Masterwork’s CFO Runs 12 AI Agents at Once | Nigel Glenday

Nigel Glenday (0:00)

If we had the same memory to intelligence ratio as these tools, we wouldn't be able to remember how to brush our teeth in the morning. It's so true. They start from a blank slate. These tools need a map. They need a way to understand the world around them. I gave the Masterworks team really an ultimatum. I was like, listen, 80% of all these machine tasks we were doing need to be performed by an agent, or we need to offshore them, or we need to outsource them, or maybe some combination of all three. So, I'm going to go ahead and talk about the values created by addition by subtraction. You can have AI create as much content as you want. And it comes back to my point about relevance. It's figuring out what's important. It's surfacing the right context. It's human taste and judgment.

CJ Gustafson (0:45)

Is this thing on?

Nigel Glenday (0:48)

Yesterday's price is not today's price.

CJ Gustafson (1:00)

Welcome back to Run the Numbers. My name is CJ. I'm a recovering tech CFO. And today I sit down with one of my best CFO friends, Nigel Glenday, CFO and COO, he's a renaissance man, over at Masterworks. Nigel has come on the show before. He talked us through the securitization of artwork and how that works. Pretty mind blowing. You can go back. We'll put that in the show notes. What we go through today is how he is using AI in his daily life. Funny story, I held a dinner in New York City. Nigel got there 10 minutes early. I caught him having a cold beverage at the bar with his computer open and he was running like 10 agents. Before you know it, me and him are both sitting at the bar and he's walking me through all his workflows. I said, dude, you got to come on the show and talk about how you are building with AI. Masterworks, they really got it on lock. They have some super technical finance people. He walks us through the evolution of the finance leader role and how accounting and FP&A people are contributing in the world with AI. So you'll enjoy this combo with Nigel, great guy.

Stay tuned.

Nigel, my friend, it is so nice to have you back on the Run the Numbers podcast.

Nigel Glenday (2:06)

Hey CJ, good to see you.

CJ Gustafson (2:07)

I want people to know how about this AI life you are. So I come into the dinner that we're having and you beat me there to the restaurant and you're sitting at a high top table. You have your laptop open. You have a cold beverage on the left and you have two Claude terminals running in real time. This was next level stuff.

Nigel Glenday (2:27)

That started for my banking days way back. I have to lug a laptop. This whole view that AI is going to reduce people's work, I just don't see it.

CJ Gustafson (2:36)

Then me and you get into a 20-minute demo where you're showing me all the cool stuff that you're doing. We're going to talk about that on the show, but I just wanted to bring it up to people because it's fascinating to your point, how we think that AI is going to take away our jobs. I think many of us are working harder than we ever have.

Nigel Glenday (2:52)

AI, if anything, it's operational leverage. In principle, it should make people more productive. You're just able to produce more output. I think that your ability to produce more output just creates and raises the expectations of your stakeholders, whether it's your boss or your customer, for more output.

When I see people lamenting about, well, what are analysts going to do and what are auditors going to do? I feel like they're going to do 100 times more work, is what that is. I had a situation where I built a little model for myself for a project and cranked out this financial model an hour or so, and I said, if I think back to my banking analyst days, your MD knew you could crank a model out that quickly. It's not like, hey, go hang out on the beach for the rest of the weekend. I need to see 30 of these on Monday.

CJ Gustafson (3:40)

Well, we're going to get into the workload and also some of the cool ways that you're leveraging AI. The last time you came on, we neared it out for an hour on the securitization of any sort of asset class. And you're at the forefront of Masterworks of securitizing artwork so people can buy fractional shares on it. I just wanted to quickly check in with you. As our resident art expert on the Run the Numbers podcast, what's the state of the art market?