity solutions across various sectors.
So I know with the adoption of IoT and 5G technologies that creates some challenges and opportunities for you.
So what are you thinking of in terms of implementing them and supporting your business roadmap?
Yes, so Michael talked about how it's data storage.
Our company manufactures interconnect solutions, cable connectors, into companies for under the sea, in, on the land, in the air, or into space.
So anywhere you can think of applications that use cable that is ruggeded, and that's what we do.
And we make these cables to satisfy it.
is oftentimes customized so that the customer needs a customized solution.
We do the engineering.
We work with the customer, making sure the cable connectors can be reliable and protected for the data transmission.
So with the IOT and the 5G, oftentimes these cables are the ones that data goes from one side to the other, ultimately into data storage the customer used, but really transmitting data.
The 5G network has allowed the data transmit very faster, much more faster, and then we also have the IoT.
So one of the applications, for example, is we manufacture these cables under the sea where they're wrapped.
They're protected, so it doesn't really get eaten away by the salt water, but really when we are putting on a cable, there's sensors.
So these are solutions where the divers, the rover units, can be surveying the C floor, surveying what's happening with the petroleum unit or with other things, and it doesn't require any operators to be physically there, but using the sensor to detect what's happening with the cable and what's happening around the C floor.
And so that's really utilizing the IoT.
It's really using the 5G network.
Internally, we are – earlier I talked about capital investment.
So we – finance is always, you know, we worry a lot about inventory management.
So one of our facility, actually multiple of our manufacturing facility has these inventory machines we call vertical lift machine.
They are big vertical lift and I, I described to those who go to a dry cleaner is that you think that dry cleaner with the clothes coming around a rack, these are inventories that goes vertically and they take very little space for inventory they have sensor where anytime an operator is picking parts out of the system, it has sensors to protect for safety reasons.
You're not going to be able to pick if your hands are too early into the line, cross the line until the parts come your way.
At the moment that our operator picked the parts, it's entering to the system.
It connects with our ERP.
It tell us how many parts have been picked, how many are still in demand with MRP, and what we need to procure or also for allowing finance to do what we love to do for inventory tracking and management.
So that's how we use these IoT and technology solutions within our capital environment internally as well.
That's great. And Glenn, I want to ask you, sort of the broader perspective here.
I think it's fair to say that Gen AI is the most transformative technology since the wheel, certainly within the course of our careers.
So in your perspective, how is it really changing the skills and competencies of the finance function?
And are there specific roles that will see significant change or disruption, or maybe even sort of be phased out?
it's interesting right now, as far as what it's doing today.
We all see the potential of it, and we're really seeing just the very early stages of true applications.
So I've been teaching how to use generative AI and FPNA primarily for the past year and a half.
When I'm teaching the courses right now, it's going back to, I guess, GPT4 was probably the first courses I was teaching on.
It's not parlor tricks, because I'm an evangelist for it, but that said, as far as heavy duty real usage, up to now, I think 2025, we're starting to see a change there, it's all been let's play around with this to see what's possible.
But I'm when I have to take my work and come out of your normal workflow, if you're in your ERP, and you're in whatever reporting tool you're using, but you have to pull a CSV or different data out and upload it into something that's web based or whatever, it just feels clunky.
And it's I mean, don't get me wrong, people are finding all kinds of individual productivity acts, but we just haven't gotten there to where it's really not even getting into the fact that the results you get from Generative AI are probabilistic, not deterministic, whereas classical machine learning where you get the answers are going to be different.
Every time we use Generative AI, that might be great for marketing.
It's a little bit of a problem in finance and accounting.
If your trial balance doesn't balance, then something's wrong, there's not a gray area there.
So that said, even doing these courses and showing how it can be used, you see the future and the potential.
And I think we can't ignore it and think it's going going away at this point.
That said, I'm not going to fire my team and turn it over to the robots at this point.
But there are ways that we can get a lot more efficient by using this.
And I think, again, for many of us, the only use that we'll have of it is if it's built into our ERPs, our CRMs, VPM and other tools.
But then for companies like Wasabi, and I know if you have a data engineering team, it is already working with this data in a sophisticated way, those companies are gonna build out really cool applications where, think about your dashboards that you have today.
Whatever system you're in, you have this two dimensional data that you can, maybe you can click in and drill down one or two steps.
But if you want more detailed information, you have to put in a request for a report and get in queue to get this report.
You're interacting with the same data but you're doing it in a way that you can use natural language.
You don't have to be able to write SQL queries.
You don't have to be able to use to write Python code or whatever to interact with the data.
And that's going to really it's going to be like a superpower for analysts in particular.
But anyone who's using those dashboards, because if you can do sort of data science kind of calculations, but you don't have to write a Python application to do it, I mean, there's some amazing tools there.
But in what that's going to do to the teams and the kind of the skills they have. There's a quote by a guy named Clifford Stoll, a really interesting guy, if you haven't heard of him.
But the quote is, data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom and wisdom is not understanding.
I think I got that right.
Whenever I think of that quote, I use it all the time because to me, it's the levels of value that we can add.
So turning data into information, that's the data entry thing.
Nobody goes to get a master's in finance or accounting because they're passionate about entering data, that's at the lowest level.
And that's an area that is really being automated more and more.
But what we're seeing with generative AI and well with analytics in general, but even more so maybe with generative AI, is they're kind of kind of moving up that pyramid so the human in the loop element becomes much more of adding that strategic value than just building models.
And because when all the skills that we prided ourselves are in Excel for being able to write these complicated formulas and doing, you know, building out the models in Excel, well even when I talk about it been integrated.
So Microsoft spent, invested fifteen billion dollars or more at this point, in degenerative A .I.
between open A .I. and the Aquahara that they did and in the internal development that they're doing, they're going to nail copilot.
And when they do, all those FP &A people, all the code or all the sophisticated modeling that we really prided ourselves on, anyone is going to be able to do that, not by writing nested if statements, by just going in and typing into the modern version of Klippy, the Microsoft Assistant, and saying, you know, go do this with my data.
So I think that where we need to be thinking about our teams is moving them up on that strategic level.
And they need to understand how to use generative AI and when you can use it and when you can't, but the real long -term value is gonna be if they're not building those models, how are they adding value to the company?
That's great. I got a lot out of that.
I'm not like the most digitally astute person.
In fact, the only part I really understood is when you talked about washing machine.
So that was helpful to me and hopefully some of the rest of you.
But let's chat a little bit about tariffs.
And Kathy, I think perhaps you're the one most immediately impacted by tariffs.
You and Michael for sure would be.
But you serve a lot of industries.
It's all about international trade policies, right?
That's kind of the world that you're living in these days.
So how do you, as the financial leader of a company like that, navigate the financial uncertainties posed by tariffs, trade tensions, and what measures are you implementing to mitigate these risks?
And, you know, adding to the complexity of it, and this will not turn into political discussion, but it does seem like every day we not only get new news, but contradictory news on what might be happening.
So, you know, can luck with that.
I think both tracks on Elsaba Technologies, I think we had a healthy debate of who gets impacted more.
But I'll go and get started.
So we, by nature of manufacturing globally, there is this impact that we are receiving on the receiving end.
and you're right is ever changing, and it changes by the minutes by the day.
The one thing that we keep center in front for us is that not only we are impacted, our suppliers are impacted, and our customers are impacted too.
So our approach has been being very transparent and open communication with our suppliers and our customers.
So this is not a new thing.
From an internal perspective, our system was ready a few years ago, and now is again ready.
So the IT team, the systems and people who have to deal with invoices were ready to, you know, really react to this really quickly.
From a customer facing or external facing perspective, as soon as we hear the news, we are actually preparing letters to go into our customers and working with our customers very directly to communicate there may be this impact and the moment we get impacted we will have to pass this on to you.
and most of our customers are very receptive to that.
On the supplier fund, we also get a lot of inputs and we immediately jump into analyzing our source of our purchase, where we may have direct purchase or indirect purchase, whether we're going to get impacted.
And this is also another way where, another place where all the procurement team were put on notice immediately to say, when we receive some notice or information, be sure to communicate internally and then let's make sure that we have a strategy to react.
Check zone house, we have 12 business units and 16 manufacturing sites.
So we have all these information from all angles and all front.
And the team is really, really together to think this.
And we are, I always encourage our team to not be silo, but really to be open.
And we found right away that we were able to just know what's going on at each site.
Very luckily, I think that our impact is probably not as material as we had feared to be, but nonetheless it's good to be prepared and ready to respond.
Yes, indeed. So and I didn't realize you two had fate about who would be impacted what, but it's a very real thing for Sabi too, and particularly you're, you know, aggressively expanding your global footprint, it's fair to say.
And so how are you addressing the challenge related to tariffs and, you know, international trade regulations generally, particularly on data sovereignty and cross -border data flows which is critical.
The theme of the day is uncertainty and managing uncertainty.
You know the good news is as an organization that's managing hyper growth built in some level of resiliency to manage uncertainty.
When you're growing almost in a vertical line, what's the slope?
I don't know, it's really really high but we don't know exactly what's going to happen so we have to build in a lot of resiliency in a lot of the systems and the people that are able to react to changes and the trajectory Fortunately, it's been all high growth up until now And so we're hoping to continue to capitalize on that But uncertainty is the word of the day and I think it relates to all the topics that you just mentioned Sure, it starts with tariffs But you know depending on which economic theory you ascribe to our tariffs inflationary or not.
Do they cause? trade imbalance or not, will it cause additional trade barriers to be erected by other countries or not?
How is that going to impact customer behavior, are they gonna buy from US companies or not?
None of these are known, and so we have to think about all of those constantly as we make sense of the environment.
Now, as an organization, why the debate raged is we're in a pretty simple business.
We buy storage equipment, we put it in a data center that we rent someplace.
And we rent that out to our customers and we operate it for them.
And that's, it seems like a simple business, but there's a lot underneath there.
So that can involve procuring equipment that's manufactured in Mexico, that's drop shipped to the United States and integrated into a platform with hardware that comes from other countries, software that's built here, it's maintained from somewhere in a low -cost development center in Europe or in Asia.
And then it shipped out to one of our data centers worldwide perhaps in Canada.
So you have boxes that go from Mexico to the U .S. to Canada.
As one example like a tariff or not how is it going to get tariff?
We just don't know right now.
So we're in the early stage of this.
So we're just understanding what are the flows that we're subject to.
This is no different, by the way, from understanding data sovereignty.
And that's another set of regulations where if we're erecting trade barriers amongst countries that can cause residents of one country, commercial or otherwise, to avoid sending their data to other countries.
So let's say we have a data center in London and a data center in Frankfurt and a data center in Milan, Italy.
Why do we have all those data centers?
Well, German customers didn't wanna send their precious data over the channel to London, which is not an EU country anymore.
They were more comfortable keeping it in Germany.
and our Italian customers didn't want to send it to Germany.
So we opened a data center in Italy with a partner.
So we've been thinking about sort of these artificial barriers for a long time.
Tariffs are no different.
They affect the economics of the business.
They affect the customers.
And just knowing where those barriers are is the first step.
And I'm just hopeful that we land on a solution, a foundation soon so we can build plans around it.
We'll be right back.
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Glen, I want to keep it on a terrace, but changing it a little bit.
AI, it seems like eventually it'll be able to do pretty much everything, but can AI be used strategically in, you know, enhancing supply chain visibility enabling a more rapid response to trade disruptions and other geopolitical events?
Yeah so this goes back to what I was alluding to earlier that the capability is there is whether or not it is integrated into your data.
So you know some examples of ways that you could use AI today is like the deep research tools that OpenAI has one, Google has one, perplexity has one, Grok has one, they all have these deep search tools that will actually go away and research something for you and take 10 or 20 minutes to do it and come back with 30 something sources.
And it's really powerful to incited sources so that, you know, it's not hallucinating, even though there still are some issues with hallucination of sometimes making up sources, but the deep research programs have gotten a little better than that.
But if you were wanting to get like the latest news from, you know, globally on whatever you know economic impact was in that country, you could have these research reports and that's I mean I'm thinking about the work that your FBNA teams have to be doing right now with I don't know how many versions of the forecast you could have like you know see you felt good I'm sure when you got the 2025 budget done and you're like okay we've got this nailed in and now every you know few weeks it's changing dramatically with you know are we gonna be in a trade war what's gonna happen with this percent tariff
what's gonna happen with that, so I would imagine that it's just a bunch of Excel and whatever other systems that you're using doing these multiple forecasts that you can spend a week creating and then end up having to pitch them when the wind blows a different direction.
So I think that uses today if it's not integrated into your historical information you're not able to interact with your actual data, you could do smaller pull off a couple of revenue accounts and are small enough to stay in the context window and you could use it as a thought partner and say, well, you know, help me come up with what would the impacts be if we buy goods from China and the tariff goes up to 50 percent or whatever the tariff rate is and you sort of come up with impacts of that.
But as far as doing the math, you still have to step out into the other systems and do it.
So see the potential there.
I see long term yes, it's we're going to be able to use it as kind of a coworker and a thought partner in the space.
But the you know, for doing a whole budget, you know, just, you know, budgeting revenue and associated expenses, it's too much for coming out of your systems and going into a web -based chatgpt or gemini or whatever.
So you know kind of thought partner getting some ideas but the heavy duty modeling still has to stay in systems that can do it.
But again the SaaS providers are going to start integrating it more and maybe make those tweaking the forecast a little bit easier than in what we have to go through right now just by making it more accessible to more people.
Well it's interesting Michael you look like you're maybe going to comment on that.
I would jump in on this I think it captures both of these you made a comment earlier Jack that AI was the most transformational technology that we've seen in our lifetimes.
And I'm not going to disagree with that but I'd put some nuance on it.
If you go back to thinking about the green shade accountant of a hundred years ago who's writing a list of numbers together and how transformed their job was when the calculator came out.
And then how transformed that calculating calculator using accountants job was when the first spreadsheet came out.
To then think about that spreadsheet using green shaded accountant when the internet came out and they could suddenly access and communicate with others.
These were all highly transformational.
Mobile just made it more annoying because it's with you 24 -7 but it didn't actually give you anything anything more.
It feels like the AI we have today in this reference is what what Glenn was saying it's still at that point of being a tool, and perhaps a very powerful one, but it's a tool.
And I think about you know going back to those other examples, you know how many hours a day of adding up columns of numbers did we solve when we made things available and put them in a spreadsheet and have the column just happen.
It'd save, you know, 80 % of an accountant's days so they could start to think about things and become more of an analyst. We're probably getting there, but it's still early, and now you have to think about what is that AI tool actually telling me is it useful?
When we get to the transformation is what it can do things that Glenn's alluding to, which is, here's a bunch of stuff.
What should I do? And it will spit out, geez, are really exposed to trade policies, you should be thinking about how do you rebuild your supply chain.
That's the analyst in it.
And that becomes transformational when I don't need the analyst anymore.
And it feels like we're a ways from that.
It's not tomorrow, it's here in 30 years.
Is it three years? Is it one year?
Who knows? We have a debate about it, but it's coming.
But I think that's what makes a transformation.
You see a glimpse of what it's gonna be.
It's just the context window and sort of, it's not deployed within our systems deeply yet.
And it's the big SAS companies are kind of slow rolling it a little bit.
Certainly Oracle and NetSuite are because you can't afford to be, the companies, the public companies that you have, you can't afford to have a system that is buggy and hallucinating.
Yeah, that's interesting.
But look, I'm sure none of you in the financial profession has ever made a mistake, right?
I mean, mistakes happen, and so we built up mechanisms for ensuring that they get caught in what we call controls, they're double -checking each other's work, they're the brown M &Ms we scatter all through our organizations to make sure that we're right, and AI models today are no different from that.
They make mistakes.
We're getting to that point where they're probably on par with our decent employees and team members.
Well, that's great.
They're going to have to do better than that to make us say, well, I'm going to discount what my human analyst is saying and believe the AI.
But the two of them together are a really powerful combination.
And it seems like where we are today, where we advance from that.
We might be in a different place.
So I was going to make a really quick point of where we used to be hiring people to do the 10 accountants job, 10 finance people job we have to try to person and see if that works out.
Maybe it's a good fit, maybe it's not good fit.
Today with the tool, we could actually have small quick win with the tool.
And we could try this AI model, we could try this capability, and then if it doesn't work, we could change.
So I think the speed of adoption has really tremendously ground in quadruple or however many times, but I think that adoption that change and the ability to really try new things that we could turn and is really exciting time for the finance for the CFO office.
That's the trait to hire for then.
It's less about the person who can build and maintain a process.
It's about the one who can envision how this works in the future and be constantly revisiting and rebuilding the process.
It's totally different skill set, totally different kind of person.
Are you seeing companies, maybe your smaller suppliers, deal with you around this level of uncertainty?
Are the contract structure, are the deals structure subject to adjustment because of this?
I mean, how are you about pragmatic standpoint dealing with this?
Particularly when you have more meet time, many fashion processes are extended delivery timeframes for completing a deal.
I'm just wondering from a very pragmatic standpoint.
So I'll take a shot at first. So for us, we are, as I said before, we're actually communicating with the customer that we are going to reserve the ability to really add on the tariff charge when we see the impact, that's coming our way.
So we have some customers who we do have long -term project contracts.
And if we didn't have that in the contract, we would have now go into discussions with the customer to warn them that this is coming.
For sure, the next time we bid on the job, we're going to think of that, whether it's an extra charge or pricing, but right now that's how we're handling it.
And we're not seeing it yet, but I fully expect that those costs are gonna get transferred on to us as a consumer of computer hardware gear, and we'll have to assess the impact of that on our customers.
There's a certain amount of uncertainty that we as a service provider have to absorb, but that only works to a point.
Yeah, I'm gonna be a podcast host now.
I sandwiched in here.
We're surrounded, what do we do?
So in manufacturing, I can see it's just the past, but your capital, how do you factor in?
So our customer relies on us to manage all of the difficulties of running their own data center, buying their own equipment, maintaining it, operating, et cetera.
they push all of that on us.
So we're called infrastructure as a service for a reason.
We deliver a service.
A portion of that is that we buy equipment, we deploy it, and then we rent it out to our customers.
Rent them space to store their ones and zeros basically.
Will that have an impact?
Sure. They're expecting us to figure that out.
And look over the last year, we've seen, or you know, last few years, We've seen supply chain shortages and surpluses.
We've seen uncertainty about delivery timeframes.
We've had to manage all of that uncertainty over the past handful of quarters.
Power prices have been up meaningfully in different parts of the world.
Again, all of that comes to us to manage so that we can deploy our service to our customers as one simple price.
Is there an expectation that if all of that comes to Roost Do we have to adjust our pricing?
Potentially, but right now it's up to us to manage that.
And so, if one cost goes up, we're gonna have to find a way to manage that on another part of our platform and just deliver that.
So, services have a different responsibility to their customers.
But ultimately, your customers want you to be around.
And in order to be around, you have to make some money somewhere, and they're understanding that.
Good stuff. Thanks for doing my job.
You came in and helped us out.
Part of my feel to Glenn for that.
That would be great.
So final question on tariffs and I'm going to ask it to the two current CFOs.
Pricing strategies, is this affecting your pricing strategies or are you going to absorb the cost?
You're going to pass them onto your customers?
Have you even thought that far through?
Kathy you looked very pensive.
So you want to take the first crack at it.
We're not necessarily going to jump into pricing increase because of the tariff charge.
but as a continuing margin expansion or looking at our inflation environment there are regularly price increase, regular price increase that we make with our customers, whether it's short term contract, POs, or a long term contract.
But not necessarily tariff, just a regular normal part of the business.
We were forced into a position of having to raise our prices last year because of a number of deflationary pressures.
And I think that's fallen, versus the entire SaaS and IaaS industries that exist today, just costs are going up.
And so eventually you have to pass those on.
I think tariffs are but one part of the uncertainty.
I worry more about the overall inflationary impact of the general macro environment, because that affects every part of our cost structure.
Tariffs impact one portion of it, And so, it's the sum total of all those impacts, which would cause us to reassess pricing policy.
We think about all the time, but again, our customers expect us to manage that and not be constantly adjusting our prices.
They're expecting us to give them a simple, predictable price and it's we deliver.
Okay, final questions on tariffs before we go on to talent, another one.
Joe, you usually have 10 questions with all of these things, nothing?
I'm kidding, cool. Okay, let's chat a little about talent.
Let's have a question for all of you.
And it is more opinion in nature, but where do you all stand on the whole back to work, remote work type of thing?
Do you think employees need to be in the office, all of them, some of them?
Do your employees agree with your position as leaders?
So my company, Aventus Advisory Group, I work with Hadi there.
We are about 50 employees.
We're 100 percent remote and have been since the founding of the company.
And it's uh, I have an office outside of the house just because I can't mix those those two that I walk my one block to my office every day.
But I run team meetings on video all day.
And I get that there are there are some things you miss.
It's one thing that I wonder about is, is junior employees like sort of the one on one coaching and training that it seems like, yes, you can do all this remotely, but you have to plan for it more.
This spontaneous stuff doesn't happen.
So but as far as the kind of work that we do, we could do it from anywhere.
I mean, everything is cloud based and tools are accessible from from anywhere.
I don't see the need, productivity wise, to get everybody in the same place.
But you know, maybe you guys are in a different situation, obviously with manufacturing, can't really do that.
Well, I guess you could have the robots do it.
I guess you could. Yeah.
Yeah. So we're manufacturing the production for the workforce, have always been on site.
And in terms of the office, the staff, professional functions, it depends on the location but most people are four days in the office and we've been that way for I would say a couple of years.
Here in Boston we have a small office with small staff and we travel all the time to see our sites and to see our teams globally but really when we're not travelling we try to be together.
It really stimulates a lot of brainstorming, really discussions.
We value the time together, and we have some, I would say, junior or early career staff.
They are very, very much appreciative of our time together because we spend a lot of time talking and really just have ideas going and then just get synchronized on different practice whatnot.
My finance staff is across the world, so I do regular virtual meetings, and we've been doing this since before the COVID time.
We actually have done… I started having remote work in, I don't know, 10, 11 years ago myself.
But having… it's part of the joy I enjoy being a global company is the ability to really work with worldwide staff and then just have these virtual meetings and I make everyone show their camera because then we can feel like we're in the room together to break down the silos.
We're a cloud company.
So by design from the very get -go, We were remote -friendly, it was called back then.
And we made it part of the culture.
When the pandemic first hit, I think we had just shy of 100 people.
Today, we're over 450, which means that 350 of them were hired in a remote area.
And so that was part of the compact with them.
It means that we've hired people who were comfortable in a remote environment.
That doesn't mean we haven't had to make shifts.
I think the point about junior employees are the biggest one, where do they get the training, where do they get the tap on the shoulder just that I used to do, just walking down the hallway with a banker or with a partner, whoever it was, and say, hey, John, come on, join us in this meeting, just so you can hear what a CFO talks to a banker about and just get some experience that way?
Or the little things that we overhear in the hallway, a question that you kind of key into and say, huh, that question could use a little bit of refinement or maybe there's a different answer.
Those moments are gone.
And so they have to be done by design.
We did a fundraising where we had Diligence going on completely remotely.
And in the early days of the Diligence, as we were pulling around together, I would get on calls with investors where they had one or two people on the Diligence team.
And I had nine or 10 people from the finance team on the call.
It wasn't like we needed nine or 10 people there, but it was really important for me to design a process where they can all feel like you're a part of that round, to learn from the experience, be a part of the questions, part of the answers.
And I watched, as one of our analysts in particular, just shine in communicating the very gut details of how our transactions work to investors who are pretty tough customers.
I might not even have had that experience before had we not been in this remote era.
So we've got a team that's global in 10s of companies, excuse me, countries around the globe.
Most of that's go -to -market, but we have a finance team that's distributed across the US, and across the world.
We just make it work.
It just... It's got to be intentional.
And we do provide office environments for those folks who are more comfortable going into the office, but just have to be very thoughtful about their experience.
Another question for you in the talent area — young professionals aren't entering the world of accounting anymore.
In fact, I heard a statistic that I thought had to be wrong, but I double checked to find something like 70 percent of CPAs are gonna retire in the next seven years.
It was a bit scary, but young people just aren't going into the profession.
So how are your organizations preparing for what are likely to be historically unprecedented talent shortages in the accounting area?
Why don't we, Michael, you're on the floor, why don't you stop this.
I think the accounting professional, the profession is going to suffer from a talent shortage and it's clear they're doing things to address that.
They're lightning the college requirements for it.
They're looking at how do they figure out exactly what skills an accountant needs to come to the market with.
And in my copious spare time, I also teach a class at a local business school.
And so I see this not just from the perspective of a hiring manager and an engaging manager purchasing accounting services, but also thinking about what the students are interested in.
I think you're right.
They're just not interested in the accounting profession today.
You listen to the things that, you know, Glenn and his colleagues talk about about what the world will turn into as we unleash agentic AI and other forms of AI into it, and it might get exciting again.
You think about the farmers of long ago, it wasn't all that fun to wake up early in the morning and till the fields all day, but now there's a whole field of computer science that's around how do you optimize the performance of an acre of land and data science that goes into it.
It's just a different way of approaching it, and I think we're gonna see the same kinds of transformation of that profession.
How do we as a company deal with that?
again, it gets back to a real focus on hiring people who have a growth mindset, who are the right people for the job, not today, not tomorrow, but two or three years from now, the ones that love to learn, that love to be on the edge of technology by doing something that's interesting, and the ones that frankly don't want to be doing the data processing, which was the defining skill set of kind of the last generation of employees.
So it's more difficult now to bring on accounting background folks.
When we do have them into the into the company, what we do is we provide these who are hired in as accountants or accounting manager of a career progression or opportunities to see how accounting is being utilized as a finance person, a business partner for the business.
And so we very intentionally allow opportunities for them to work with a business, to work with sales or other functions, to really build in a PNA function.
So to broaden their visibility, their exposure to really be more to think of accounting with more practical application in the finance profession and to allow them to see the other side.
And we do so by hoping that they become the visitor of us to hire more accountants or accounting background folks into the into the company?
And I guess what the you know, we're a financial advisory services firm, so we have CPAs that we, that's a position that we have to fill.
But we also knowing where the market is now and certainly junior CPAs are demanding a lot more income now than they did just a few years ago as the shortage comes in.
I mean, the market is they're at a premium, but we also hire people who don't yet have their CPAs and you know, maybe even junior accountants that are working on their CPA at various levels and bringing them up.
And I think we're also looking at, okay, if we can't staff accordingly, how else are we going to get the work done?
So we're for the first time, we're doing some offshoring and nearshoring.
Having really good success with that out of the gates, but also, we are building out a platform we're testing now and we haven't rolled this out to any customers but areas where we can use AI to streamline workflows and we're trying because we serve so many clients we're trying to approach it in a way that can be you know we're Hadi and I were talking right before this about you know everybody's chart of accounts being different and all the mapping that we have to do to bring them into a system but what are ways that we can automate this and we're using some AI some rule based stuff but trying
to build out that you know a system where it doesn't matter what input is we run it through our kind of our sausage making process and have standardized outputs, regardless of what your chart of accounts looks like or what industry you're in, and all that.
And that's, we're investing that the time and money into that now, because we know, you know, in a couple, one, margins are getting squeezed in the business, especially if there's a downturn in economics.
And we're, and we're leaning, trying to move away from like time and materials pricing, to value based pricing.
And so we're constantly looking at ways that we can increase margin and deliver a faster and more efficient product.
So it kind of goes along, you know, whether there was a shortage or not, we'd still be doing this work, but hopefully with those solutions in place, I mean, we haven't felt a pick up from it yet.
One of the expectations of young people today is that a lot of stuff is going to get automated away, either through machine learning, AI, or just computer activities.
So a field like accounting can sound very risky because it's associated with transactional activity, recording, everything that is going to disappear at the human level over the next five to 10 years, therefore, I will be redundant and laid off in no short order.
So unless the industry figures out a way to get past that point with potential young people it's going to be tough to attract people and putting aside the CPA standards and all this stuff.
It's not a sexy place, people are not that excited about it.
But that's a fundamental issue when I talk to people.
They're nervous about the fact that a lot of this work can get automated away or AI away at some point.
The other thing, I think, is companies are not doing what they used to do because everything is more quarterly -based and transactional now.
A lot of the larger corporations used to have programs to develop talent internally, and these were formal programs designed to enhance professional development, to cross -train people in different departments and things like that, so I don't see that much anymore.
And that seems to have disappeared in the last 20, 30 years, and I'm just wondering from the two practicing CFOs here, what are your thoughts on trying to minimize this risk to replicate this risk at the low end when they're coming in, and then trying to help make this case that this profession could develop you in my work environment?" So, I guess I'd answer that.
I might have a slightly different view, and I'm not, I wouldn't say it's narrowed by thinking about accountants.
I don't wanna offend anyone on my team, but I don't hire accountants, I hire economists.
I hire people who understand the flow of business.
finance is just applied economics, and accounting is sort of the detail underneath it so you can make good economic decisions.
In that framework, and I think what we look for are people who can learn.
The junior folks obviously need some time to understand how do those flows work, but it's got to be coupled with, whether it's formal or informal, development activities with a sense that they're always learning and on the edge.
So it's a very conscious effort that I make myself and also the leaders in our organization to make sure there are always opportunities to learn, opportunities to sort of expand.
I think your view of no more training programs, I think there's, my sense is, from having two sons that graduated from college in the past, in recent history, there were lots of training programs could have gotten into, they just weren't interested in that.
They wanted to get to real applied skills and real jobs, if you will, where they're active at the beginning.
But there are still plenty of options for students that want to come out of college or other, you know, other development activities and go into something and, you know, be engaged in a training program.
This might be a little bit different.
And I'll say, you know, I, we're, we're a proud client of one of the Big Four won't mention it, be careful of sponsorships here, but they've got a massive university approach to training their teams where they're aggressively investing in training students that come out of all walks of life as juniors, but also engaging in their whole career progression with a lot of training.
As an employer, again, it's up to us to be thinking about the career pathing and the skills development and allowing our team members to engage in lots of different things that keep that interest satiated.
In particular, if you hire really good people that are really smart and wanna learn things, you have to teach them all the time.
So I do view people, besides what we do as a company, is a number one asset for us.
We look for those who are curious, open -minded, and able to go with change or lead change, to be the change agent.
So personally, I've never been a formal development program, And I've been part of large companies, but I know that there are opportunities that's given to me as I started my career.
And that's the velocity, the value that I try to apply with my current organization and then previously.
And that's always the thing is to intentionally give those opportunities to go cross function or to try different disciplines within the finance organization.
And not only just be in the office, but really to be with the team, with the business, learn from different things.
And oftentimes I would actually, we would actually try to give people spot project outside of their current role so that they can try something out for a period of time or to observe a particular process so that they can be visible and exposed to those.
And that's how I think that there's not a even without a formal program.
I think there are ways.
And I view that as my responsibility as a CFO to allow that to happen, to force that to happen, to encourage that to happen within the company.
Kathy, you talked a little bit about passing it on to the customer.
Does the customer at some point go, I'm done?
I mean, have you planned that in there as well?
Yes, we have. I think that's probably at track zone.
This is what we offer to the customers customers are very customized solutions.
So not that we will feel that it's a given or we take that as a given to pass everything onto the customer.
And this is where we would trust that there is a good relationship.
We would be very transparent with the customer and make the help the customer understand that we're experiencing the pain and to if we have to meet in the middle.
But really to go through with some discussions.
Now, if we consider a price increase, it's the same that we don't just bluntly increase price.
There is going to be justification or the case that's made is so that we would help the customer understand that we're ultimately trying to make money for our business.
And this is a partnership.
We value that partnership, therefore have not experienced that type of a push back so far.
So, Claudia Russell, nice to meet you, and thank you for putting this together, Jack.
The industry literature is stating that most CFOs are staying in corporations for an average of two to three years, and it's kind of like a rolling rack in terms of CFOs and how long they sit at the table.
What is your opinion in terms of the CFO profession and where it's going?
I know we talked about the accounting profession and CPAs and I'm actually a CPA myself, but what do you think about the whole CFO and their seat at the table?
I'm not sure to even start with that.
Yeah. I've been doing what I've been doing as a CFO here at the same company for going on seven years now at the same company.
It's a long time for me.
Usually, early -stage companies bring in a CFO to facilitate a transaction, which is something that I've done a few times along the way.
We're in no rush to do that, But I sit ready to do that when it's appropriate.
I aspire to be with hyper growth companies, and that's what's really exciting.
And, you know, I'm deeply engaged in what I do because it's hyper growth.
It's something new every single day.
I get the pleasure of working with a team that I've been able to attract and I get to work with every day.
And and they're just they're fantastic.
You know, why would I why would I do something different now?
I know that the CFO track can be one that's a mill because often times, you know, you miss your number, first one to go, you know, first you take out the head of sales, then you take out CFO, and then you take out CEO. It's always, that's the order, right?
And so a lot of companies are missing their numbers, anything as the CFO has become more strategic and, you know, a bigger role here, the CFO is the new CIO, the CFO is the CIO, the, you know, the C -O -F -O has emerged as a role.
there's one at Salesforce.
Look, it's a broad and encompassing role that's becoming more and more interesting as there's more of a story to tell and more uncertainty out there and all that.
Why would you leave?
So my journey, CFO journey, is slightly different in that so I have been CFO for PE portfolio company so by definition the role is going to turn.
Right. And what I what inspires me to what I value when I select my next journey and is I'm looking for the long term for the team for the business.
So I go in with growth of the company.
There's value creation for me and there's the people that I want to work with.
I have tendency to lean towards global companies and by now probably manufacturing thing, but really is working with the team working with exciting product with the growth industry.
That's where I wanted to be in, and whether it's going to be a two, three or five years, depending on the journey of that portfolio company within the PE investment, is not something that I set a timeline for myself.
I go in from day one to the last day with my 100%, 200%, and I enjoy it.
And I think we are in a evolving time for a CFO. Even today, where 75 minutes, we intend to cover four topic, we weren't able to cover three.
And I think these four are not the only topics we get to deal with on a daily basis.
So there's so much to talk about that we deal with.
And I personally found it very interesting and exciting on a day to day, there's so many to tackle and it is good that we have a team, we have experts around us to find these supports.
The only thing I would add to it is, I also worked for PE back to companies as CFO and I was brought in usually when an investment that was getting long in the tooth and they needed something to happen.
So one kind of a real turnaround, but a lot of times it was just, let's get this company ready to sell.
So I was personally bringing the number down in with 26 CFO positions.
Jack, I'm guessing that you are probably the reason that I think they take you as an outlier out of the mix.
And it's the tenure probably goes up to at least three and a half years.
People worry he's 170 years old.
If you have 26 years I was a contract CFO like Joe.
And so Joe, you have like two or three clients at a given point in time right?
Well I have like two or three anger clients, I have usually three to four occasional finds that are on a monthly basis, I might do a few hours.
No, that is great. I actually wrote a paper predicting what the CFO role would look like in 2030.
I wrote it in 2020.
Doesn't look like I did a great job on it, but I'll be happy to share that, I did the same thing in 2010 about what the role would look like in 2020.
I destroyed any evidence that that thing ever took and I was completely out of it.
2020 I did a mediocre job.
And about five minutes left, and Glen I thought since even though I was the moderator, you're kind of the host and the star of the event.
First of all, I do wanna thank DataRails for making today possible.
Where are my manners?
So thank you for all of your support in putting this together.
I also wanna thank all of you for coming and being part of the audience.
And Glen, if you just wanna share some closing comments.
Yeah, actually I didn't really prepare anything for this.
I'm gonna extemporaneously, yeah, break into song here.
I can ask ChatGPT to help me with some closing remarks here.
Now, I want to echo what Jack said.
Thank you, Databrails, for putting on this event.
And thank you all for coming out and taking some time out of your day to day.
And I think, the uncertainty at this point in 2025.
It feels like those of us who've been doing this a while, we had, I go back to this isn't 2008, 2009, which is my first CFO role, was a little bit dicey, in an over leveraged business that was doing a lot of construction in that period was a little bit scary.
But, you know, the uncertainty that's out there, you know, we at least kind of knew what we were dealing with them once it happened and working way through it, and now as we try to plan for differing futures, I'm, I think I'm maybe a little relieved that I'm not sitting in the CFO seat right now trying to answer board and management questions and trying to figure out the impact of all this.
I mean, just thinking about, you know, passing on cost and in getting to the basic economics of, you know, how what happens if there's a global trade war, if these tariffs go in and and kind of factoring all this.
And there's only, you know, you can model all these different scenarios, but it's trying to navigate limited resources through this.
I admire the work that you guys and that everyone's sitting in the seat at companies is doing right now.
So thank you all for coming out.
And it was great to hear your insights on this for you guys.
And thank you for the questions as well.
Thanks. Thanks.
