7 ways I actually use AI in finance

You've probably heard it's only a matter of time before AI takes your job in finance.

But most of what you see online is AI slop.

Generic prompts, fake dashboards, and demos that fall apart the second you point them at a real client's numbers.

I run a fractional CFO firm and a financial modeling software company, so I get to watch which tools survive contact with an actual board meeting.

And some of the tools I've used for years have completely changed.

There are tools now that turn a CEO's vision straight into a spreadsheet, tools that make an Excel file look like a designer touched it from a single prompt, and tools that will build you working software in a few minutes.

For me, all of this started in a board meeting.

With a moment I'm still a little embarrassed about.

Alright, so let me start in the room where all of this begins for me.

Every quarter I sit in a board meeting with Nicolas, the CEO of Chili Piper, and we go through the entire business.

I've been his fractional CFO for about seven years, so I know exactly how much those meetings matter.

If you've never sat in front of a board, these are the people who can replace the CEO.

Remember Steve Jobs?

Here's how those meetings used to go for me.

"Sorry, can you repeat the part where you said... the things?"

Not my finest work.

Now I have Wispr Flow running in the background, and it transcribes the whole meeting, pulls the action items, tells me who said what, and catches the things I missed while I was busy scribbling.

And honestly, that changed a lot more than board meetings.

When I meet with a client now, I walk away with a full transcript of everything happening in their business, and I can feed that straight into building their financial model.

Which turns out to be the whole point.

The best context about a business is sitting right there in the conversation, and until recently there was no good way to get it out of the room.

Okay, so a few weeks ago I got an alert that ChatGPT can now connect directly to your finances.

I tried it, and it found something I was not expecting.

I'd been paying for Hulu for almost a year without using it.

My wife's reaction, roughly: "why isn't our Hulu working anymore?"

Now look, losing a few dollars a month to Hulu is not a CFO crisis.

But point that same idea at a company spending millions across hundreds of vendors, and it gets a lot more interesting.

Here's the thing though. Your bank only knows so much.

It knows who you paid and how much.

Your accounting system knows what that payment actually meant.

So the connection you really want is into the accounting software. Or your ERP, if you want to sound cool.

And the software companies are already there. Intuit is putting AI agents inside QuickBooks that categorize transactions, reconcile accounts, flag unusual activity, and analyze the results.

If your accounting system isn't, tools like Claude Cowork can plug into your systems through MCPs, which are basically standard connectors that let AI reach the data sitting inside your company.

I show the whole setup running in the video if you want to see it on real numbers.

Alright. This is where I've spent most of my career, and it's where AI surprised me the most.

The first time it clicked was watching a video from Leila Gharani, a fellow Microsoft MVP I owe a lot of my Excel knowledge to.

Until then I thought of AI as something you have a conversation with, not something that takes control of your file.

Then in February I got into the beta for Claude for Excel.

Halfway through a build, I caught it referencing the wrong column.

So I sat back, ready to declare victory over AI.

Instead I watched it spot the mistake on its own, go back, fix it, and hand me something close to flawless.

Hallucination is still the biggest risk when you lean on AI for anything in finance.

So watching it check its own work inside my model was a real moment for me.

But I'd never blindly trust it.

I've watched AI hardcode assumptions, build dashboards that made me nauseous, and completely crash when I asked it to roll a model forward with a new month of actuals.

That last one is the one I care about most.

Rolling a model forward every month is exactly the repetitive, finance specific work that general AI still can't handle.

I run every one of these tests in the video.

Now look. Everything up to here was about getting to a number.

This part is about the thing that actually gets seen.

Most stakeholders still expect slides, and if you're building those by hand you're pretty much in the Stone Age.

So I uploaded an Excel file to Claude for PowerPoint, and it built slides on my branding, read the data, and wrote the commentary based on what was happening in the business.

But I barely use it anymore, because I found something better.

With Claude Design you're not stuck with slides at all. You describe what you want and it builds a working page you can actually click through.

A live dashboard your CEO can filter herself. A calculator that runs scenarios. An internal tool that pulls straight from your model.

That's software. Not a deck, not a spreadsheet, an actual thing people use.

And this is where it got weird for me, because I don't know how to code, and I'm still personally shipping features into our own product.

Same tool, completely different job. My editor Yurii used to build every animation in my videos by hand, until he told me he'd started having Claude Code make them instead.

Which gave me an idea.

So I asked him if he could take an Excel file and turn it into a video walking through the insights in my voice, since explaining the numbers is something I do for clients every single month.

A few minutes later he sent one back.

It's not perfect yet.

But think about where this goes. Instead of emailing someone a spreadsheet and asking them to work out what changed, they get a five minute video explaining exactly what happened in their business and why.

The full walkthrough is in the video.

Now look.

I'd never use any of these tools without understanding the fundamentals underneath them.

For strategic finance, that starts with knowing how to build a three-statement model, and that's still the first thing I'd learn if I were starting over today.

The tools keep changing every few months. That part doesn't.

Knowing the fundamentals is one thing, though.

Rebuilding the same model from scratch for every new client is another, and that one I did get tired of.

So I built Model Wiz.

You connect your accounting software directly, or you just upload a P&L and a balance sheet, and it reads the data and builds you a CFO grade financial model inside Excel in as little as two minutes.

Then when the month closes, instead of rebuilding anything, you hit roll forward.

It pulls in the new actuals, spots any new accounts that showed up, and adds them into the existing file without wiping out the work you already did.

You can try it for free at modelwiz.com.

Now I'm curious about you.

Which of these have you actually tried on real client work, and which one let you down?

Hit reply and let me know. I read every single one.

Josh (Your CFO Guy)

Thanks for reading my article. My goal is to help you grow in your career with proper Finance and Accounting.

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