Recall Sessions: Why Two Finance Leaders Are Ditching Excel for Claude Code | Jeff Cobourn (Gusto) & Rohit Divate (Tide)

**Jeff Cobourn** (0:00)
We've got a board meeting tomorrow, a investor meeting tomorrow.
A year ago, that would have been two weeks of work, five people updating a slide deck, updating the backups in Google Sheets, and trying to get the right data in, and reconciling all the pieces. And today, our team is creating pull requests in GitHub, against an HTML file that is on board.

**Rohit Divate** (0:21)
I want like a company Jarvis, right? I can ingest everything and I can ask it through voice.
You know, give me the answer of all the meetings you ingested, all the Slack and all the Google drives.

**Somrat Niyogi** (0:43)
My guests today are Rohit Divate and Jeff Cobourn. Rohit recently joined Tide as VP of Finance after seven years in corporate finance and strategy at Gusto, and Jeff is approaching nine years on Gusto's finance and strategy team. Between them, they've spent the better part of a decade inside one of the functions that determines how a hyper growth company actually scales. The finance stack is being built in real time. Today, we're getting into what that actually looks like from the inside. How the role of finance is evolving, how teams are using AI to transform the work, how that's shaping headcount decisions, and where the actual debates are happening, from token management to build versus buy. Let's get into it. Jeff, Rohit, I've known you guys for a long time. I've been wanting to do this. I feel like finance is the center of everything right now, given the amount of tension and spend that's going off the roofs, at least that's what's been written about these days.
I'd love to just see what's happening in your world. Maybe we can start.
Rohit, Jeff, both of you guys are finance leaders in your own respective domains. Tell me what's happening in your role and function, and how it's changed over the last few years as AI hit the road.

**Rohit Divate** (2:01)
Yeah, I can go first if you'd like.
When I think about AI, I don't think it's really accelerated until probably the last three to four months. I think even before, like if you look at the last two years, we've had ChatGPT, we've had Claude, but mostly ChatGPT, and it's been used for writing, research, but not necessarily doing anything like really finance centric. I think it's because the models haven't, you couldn't really use it for modeling purposes. It was more like writing and research. But over the last three months, I would say it's gotten quite crazy in terms of the change, and I predict it's going to continue going on like that, at least for the next six months a year that I can think of. I think even thinking beyond that is, I don't think anybody really knows.

**Somrat Niyogi** (2:55)
What has changed specifically? Is it just how the models have just gotten better, or is it like we played with it the last few years, and now we're like willing to lean into it more? Like what's going on? Because for the last few decades, the spreadsheet was king. Like what really changed here?

**Rohit Divate** (3:14)
Yeah, I think for me personally, it was using Claude Code that changed.
And the fact that you can throw in a model, talk to it, and actually model things out is what the big change is. Because before, if you put something in Chat GPT, you were just getting a summary of it. You couldn't really do anything with it. You could just ingest whatever you put in there. But I think now you can actually start coding. You can start coding, you can start building things as a non-technical person, as a non-engineer, you can write databases. So that's the more exciting piece is you can use it as a partner to build things in the finance domain that you couldn't do before.

**Jeff Cobourn** (3:56)
So I think for us, a year ago, let's say, our day-to-day was using Google Drive, was using Microsoft Office. Those are our main tools. Using SQL, as most of our team have a NoSQL, and using Redash to get data out of our beta warehouse. That was our core toolkit. We were in meetings, creating presentations, creating models, and spreadsheets. Today, all of that is gone. Ninety percent of my day, my team's day is just using Claude Code.
All day, every day, we're running multiple sessions and accomplishing different tasks. When we get a question, we immediately go to Claude Code, and we're leveraging the tools there.
When you think about the recurrent processes versus the one-timer or project-based, the recurring processes have changed massively. We've got a board meeting tomorrow, a investor meeting tomorrow. A year ago, that would have been two weeks of work, five people updating a slide deck, updating the backups in Google Sheets, and trying to get the right data in, and reconciling all the pieces. Today, our team is creating pull requests in GitHub against an HTML file that is on our bed and has all the same functionality because I built the Google slide commentary, I built edit inline and ratio out, so you don't need to do a pull request to edit one word. So it's massively change those recurring processes, and then we're leveraging those for the projects as well. Our instinct is just we're using Claude Code, drafting up a new session, leveraging skills we built, and that's our day-to-day. So it's been night and day, and I think I can really remember the day that it changed, which was February 3rd. February 3rd, we all had access to Claude Code, and everything changed after that.