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Patrick Villanova (0:03)

The way I would put it right now is that the partnership between the CFO and the CIO has never been closer.

Olya Brase (0:10)

I think accountability will still stay on the human. My rule is no human owner means no go live.

Patrick Villanova (0:18)

CFOs are inherently risk averse. We have to be. And so we have to be very prudent when we implement AI and agents.

Olya Brase (0:25)

How do we create enough governance to protect the organization, at the same time, not to govern away the entrepreneurial spirit?

Gina Gutzeit (0:33)

There's no excuse. The accountability has to stick with the humans. As Harry S. Truman said, one of our dear presidents, the buck stops here. You're the CFO. You're signing the name to the financial statements.

Tom Parker (0:44)

That's it.

30 years ago, the role of the CFO was vastly different. While they still looked ahead to build budgets, they acted more like historians, studying the past performance to manage the books, taxes and audits, but largely kept out of board level email chains. Today, most CFOs at the top of their game barely recognize the environment they started their careers in. They are now less a historian and more a fortune teller, sitting firmly at the right hand of the CEO and guiding big strategic discussions. AI's predictive modeling and big data crunching makes wearing the co-pilot hat for a CFO that much more comfortable, as they help navigate their companies through global risks and critical business-wide decisions. But keeping the plane on course during the rapid, sometimes turbulent, ascent of AI still requires an adept mind. One that can weave through two opposing forces.

One's an old hat, mathematical certainty, the rigid, unforgiving demand for data lineage, auditability and historical truth. The other has never been worn on the runway before, predictive agility, the magnetic north pulling finance heads towards a real-time enterprise that senses risk before it ever lands on the balance sheet. Sitting right in the middle of that tension is the CFO's new tool, agentic AI.

Not just a chatbot summarizing last quarter's numbers, but AI agents that can monitor demand, run its own financial statement fluctuations, and hand the CFO a set of options before the meeting has even started. But with that autonomy comes new headaches. Legacy infrastructure groaning under the weight of transformation, uncomfortable questions about who's liable when it's an algorithm, not a person, that makes a financial reporting error, and a talent market where the technical half-life of a skill has shrunk to just two and a half years. Well, with all of that, welcome to The Next Five podcast. I'm Tom Parker, and today we're asking what it really means to run finance in the age of AI. In an episode, we're calling CFO Futures Navigating the Real-Time Enterprise. Joining me to unpack this are three experts. First up, Patrick Villanova, Chief Financial Officer at BlackLine. Patrick, welcome to the show.

Patrick Villanova (3:28)

Pleasure to meet you. Thank you, Tom.

Tom Parker (3:30)

Next, Olya Brase, EVP of Finance Optimization and Governance at Highgate. Olya, thanks for joining us.

Olya Brase (3:37)

Pleasure to be here.

Tom Parker (3:38)

And finally, Gina Gutzeit, Senior Managing Director and Global Leader of the Office of the CFO Solutions Practice at FTI Consulting. Gina, welcome.

Gina Gutzeit (3:49)

Thank you. My pleasure.

Tom Parker (3:50)

Patrick, let's start with you.

As I said at the top of the show, the environment that you as a CFO now operates in is nearly unrecognizable from a few decades ago. Given the rise of agentic AI, and I'm not talking about pop-up chatbots. I'm referring to an agent that can execute core accounting tasks. What does the day-to-day of a CFO now look like? Is it a continuous finance model, rather than being bound to a monthly or even quarterly earnings calendar?

Patrick Villanova (4:23)

Yeah, thanks, Tom. I've been in this industry for about 25 years. I've been a CFO for a couple of those years, but my background is accounting. I started at a big four firm, PWC, and just have a lot of perspective, just working with executives for 25 plus years, and just seeing how their roles have changed, and just even my 11 years here at BlackLine, seeing how dynamically things have changed here.

The way I would put it right now is that the partnership between the CFO and the CIO has never been closer. If you're an effective CFO, you should have always have had that relationship, but now we're literally linked at the hip talking every day, and why is that? More so, we're now data managers, and the business, while maybe the CIO handles the infrastructure, handles the backbone of technology, the accuracy of that data, the speed by which you report on that data, the speed by which you synthesize it so other executives can make decisions and execute the strategy, that falls on the Office of the CFO. Not just me, but my entire team, because we are data experts, we're experts in controls, we're experts in accuracy, so the business looks to us and says, you have this proliferation of data, and we need the CFO to take that, consolidate it, synthesize it, and package it in a way that we can make effective decisions and understand and comprehend it. Now, what happened in the last couple of years? You had the rise of agentic AI, and that is game-changing to the next level, and you mentioned several things in your opening comments. That's exactly what this company does. It has agents that perform standard accounting tasks. Now, what does that mean for somebody like me? Well, CFOs are inherently risk-averse. We have to be.