Most conversations about AI in finance start in the wrong place: with the tool. A shiny demo, a dashboard, a promise. But the teams I've worked in never needed another dashboard. They needed their Thursdays back.
The hours hide in the ordinary
When you've run a close by hand, you learn where the time actually goes. It isn't the big judgment calls; those are the interesting part. It's the reconciliations that are almost the same every month. The report someone rebuilds from scratch because last month's got overwritten. The email chain to chase one number.
That's the work worth automating. Not because it's hard, but because it's frequent, repetitive, and exactly the kind of pattern a well-built workflow handles better than a tired human at 9pm on close night.
Practical beats theoretical
I'm not here to sell you on AI in the abstract. I'm here because I've done the manual version of nearly everything a finance team does, so I can tell the difference between a step that needs a person and a step that needs to stop being someone's job.
More soon: real examples, honest tradeoffs, and the occasional strong opinion.