Anna Tiomina's Bold Prediction: Finance Teams Will Be 'People and Robots' by 2030 - Part 1 of 3

Summary

In this episode of Asking Good Questions, host Edward Roske interviews Anna Tiomina, a finance executive and AI advisor, about her journey in finance and the integration of AI in financial operations. They discuss the evolving role of CFOs, the balance between risk and innovation in leadership, and the transformative impact of AI on financial processes. Anna emphasizes the need for finance professionals to adapt to new technologies and the potential for AI to enhance decision-making and operational efficiency.

Takeaways

Finance is essential for company growth and management.
CFOs play a crucial balancing role in leadership dynamics.
Different CEOs have varying risk profiles that affect decision-making.
AI is set to revolutionize financial operations and processes.
The future of finance will require more tailored analysis roles.
Manual tasks in finance will be replaced by AI technologies.
AI will create new roles focused on auditing and compliance.
Understanding financial statements is key for effective leadership.
AI can provide real-time insights for better decision-making.
The standards of financial operations will evolve with technology.

Sound Bites

"Cash is king."
"AI will change the way we work."
"Reconciling is not a ton of fun."

Chapters

00:00 Bridging Finance and AI: An Introduction
03:07 The Role of CFO: Balancing Act in Leadership
05:48 Understanding CEO Risk Profiles
08:54 The Impact of AI on Financial Operations
12:08 AI: A Force Multiplier in Finance
14:57 The Future of Financial Roles in an AI World

This episode of Asking Good Questions is brought to you by Caprus.Ai.

Check how we empower the office of the CFO to harness the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and revolutionize their operations.

Transcript

Asking Good Questions Podcast - Anna Tiomina Interview 

Edward Roske (00:00.334) Hello, and welcome to Asking Good Questions, the podcast where we explore the future of finance through meaningful conversations with extremely intelligent industry leaders. I am your host, Edward Roske, professional good question asker. And today I am joined by someone who has successfully bridged multiple worlds that many are still trying to connect: traditional finance leadership and AI integration, with over a decade and a half of finance executive experience spanning multinational pharmaceutical operations and tech innovations. She recently founded Blend to Balance, offering both fractional CFO services and AI implementation consulting. She says finance people are much more conservative and more risk averse, but she also says if you're not doing it now, in six months, it's gonna be a lot more difficult to start than it is now. That someone is our great guest for today, Anna Tiomina, MBA, AI advisor, and CFO. Anna, welcome to Asking Good Questions.

Anna Tiomina (01:25.422) Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

Edward Roske (01:33.742) We are going to have a lot of fun over the next hour. You may not know this, but my regular guests and listeners do. I always wear a hat, but I reserve the red hat for very special guests. So today is going to be wonderful because rarely do I get to interview somebody who understands both that financial side and the AI side and is bringing them together. So we're going to start by talking through your journey. So you've had quite the path. You were a controller, were a CFO at Sandoz across multiple countries, none of which sound easy to understand at all. It's like, I wasn't even aware of what GAAP must look like in Belarus. CFO at SoftTech, you were managing international operations. You've now founded your own venture, combining that fractional CFO with that AI consulting. You've done a lot. And what I'm trying to figure out is what is that through line? Like what connects those experiences?

Let's start there. What has remained constant across all those different financial leadership roles across really diverse environments?

Anna Tiomina (02:45.000) Yeah, that's a great question. I really have an unusual career as a CFO. I'm one of the not many leaders who've left the corporate world. Most of the colleagues that worked with me in Sandoz, they are still there in other locations, perhaps in other finance related functions, but people rarely leave the corporate world.

And I have switched several industries, but what remains constant for me is my passion for using finance to help companies grow and manage. I look at finance as the blood of the company. It is everywhere. You don't necessarily see it, but if you know how to look at it and how to track it, you understand where the company is and if it has any diseases, it is pretty easy to spot. And if you give some treatment, again, taking a blood test, you understand if this treatment works or not. So this remains my passion. I started in finance and I don't think that I'm still an acting CFO in spite of this second AI implementation advisory role that I have. So, and I'm not planning to stop it. I really enjoy doing that. I like working with CEOs. I like being number two in the company. So yeah, so that's what drives me.

Edward Roske (04:15.000) I like the idea of finance being that Star Trek tricorder. You know, it comes in and just analyzes the whole body of the company and says what's going well and what's not. I like the thought of a CFO as not just being backwards looking and governance and compliance, but really what is happening right now. But to your point also, how do you treat it? How do you cure it? How do you improve it? Like, what is that going forward?

You talk about the CFO being that number two role in companies. How do you strengthen that partnership? Like how do you make sure the CEO understands you're not just the person to call to find out what already happened, but the person to call to find out about what's going to happen?

Anna Tiomina (05:00.000) Well, again, that's a great question and the answer lies very much in specifics of the company and the person you're working with. But what I was always trying to do, I was trying to balance the person I'm working with. And balance is generally one of my favorite words and concepts, which can be seen by the name of the company that I founded. But what I'm trying to say is, some of my number ones were very conservative people, so I had to push them forward. Let's not try to collect all the information. We need to decide, act, take some risk, and see what happens. Maybe manage this risk, maybe be smart about how we do that, but let's not wait because some of the CEOs are really, really conservative. Some of the CEOs, founders that I worked with are the opposite. So they are running forward, they're not looking around, they're not making plans, they are not agreeing with the rest of the team. And in this case I am kind of trying to hold them back a little bit. Let's stop here, let's put a plan together, let's get everyone aligned about it. So I really see my role as a balancing role and I'm not perfect myself, so I have my personality too, right? So some things I can balance, some things I cannot. I'm naturally not very patient, so I probably would work better with the CEOs who are trying to move forward faster and then put some controls in place. But I found ways to work with very cautious and very conservative leaders as well.

And I think this should be one of the ways that finance function works in general, but also giving the visibility to the rest of the team of what's going on, making these blood tests regularly and describing to everyone else what you actually see there, because not all of the leaders can read these financial statements and see what we see. So translating between the finance language and the general business language. And I also always liked to educate my peers and very slightly my bosses around what is finance, how do you read financial statement, how P&L, balance sheet and cash flow connect and why cash is king and how you come from profitability to cash and not the other way around. All of these things, like sometimes the person at the top of the company, they are very talented salesperson, not necessarily very well understanding how to manage the company, right? So if that's the case, my role is to help them. Like I said, I really enjoyed this, the number two person in the company role.

Edward Roske (08:16.846) So what do you think leads to some CEOs being more risk averse, some more tech forward, some more open, some more kind of controlling? Do you think that that's like, do you think it's industry specific? Like maybe, you know, pharmaceutical and tech, like one of them might be more receptive to AI integration and one of them not, or one more financially minded. Do you think it's an industry thing? Do you think it has to do with length of time of the company? Do you think it's just CEO personality? Like what leads to those different cultures and openness?

Anna Tiomina (09:00.000) I think it's a little bit of everything. I've dealt with CEOs who were very fresh in their roles. So they would be sometimes more cautious and more risk averse. At the same time, a person builds their career and they learn what works, what doesn't work. So a lot depends on the history of their successes and failures, I think. So again, I'm very international. I've worked at very difficult markets where things go rapidly up, but then the next thing you see, it's all down. And there are some strategies that you adopt on this market and it's not necessarily true that it will work on a different market. So it really has a lot of aspects to that. I would say the strongest driver is probably still the personality because what I see in these CEOs when they change the market and they change even the business they are working with, these traits like being conservative or being risky, these stay most of the time.

Edward Roske (10:30.000) It probably makes sense. And I feel like you're at the right place at the right time. I mean, going from that full-time CFO role to founding Blend to Balance, there's an inflection point we're at where not only is AI going to change the world, but finance and all those back office functions have to change as well. Like we can't keep doing it the same way we did for the dawn of time until two years ago, where we assume humans will do it only aided by tools and technology. We have to assume tools and technology will do it aided by humans. How do you see your role with Blend to Balance helping companies make that transition?

Anna Tiomina (11:15.000) Yeah, so I do agree that this is a very interesting time. I am 100% sure that AI will change the way we work, and I am not tired to repeat that as many times as needed. And I'm actually the one who is excited about that. There are people who are more frightened or who are saying what's gonna happen to our jobs or what's gonna happen to our businesses, processes, you name it. I am very excited. I think this is a good change. I think this is giving us the opportunity to get more insights from the information that we have, focus more on the things that A, bring value to the company and B, we enjoy doing. I haven't seen a CFO who would be excited by reconciling.

Edward Roske (12:08.254) We're all really good at it, but it's not a ton of fun.

Anna Tiomina (12:15.000) If you ask what do you like doing, it's not what you would say. I have not seen people in executive finance roles who are very happy about these internal audit checks that we have to run in our roles and it's completely understandable why we have to do that, but that's not exciting. What is exciting is using the data, doing some meaningful analysis and driving your company forward, uniting your team around some vision that you can derive from this data. That's exciting. Like reconciling and finding errors and mistakes, it's not. Like spending time with accounting teams discussing how you should book this transaction or another transaction, again, not very exciting. Double checking expense reports, not. And I am very happy to see that the technology is finally coming to the areas that don't bring a lot of fun to our functions. But also, that's actually an interesting separate topic to think about. I think our standards of building financial operations will change with that.

For example, the companies that I worked with had twice a year budgeting cycle, right? So you do budgeting somewhere in the fall and then you do recalibration somewhere in spring. Now, is it enough to kind of drive the business and to manage everything that you have in the business? No. But we had to agree on this trade-off because it is also very much a lot of effort to get the full budget for recalibration, right? Now with AI, you could probably have it every quarter or every month or maybe every week.

Edward Roske (14:00.000) Real-time budgeting. Yeah.

Anna Tiomina (14:05.000) It is happening not maybe in every business, but it's happening. And it doesn't mean it will require a ton of people to be able to do that. And also, not only does it need a ton of people, but this entire budgeting exercise needs a lot of inputs from key business people. Like what is your vision about what's going to happen? Again, all of that can be replaced with AI in one way or another at some point, right? Again, it's not the question of tomorrow, but it's maybe the question of, I don't know, couple of years from now. But it also means that that is gonna be the next standard. So if you're coming to the company as a CFO and you're only used to having two budgeting cycles in a year, your company will underperform and you will underperform. So that's what I think is happening.

Edward Roske (15:00.000) Let's dive into some of that fear around AI. And there are definitely people that are worried it's going to take their jobs. Every technological revolution I've seen, at least in the short term, generates more opportunity. It doesn't destroy it. But what I'm wondering is, in the short term really good, or even in the mid or long term, going to really replace any roles, or is it going to be more of a force multiplier? You're looking at it from the technology dev side, they have these developers, they call them 10x developers, where they are just 10 times as good at coding as the traditional person actually is. We don't hear about 10x financial analysts. Will AI be able to make those 10x financial analysts or will we only need one tenth as many analysts as we did before?

Anna Tiomina (16:00.000) Again, that's a great question. I actually was on the side of the people who would say we will need fewer people, especially in the manual entry roles or in reconciliation roles. So some of these roles will definitely disappear and I already see it happening. Like in accounts payable processing, in expense reconciliation. All of these tasks can be very reliably handled by AI already today. Now, will we have these 10x financial analysts? I think it's possible. I had an interesting conversation with a head of software development company. So he said, everybody is saying we will need fewer software developers, but he thinks we will actually need more because every business will have a custom website, for example. Now these websites are either very standard and not actually representing what the business needs to have there, or they are not existing. So if you increase the availability of something, it is very likely that the demand for that will grow up. So my thoughts in this direction are some of the roles will definitely disappear. Everything manual will go away pretty soon. I wouldn't even give it five years, I think, ten years tops. Everything more tailored to business needs, business partnering, analysis that will require more people who know how to handle AI outputs. Also, embedding AI in financial processes will create roles that we don't have just yet. For example, people being able to audit AI systems. We will need these people. We don't have them now, or at least we don't have a lot of them.

We will need people who understand how to check what AI is doing. That's a very exciting task. I think OpenAI doesn't know how to do that yet, but we will need to build systems that will be able to also audit the AI inputs to make sure there are no biases, that everything is compliant. The compliance requirements stay. They are not going away. So it's an interesting time to observe that.