Good morning. CFOs are moving from the sidelines of AI strategy to the center of the conversation, and Cursor’s new CFO Council aims to turn that shift into a playbook for AI ROI.
Cursor, the AI coding company being acquired by SpaceX in a $60 billion all-stock transaction, has launched a CFO Council that will meet quarterly in rotating cities, beginning Aug. 18 in San Francisco. The group brings together finance leaders from tech-forward and legacy companies.
Newly announced members on Wednesday include Michael Brophy, CFO of Natera; Bea Ordonez, CFO of Payoneer; Dinesh Jain, CFO of Firstsource; Matthew Wajner, CFO of First American Bank; Ed Grabscheid, CFO of JFrog; and Andrew Casey, CFO of Amplitude. They join members announced on July 6: Sonalee Parekh, CFO of SentinelOne; Madhur Deora, CFO of Paytm; and Aziz Megji, CFO of Asana. New members are being accepted on a rolling basis.
I sat down with Cursor COO Jordan Topoleski, who helped develop the council, to discuss why the initiative came together.
“Everyone’s spending on AI…but it’s really hard to actually understand how we can measure the tactical ROI,” he told me, describing a common concern among Fortune 500 customers using Cursor’s agentic platform at scale.
While CIOs and CTOs still lead AI implementation, CFOs are increasingly expected to answer a tougher question, for example: Where does a dollar of AI spending reliably generate $10 in business value rather than 50 cents? Measuring that return has become a growing priority for finance leaders.
Topoleski announced the initiative with a simple LinkedIn post and was surprised by the response, receiving numerous requests to participate. Rather than using a formal application process, Cursor assembled the council through a mix of inbound interest and outreach to customers. The goal is to create a cross-functional group spanning industries, public and private companies, and sectors.
The council is designed as a working forum focused on practical tools, Topoleski said. Expected outputs include shared benchmarks for AI productivity, a framework for measuring “return on intelligence,” and guidance on model allocation and cost controls that encourage adoption rather than stifle it.
The objective, Topoleski said, is to help CFOs avoid runaway AI spending while identifying areas—from coding to finance analytics—where investments produce meaningful returns.
That focus reflects what he is hearing from finance chiefs, who are increasingly being pulled into customer discussions as AI spending shifts from an experimental line item to a material operating expense. I also asked him about AI’s role within the finance function.
At Cursor, the company’s agent framework routes work to the most appropriate models for specific tasks, he explained. At the same time, its “canvases” feature lets finance teams connect directly to live data and build AI-powered dashboards without additional software layers. Internally, two of Cursor’s 10 most active users are in the finance department, underscoring how much AI-driven analytical work is already happening outside engineering, he said.
As Topoleski sees it, adoption is no longer enough. The next phase is proving that AI intelligence translates into durable economics that CFOs can defend in the boardroom.
Sheryl Estrada [email protected]
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