Advertise on podcast: Excel at AI in Finance | CFO, FP&A, AI Tools, Claude, Microsoft Copilot

Can you prove what your AI tools paid back this year? Who asked for the last AI project your team built? Why has the same payback problem shown up in surveys since 2007? HIGHLIGHTS OF EPISODE Are AI tools worth it for FP&A? Mike asks the question most companies skip. He tells the story of a client team that built six AI projects a week, and when he checked, almost all of them paid back nothing and nobody had asked for them. The problem is older than ChatGPT. The people who build these tools have reported it in a survey since 2007. CFOs and finance pros already know the fix: write down the starting number, then come back and check. 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.

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] 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 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] 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.

AI Tools Are Automating Excel. You Have to Be Technical with AI in Finance to Survive.  What breaks if you took two weeks off right now? How many times has someone come to you before making a decision, instead of just running the numbers themselves? Can you explain what AI actually did for you to someone who'd push back on it? Excel was the bottleneck for twenty-five years, and standing in it was the whole job. AI tools now do what used to earn a promotion, which means the exports, the cleanup, the deck nobody wanted to rebuild every month, the part FP&A got rewarded for owning, is finished, and what's left is a choice between going technical, staying close to the business, or using AI to cover the technical so you can do both. Bill never touched a mouse. 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.

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/ 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.

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 FinOps Foundation, State of FinOps 2026 and the Token Economics guidance Deloitte CFO Signals Q2 2026 (200 CFOs at $1B+ companies) DoiT and Sapio Research AI spending survey (500 finance leaders) Flexera 2026 State of ITAM (512 IT asset managers) Datadog State of AI Engineering 2026 Anthropic prompt caching and batch pricing documentation Finance AI Insider, the free weekly newsletter: https://www.f9finance.com/newsletter/ 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 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? Highlights of Episode 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. Resources and Links Mentioned Finance AI Insider, the free weekly newsletter: https://www.f9finance.com/newsletter/ BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab research on “workslop” MIT’s 2025 State of AI in Business report The 2026 Journal of Accounting Research field study The “Ironies of Generative AI” research 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 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? Highlights of Episode 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. Resources and Links Mentioned Finance AI Insider newsletter, one email a week with the AI workflows worth your time: https://www.f9finance.com/newsletter/ Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@F9Finance 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.

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? Highlights of Episode 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. Resources and Links Mentioned The three questions to ask before any AI tool gets bought in your finance org Finance AI Insider newsletter (free, prompts, workflows, and tips each week): https://www.f9finance.com/newsletter/ F9 Finance on YouTube (full episode video plus screen recordings for build episodes): https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance 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.

The AI playbook for finance pros who want their nights back. The finance job is getting bigger every quarter. The day isn’t getting any longer. Every week there’s a new tool, a new LinkedIn post about someone who automated their entire close, a new AI conversation happening around you. If you’re the finance pro trying to keep up without giving up your evenings, your weekends, or the life you have outside the work, this show is built for you. Excel at AI in Finance is a weekly podcast for corporate finance pros learning AI tools without the hype. Each week you get one thing you can take into your finance job right away: An FP&A workflow you can rebuild on Monday A frame for handling AI when your CFO asks An honest read on the trend everyone’s talking about A conversation with someone who’s already done the thing Every episode opens with a real story from Mike’s desk or a finance pro he’s worked with. Not a hypothetical. Then a breakdown of what actually works. And an honest counterpoint at the close, because the AI advice you’re hearing everywhere else has almost never touched a real finance function. The rule: if a workflow only ships in a vendor demo, it doesn’t ship on the show. Because the finance pros who learn AI skip the burnout and keep their jobs. They become the ones their company can’t afford to lose. New episodes every Tuesday. Mike runs F9 Finance and is a senior finance leader working in the trenches with AI tools, automation, and the FP&A work that has to hold up under a CFO’s scrutiny. He writes the Finance AI Insider newsletter and runs the Finance AI Lab community for finance pros learning AI without the hype. 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.