The Use and ROI of AI in Finance - with Sowmya Ranganathan, Former Controller OpenAI and CEO, Lumera

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Sowmya Ranganathan, the founder of Lumera and the former controller at OpenAI. We'll be covering three primary topics to Sowmya today. First, how OpenAI actually used generative AI in their finance organization. Two, some lessons learned and best practices of using AI in finance. And third, how to measure the return on investment of AI in finance. So with that, Sowmya, would you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Sowmya Ranganathan** (1:14)
Thanks for having me today, Ray. Really happy to be here. My background. So I'm a CPA, started my career in Canada, moved to San Francisco on a secondment thinking I'd be here for, you know, six months or so and would move back to Canada. That was 12 years ago and we're very much still here in San Francisco. This is home now.
I left EY to go join Square as an accountant in their controllership team. I didn't actually know how to pick companies. I was a customer of Square and I was obsessed with the product. And I had this mindset of, I don't care what job you give me, just give me any job and I just want to be at this company. I got very lucky because I happened to join the company a year before they went public and I learned a lot about what building accounting and tech at scale looked like. After Square did a couple of stints at startups. One was robotics for a restaurant startup. The second one was Rippling, which is, of course, like an enterprise, software company serving HR payroll in a whole suite of products for different parts of the business. And post-Rippling, I was on a sabbatical. Lucky for me, my last day at Rippling was the day ChatGPT launched, and I was enamored. My whole time that I wasn't working, I just couldn't stop playing around with the product, and I got a call to interview for the controller role at OpenAI, and I was a no-brainer. I was just head over heels over what this new technology meant for accountants, for finance teams, for the world overall. And so I was very lucky to join OpenAI as controller the month that they launched the paid version of ChatGPT. So I did that for two years, and this past March, I left to found my own company, bringing AI deployment to finance teams everywhere. So that's the journey.

**Ray Rike** (3:13)
Well, wow, 12 years out of Canada, Square, Rippling, OpenAI. I must admit, you have had quite the run here in the US of A.

**Sowmya Ranganathan** (3:24)
It's, I mean, look, this place has treated me really well, but I'd say the real amazing part of being here. And the reason I chose to build my company here is just the professional network you build here is part of, you know, it's really just the best of the best.

**Ray Rike** (3:42)
Yeah, I was so fortunate. I moved to San Francisco in the mid-90s, and my first job up here was with a company called Netscape, which was kind of the launch of the internet era. So same thing, the network I built, but more importantly, the experiences and lessons I learned, invaluable. But let's move to OpenAI. Okay, they launched, I believe, what? November 30th, 2022 was when Chat GPT launched?

**Sowmya Ranganathan** (4:05)
Yep.

**Ray Rike** (4:06)
So you were there during two years of just amazing growth. So the first thing I have to ask you is just, can you explain a little bit about the environment for those two plus years where growth was just off the charts?

**Sowmya Ranganathan** (4:21)
It was very humbling. You know, many people, me included, thought we had seen just hyperscalers, hyper growth coming into the company.
And it was the kind of job where there's no playbook you could rinse and repeat. Nothing you thought worked in a different place would work here because this was just operating at a whole different level. It's almost like, you know, maybe you thought you were a star player and someone changed the rules of the game right as you were in the game. That's realistically how it felt. Now, we were very lucky. We had an all-star team. It was a very small team. All of Finance was around 10 people, I think, when I joined and, you know, we were, I joined in March 2023 So a few months after ChatGPT launched, but the month we launched the paid product. So from an accounting and finance perspective, there's a lot of rebuilding to do. But we had folks around us on the team who, you know, like I said, you couldn't really bring your playbook from anywhere that you'd worked before. But we had the ability to think from first principles and think about, okay, how should this really work? What is the problem? What does the solution look like? And it was this culture of being super empowered to just go do the thing that needs to be done. And in many ways, it was, you know, it was crazy, but it was also the most energizing type of work that you can imagine for a finance and accounting org.