Ever opened a deck your AI Tools built and found the numbers went wrong three steps back?

Watching every AI pilot on your FP&A team stall out before anything ships?

Tired of being the only person in the room asking who actually checked this?

Mike came back from his yearly AI conference with a pattern he did not expect, because talk after talk was about AI not working, and the reason kept tracing back to the same thing: nobody checking the information going in. He fixes it the way companies approve big spending, with named people at set points who can each stop the whole thing. He calls them gates. Every AI process needs three. Built for finance pros and any FP&A team putting AI Tools into real work. He goes to that same conference every year.

This episode's sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Contact -> [email protected]

Next Steps:

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you're ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it's time to invest in AI for Finance.

What happens to your workflow when an update you never asked for installs itself overnight?

Should one AI tool ever be allowed to run your entire day in finance?

What's your backup plan if Claude, Microsoft Copilot, or any AI tool goes down tomorrow?

A routine Windows update broke the daily workflow Mike runs his finance work through, and he spent the whole morning rebuilding what one overnight glitch had wiped out completely. Work stopped cold. Offices already have a rule that no critical job rests on one person; Mike had let Claude become that person without meaning to. He still uses Claude every day. He just wants FP&A teams to build a backup before their own version of this morning finds them. Windows never did ask permission first.

This episode's sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Contact -> [email protected]

Next Steps:

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you're ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it's time to invest in AI for Finance.

AI Tools Are Automating Excel. You Have to Be Technical with AI in Finance to Survive. 

This episode's sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Contact -> [email protected]

Next Steps:

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you're ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it's time to invest in AI for Finance.

Tried AI on real finance work and got back something you would never send?

Can you point at an example of good, or can you only describe one?

Ever written off a tool on the strength of one bad Tuesday?

HIGHLIGHTS OF EPISODE

The first time I opened Microsoft Copilot for Excel I gave it three months of revenue data and one sentence, asking why a line wasn’t working, and when it handed back something unformatted and generic I decided the tool was junk and didn’t open it again for two months.

I was the problem.

A new analyst gets weeks of context before anyone judges the work, and I gave the model a sentence. This episode is the three things missing from that handoff: context, standards, and the job you picked. Adding context took my output up about 80%. Attaching one report my leadership had liked took it to 95%.

If you work in FP&A and AI has burned you once, this is the fix, and it takes about 10 minutes.

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Contact -> [email protected]

Podcast -> https://www.f9finance.com/podcast

Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Instagram -> @f9finance

TikTok -> @f9finance

Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

Next Steps:

Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/

Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you’re ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it’s time to invest in AI for Finance.

What if the AI win you keep bragging about isn't actually finished?

Why can a 30% drop in your exception count mean nothing got fixed at all?

What happens when your AI tools quietly stop working, and your CFO finds out before you do?

Eighty percent took minutes. The rest took weeks.

I'm sharing how I built an AI-assisted reconciliation that looked finished in eleven minutes, then broke the moment I tried to run it again, and what it actually took to make that automation hold up under a CFO's scrutiny.

If you're an FP&A team already bragging about your AI win, this is the test to run before you promise anyone a repeat performance.

This episode's sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Next Steps

Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/

Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you’re ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it’s time to invest in AI for Finance. 

Why did the finance teams who called themselves most mature at AI cost control do worse than everyone else?

If Technology says it owns AI cost 55% of the time and Finance says 53%, who actually owns it?

Why does 40 to 60% of what an AI feature actually costs never show up on the vendor invoice?

Highlights of Episode

AI in Finance spend stopped being an engineering experiment and became a real line on your budget, and in most buildings nobody, not Technology and not the CFO's office, actually owns it.

Nobody owns the number.

In this episode, I break down why your pilot number was never going to survive production, the mechanical reason AI cost grows like a triangle instead of a line, and the three levers, ones you already know how to pull, that bring it back down.

Resources and Links Mentioned

Sponsor

This episode's sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Links

Next Steps

Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/

Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you’re ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it’s time to invest in AI for Finance. 

What good are a couple hundred saved prompts if you're still losing your afternoon to month-end?

What do you do when Claude hands you the end of 12 steps you never watched?

What changes when you brief Claude like a new FP&A analyst instead of prompting it?

Highlights of Episode

Last month I watched Claude take a job I would have broken into fifteen separate prompts and just run it, start to finish, while I got a coffee.

Fifteen prompts, one brief.

This episode hands you the three things that change once you brief Claude like an FP&A analyst instead of prompting it, the same shift that took one reconciliation from a full afternoon to about ten minutes.

Sponsor

This episode's sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Links

Contact -> [email protected]

Podcast -> Apple Podcasts and Spotify: https://www.f9finance.com/podcast/

Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Instagram -> @f9finance

TikTok -> @f9finance

Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

Next Steps

Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/

Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you’re ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it’s time to invest in AI for Finance. 

What is “workslop,” and are you already passing it downstream without knowing?

Why did 40% of workers get handed broken AI work in a single month, and could you already be one of them?

Why did 95% of enterprise AI pilots return nothing measurable?

The same AI tool, in the same week, saved me a full afternoon on one job and cost me one on another, and this episode draws the line between AI tools that pay you back and the ones that just add more work with a nicer font. Same tool, opposite results. I’m grounding the split in fresh 2025 and 2026 research and a rule I call the verification tax, so you can tell checkable work from judgment work before automation touches either one.

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you’re ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it’s time to invest in AI for Finance. 

What do you do when the AI tool your workflow runs on gets pulled by the government with zero notice?

Why is betting on a frontier AI model actually a concentration risk, the same kind you already manage in a portfolio?

What are the three moves that keep a vanished AI tool from blowing up a deadline you already promised your CFO?

On June 9th, the most powerful AI model on the planet launched, then the US government pulled it three days later, and it came back three weeks after that. Gone in three days. In this episode, I break down what the Claude Fable 5 saga means for AI in Finance, for any finance pro building AI tools into real work, and the three moves that keep a vanished tool from blowing up your deadline.

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you’re ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it’s time to invest in AI for Finance. 

Why “tool first, not job first” kills most AI rollouts before month 3?

What’s the one question that separates pilots that ship from pilots that stall?

Is the CFO mandate actually enough to get an AI rollout across the finish line?

Every vendor sells AI. Most pilots stall anyway. In this episode I break down the three failure modes I keep seeing across real finance functions, why each one happens, and the exact set of questions I’d ask before any AI tool gets a CFO’s sign-off. If you’ve watched an AI pilot go quiet in the last year, or you’re staring down a vendor deck right now, this one is for you.

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you’re ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it’s time to invest in AI for Finance.