February 6, 2025

Finance Leaders Investing in AI: Impact and Predictions

Finance leaders share their perspectives on how they are leveraging AI within their workflows and the impact it will have on their teams.

Finance Leaders Investing in AI: Current Impact and Future Predictions

AI adoption across the enterprise continues to see strong tailwinds, delivering time efficiencies, increased analytical capability, and work quality improvements. It has been particularly impactful in departments like marketing (McKinsey reported strong results and adoption at companies like StichFix and Mattel) and engineering (Forbes reported that over 25% of code at Google is written by AI).

However, this shift has not yet fully materialized in finance departments. In 2024, only 9% of finance leaders are using generative AI in their processes. That’s according to a survey of more than 900 finance professionals from the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) and Deloitte Center for Controllership. Perhaps even more significant is that they also report over 60% of finance teams think they are at least two years away from adopting Generative AI tools.

Vertical AI for Finance

Part of the reason finance teams have lagged in adopting AI is that to date much of the available tooling has a lack of purpose-built tools for finance. While general-purpose AI tools are widely available, they often fall short in critical areas: they are famously bad at math, lack sufficient context, and often prove unreliable for the technical, detail-oriented tasks that finance professionals handle daily. Without robust, specialized AI solutions that can consistently deliver actionable results, many finance leaders view AI as more of a novelty than a practical tool for automating real workflows, slowing the adoption for even the most tech forward finance leaders.

As we’ve previously written, we believe that the Future of Finance is AI. At Concourse, we’ve purpose built finance specific AI agents that integrate with our customer’s finance stack to create real efficiencies and time savings for finance teams. We’ve also shared a guide to some of the best AI finance tools CFOs and finance teams are embracing across FP&A, accounting, treasury, and AP & AR. Innovation, better results, and faster execution are coming to the finance suite at an increasingly rapid pace setting the stage for an explosion in the adoption of AI within finance.

In this blog post – and the first of this series – we highlight 5 finance leaders to get their perspective on where they see the impact AI can have on their team and what they are doing to prepare for it.

We highlight our learnings from conversations with:

Justin Hammergren – VP of FP&A at Lightmatter

Ryan Pack – VP of Finance at Alto

Melanie Arnold – Head of Finance at Billy

Dave Atkins – CEO & Founder of Yardstick

Ambuj Sharma – Head of Finance at Shef

AI and Finance: Finance Leader Perspectives

The following conversations offer a glimpse into how forward thinking finance leaders are thinking about and leveraging AI. Each leader brings a unique perspective, shaped by their company's stage, industry, and specific challenges. Each is extremely excited about the impact AI has had and the transformative potential AI agents can have on financial operations. They're not just waiting for the future of finance to arrive; they're actively building it.

Justin Hammergren – VP of FP&A at Lightmatter

Lightmatter is a Bay Area based growth stage company building photonic tech in data center networking chips. Lightmatter recently raised $400M at a $4.4B valuation from T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, and GV.

“I see AI giving the team a head start on our time-consuming detailed tasks, like spend by vendor analysis and detailed department level forecast vs actual commentary” – Justin Hammergen – VP of FP&A at Lightmatter

Justin is the VP of FP&A at Lightmatter and is excited about AI's potential impact on the finance department. While the team is rapidly growing and hiring across different functions (open roles for finance here) he believes there is a place for AI to allow him and his team to free themselves from highly manual and repetitive tasks to focus on higher value added analyses to drive business goals forward. Justin and his team have already made some investments in AI tooling and expect to do more this year to continue focusing on automation and efficiency gains.

Ryan Pack – Head of Finance at Alto

Alto is a Nashville based growth stage company building a self-directed IRA platform for alternative investments that manages over $1.7B in assets and services over 29,000 investors. Alto has raised over $70M in capital from leading investors such as Unusual Ventures, Advance Venture Partners, and Foundation Capital.

“AI allows the finance team to focus on delivering tangible value to the organization to drive real goals forward instead of spending time on redundant and tedious tasks” – Ryan Pack – Head of Finance at Alto

Ryan leads the finance function at Alto overseeing everything from strategic finance, accounting, treasury, and more. Ryan has been early to adopt AI and believes strongly in continuing to embrace the technology to drive efficiencies within his department and execute at an even higher pace. He’s also very excited about the potential for AI to allow the finance team to increase its visibility and value to the organization by being able to focus on outcomes and easily communicate goals and results to the rest of the organization.

Melanie Arnold – Head of Finance at Billy

Billy is a Nashville based early stage company building an all-in-one construction compliance management solution and has processed over 100,000 policies and used for over 3,500 projects. Billy has raised over $11M in capital from leading investors such as MetaProp, Shadow Ventures, and Entrade Ventures.

“One area I'm very keen to see AI applied is financial forecasting. It is uniquely capable of combining large sets of data, understanding scenarios, and quickly evaluating outcomes.” – Melanie Arnold – Head of Finance at Billy

Melanie leads finance at Billy and has been a strong advocate of new tools and technologies to continue increasing her impact within the company. ​​Two areas Melanie is very excited about are the impact AI can have on streamlining FP&A and bookkeeping. Specifically, she has been an early adopter of AI to help with data cleaning and structuring of information which has enabled her to use AI to recognize trends and extract insights behind her financial data. She is continuously looking to increase the adoption of AI across more workflows that are manual and time consuming to allow her to share data and make decisions faster and with the right context.

David Atkins – Co-Founder & CEO at Yardstick

Yardstick is a boutique dog hotel offering premium boarding and daycare services with locations in Nashville and Dallas. Yardstick offers a wide range of services from daytime to nighttime boarding with grooming and bathing services in their locations.

“As a small business, AI allows us to afford the equivalent of a full-time FP&A analyst for cents on the dollar. This gives all of us better, more consistent, and timelier visibility into all of our business units.” – David Atkins – Co-Founder & CEO at Yardstick

David is the co-founder and CEO of Yardstick and given his background in finance and investing he leads the finance function across the company. As the founder and CEO of the business, freeing up his time and enabling himself to scale is his number one priority and he views AI as one of the most powerful ways of achieving that. Specifically, leveraging AI to help with closing the books is one of his top priorities alongside leveraging AI agents to create financial reports each month with little manual work. He’s already seeing AI’s impact on the amount of manual data analysis, time spent creating reports, and overall financial operations decrease and is excited to continue building functions with AI.

Ambuj Sharma – Head of Finance at Shef

Shef is a San Francisco based community-based food platform empowering the best local chefs to share homemade meals with neighbors. Shef offers both the ability to order one-time meals and recently launched the ability to schedule home cooked meals on a weekly schedule. Shef has raised over $100M from Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, and Y Combinator.

“In a startup you have limited resources so I see AI as being a day-to-day analyst to help quickly identify trends in the key metrics I care about” Ambuj Sharma – Head of Finance at Shef

Ambuj oversees finance at Shef and also has a deep background in analytics and data analysis. He has implemented AI into his finance stack to help with weekly and monthly trend analysis and variance analysis. Ambuj sees AI as an extremely powerful sidekick that can supplement the work that he’s currently doing by enabling data analysis and reporting to become much more efficient and automated. AI has also enabled him to increase financial visibility and accountability across teams and departments which was difficult and time consuming to do before. As vertical AI for finance continues to grow and take over more and more work for him, he’s excited about the impact it will have on business operations through finding cost-saving opportunities and new avenues for growth.

Learnings & Concluding Thoughts

The insights shared by Justin, Ryan, Melanie, David, and Ambuj paint a clear picture of the exciting future of AI in finance. These leaders, representing a range of dynamic companies, aren't just talking about AI—they're actively implementing it, experiencing real results, and paving the way for the finance industry to grow AI adoption. From automating tedious reporting and analysis to gaining deeper insights and freeing up time for strategic initiatives, they're demonstrating the tangible value of AI integration in production.

Their forward-thinking approach highlights the immense potential of AI to transform finance departments, driving efficiency, improving decision-making, and ultimately, contributing to business growth. There is a significant shift in the financial landscape, and we're thrilled to see the innovative ways finance leaders will continue to leverage AI to shape the future of the industry and the impact finance teams can have across the enterprise.

About Concourse

Concourse is building AI agents for corporate finance teams. Concourse works alongside finance teams to assist in day-to-day operations by taking on the most manual and time-consuming work.

Concourse’s AI analyst is tailor-built for finance teams with full connectivity to a company’s existing financial systems. It enables team members to more effectively retrieve and analyze data via natural language to 10x daily productivity.

Concourse’s industry-leading reporting capabilities allow finance teams to create detailed & commentary-rich monthly reports in minutes and eliminate hours to days of manual work.

If you’re excited about leveraging AI for your finance team please join our waitlist or email us at hello@concourse.co for early access.