The three ways CFOs should budget for AI spend

**Iain Hassall** (0:00)
I think today, with the AI boom, I think we're still so early on, that we just don't know, right? I think everyone thinks that we're transcending pretty quickly, but I think we're just so early, we just don't know where this is gonna be. So it's exciting, but also as a finance leader, it's also a little bit nerve wracking. You know, you see a lot of companies out there that are really struggling with negative gross margins, because, and they're basically just, you know, buying a dollar's worth of inference and selling it for 80 cents. And so what we're trying to do is think about it from a standpoint of making sure that we have a pricing and packaging strategy worked out that really helps us build a longer-term solution for monetization.

**Russ** (0:32)
Effectively, no one knows what great looks like in AI these days anyway, so let's help identify this emergent behavior of greatness and bring those learnings back into the organization.

**Iain Hassall** (0:41)
You know, as teams get smaller, and we start to adopt more AI more, you know, prevalently across the organization, it's a mandate for the entire organization to be more closely knit together. You can't have these silos, otherwise, it's going to be a failing organization.

**Russ** (0:57)
Hello, everyone. Thank you again for listening to AI Impact. I'm here today with Iain, CFO of Netlify. Iain, tell us a little bit about yourself. Thank you for joining.

**Iain Hassall** (1:04)
Thanks for having me here. Thank you. So I'm from Australia originally. I was born and raised there and moved over to the US in 2001 I've been sort of in tech industry for about the 25 years or so, really focusing on DevOps, infrastructure ops types of companies.
Right now at a company called Netlify, we are an AI-based web development platform and app development platform. So you think about anything from prompting an application all the way through enterprise-grade development and running of the application.

**Russ** (1:38)
So we've both been in the Bay Area vaguely a similar amount of time. I've been here 30 years. I think you said 25 years.

**Iain Hassall** (1:44)
25 years.

**Russ** (1:45)
Same amount of time. Would you agree this is the most exciting time you've seen while you're here? This is a fast growing area?

**Iain Hassall** (1:50)
I've been through, I guess, three probably growth phases. And what was interesting is when I came to the US, first of all, a little bit after you, is I came right at the end of the.com boom. And so I get to see...

**Russ** (2:01)
It was more fun being here at the beginning of the.com boom than the end.

**Iain Hassall** (2:03)
Right. So I get to see the wreckage that happened with a lot of companies over the years, the preceding years. But then obviously the next iteration before the GFC, and then obviously Rise of SAS, which really propelled my career with SAS, was the biggest piece. So I thought that was a pretty exciting time. It was a lot more predictable, I think, than where we are right now, but there was a lot of growth up that happened there. I think today with the AI boom, I think we're still so early on that we just don't know, right? I think everyone thinks that we're sort of transcending pretty quickly, but I think we're just so early, we just don't know where this is gonna be. So it's exciting, but also as a finance leader, it's also a little bit nerve wracking.

**Russ** (2:44)
So I definitely want to talk about Netlify and how AI helps you with your product. But before we get there, how has you seen AI Impact just your job as a finance leader? Forget the type of company you're at, just if you were a CFO or if you were still a KPMG.
What's really been the on-the-ground impact of having AI, both from your own team, and then from how you think about budgeting for other teams?

**Iain Hassall** (3:06)
Just the finance side of things, particularly. I think, as I said, I think we're still very early in our adoption of AI. I think a lot of finance leaders are.
I'm part of a CFO community, and we have regular meetings around how we're adopting AI in different forms or fashions.
And realistically, the first step that a lot of us are taking, and me included, is really how do we improve some of the productivity of simple things that we do. So an example is when I was looking at a 499A evaluation of our common stock recently, I want to look at how did this compare to a prior one. It was really just, OK, compare, put the two in an AI engine and say, tell me about the two, and it gives me a lot of context. So just more productivity around that, I think is the first step. And then we're obviously using it for a lot of meeting transcriptions, things like that. So it just summarizes our day to day and allows us to be more efficient with how we direct resources internally, how we make sure our teams are following up on things. So that's the first step on the finance side, which a lot of companies are doing. I think for us now, we're moving into the point of, are we building applications using AI? Are we actually then building dashboards and things like that? So using AI to actually help us build that and get insights into the company's performance a little bit better. And so that's the next step of the journey that we're taking right now.