Episode 18 - The Fractional Feline

Welcome to episode #18 of Agents of AI, Capto’s podcast for leaders who want to understand how humans + AI agents are reshaping the future.
The "Fractional Feline" joins us to share:
-How their math tutor falsely advised them to pursue a career in anything EXCEPT working with numbers. Later they became qualified as a chartered accountant, working within accounting practices and large companies finance functions, later starting their own accounting firm and growing it to hundreds of clients. 

-Appreciation and motivation in being the "hero" and "expert generalist" for clients; covering everything from simple tasks of closing the books, to M&A and fundraising. 

-That the most underappreciated part of the financial role is having a good bookkeeper and ensuring the month-end close is done properly with clean data, including fully reconciling the P&L and balance sheet.  The first month of nearly every client engagement of theirs is spent on data cleanup, as forecasts are "purely work of fiction" without a solid, clean data foundation.

-Existing use cases for AI and it's power - how AI assist's in achieving clean data and quicker month-end closes by decreasing the time spent on manual reconciliations and analysis.

-A key early use case involved replacing manual Excel-based forecasting, which was time-consuming and error-prone, with FP&A tools that utilize AI to automatically link data, dramatically cutting down work and improving the customer experience with visualizations.

-More aspirationally for AI would be to see AI bots deployed in accounting systems to automatically calculate and build schedules for balance sheet reconciliations like accruals and deferred income directly from invoice data. Another aspirational use case is having an AI in the finance function that can automatically connect to and pull non-financial data, such as sales and operational KPIs from systems like HubSpot and Asana, to establish finance as the "one source of truth" for the business.

-For those who wish to become CFO a recommendation to subscribe to the "Secret CFO Newsletter", a completely free resource....and finally their identity is revealed as Kevin Steel; Founder and Fractional CFO of Clarendon Finance & Strategy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevsteel84/
Agents of AI features CFOs, other practitioners, technology leaders, and AI visionaries to share real wins, failures, and strategies, so teams everywhere can learn, adapt, and lead. You can also learn any time from the entire knowledge base of our guests via our "AI Twin". https://hey.speak-to.ai/agents-of-ai 

If you know a superhero and "Agent of AI" that should join our program, or you are one yourself! Comment, tag them, or reach out to Alexis Chevallot or Peter Steube on LinkedIn.  https://www.linkedin.com/company/wearecapto