As CFO, you're evaluating AI from two angles at once: where it produces leverage in your own finance function, and how to evaluate AI capital requests from the rest of the business. Here's the practical guide on both — with the governance posture finance leaders actually need.
1. Board-deck prep. Variance narrative, KPI commentary, executive summary — AI cuts board-prep time from 8–12 hours to 90 minutes. See how to use AI for board reports.
2. Vendor and contract review. AI reads contracts, surfaces risk language, compares vendor proposals against your standards. The verification still requires legal eyes, but the first pass compresses dramatically.
3. Policy and procedure documentation. Finance teams own a lot of operational docs (close procedures, expense policies, vendor management). AI drafts these in hours; you edit.
4. Forecast modeling narrative. The forecast itself stays in spreadsheets. But the explanatory narrative — what changed and why — is now AI-drafted with you reviewing.
1. Written AI policy. Before you approve any business unit's AI spend, require a 1-page policy covering: approved tools, prohibited uses, verification standards, escalation. See our AI policy template.
2. Measurement standard. Don't approve AI capital requests that can't articulate what success looks like quantitatively. "AI to improve marketing" isn't fundable. "AI to cut content production time by 40% within 90 days" is.
3. Audit trail for material decisions. Where AI is used for material business decisions (pricing, hiring, customer commitments), require an audit trail. Claude Team and Enterprise both support this.
4. Vendor concentration limits. Don't let one AI vendor become a single point of failure for critical workflows. Multi-vendor posture is sound finance discipline.
1. Sign-off on financial reports. AI can draft, never approve.
2. Material number generation. Any number in a board pack or external report must be sourced from your system of record, not AI-generated.
3. Audit responses. Auditor questions get human responses, always.
4. Investor communications. Same as audit — investor materials require accountable human review.
When marketing, sales, ops, or product asks for AI software budget, three questions to require before approval:
(1) What's the productivity baseline today and what's the target? If they can't answer, the spend is speculative.
(2) What's the implementation plan and who owns it? Tool subscriptions without implementation are wasted spend (see Claude pricing breakdown).
(3) What's the 90-day measurement plan? If you can't see whether it worked at 90 days, don't fund it.
— Bill Colbert, Treetop Growth Strategy