Good morning. I can report that CFO Daily readers are very curious about what OpenAI is up to when it comes to its finance department. Last week, I wrote about how OpenAI is using ChatGPT Work—and heard back from many of you about the need to have people on a finance team who know when to push back on what AI says. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar shared the article in a LinkedIn post on Sunday, writing that ChatGPT Work lets teams “spend less time reconciling the past and more time planning the future.”
AI doesn’t replace financial rigor or human judgment, Friar wrote—it helps teams find issues sooner, ask better questions, and get insights to the business while there’s still time to act. “As we help other companies transform how they work with AI, it matters that we lead by example,” she wrote.
As of Monday, the post was racking up likes and comments aplenty, many echoing the same idea: AI speeds up the information reaching decision-makers, but judgment and accountability stay human. Variations of “human accountability remains” or “people still need to use their judgment” showed up in at least seven comments. One commenter put it directly: “The distinction between automating analysis and outsourcing judgment is an important one.” Others framed it as an industry shift—AI turning finance from a “reactive… painful scramble” during close into “a core strategic partner for the board.”
Friar kept the momentum going on Monday with an essay on OpenAI’s site on what she’s learned building an AI-native finance function.
“When I joined OpenAI two years ago, there was only a small finance team supporting a company growing at extraordinary speed,” she wrote. “We needed to build the function from the ground up and make AI fundamental to how we work, make decisions, and support the business.” The team set two goals: a zero-day close and continuously updated forecasting.
“The real promise of an AI-native finance function: a team that understands what is happening as it happens, helps leaders see the choices ahead, and gives the business more time to act while the outcome can still change,” Friar wrote.
She offered five lessons for CFOs: give everyone access, then create a reason to use it; redesign workflows around the decision, not the task; let finance professionals become builders; pair speed with accountability and controls; and measure value per unit of intelligence. She noted that recent OpenAI research finds that 40% of finance professionals’ specialized AI use involves work outside traditional finance, and 22% involves engineering-related tasks.
“Finance sits at the center of strategy, capital, data, risk, and performance,” Friar wrote. “That gives CFOs a unique view of how the company works and a powerful mandate to lead its AI transformation.” For CFOs, the takeaway may be less about adopting a particular AI tool than about rethinking what finance is supposed to do with the time AI gives back. *Quick note: I will be taking a few vacation days. So the next CFO Daily will be in your inbox on Monday. See you next week. Take care.
Sheryl Estrada [email protected]
The post OpenAI’s CFO insists AI won’t replace judgment appeared first on Fortune.
