How CFOs can harness AI to transform financial decision-making

In this episode of the EY Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast, host Myles Corson speaks with Isaac Heller, CEO of Trullion, on leveraging AI to tackle financial challenges effectively.

Key takeaways:

Leverage AI to enhance decision-making and optimize financial processes.
Recognize the necessity of high-quality data as a foundation for effective insights.
Understand the evolving role of the CFO as a strategic business partner to the CEOs in helping to drive organizational success.
Embrace technology and innovation to refine financial processes and adapt to rapid changes in the industry.
Build mentorship relationships for personalized guidance that supports professional growth.

For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.

Isaac Heller

"AI is here; it’s not coming. It’s here. And the skills of being a prompt engineer for an AI tool are going to be some of the most powerful skills of the next generation. We’re already seeing it.”

Myles Corson

Hello and welcome. I’m Myles Corson from EY, host of The EY Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast. In this series, we explore the changing dynamics of the business world and what it means for finance leaders of today and tomorrow, by sharing insights from global leaders on key topics affecting the world of corporate finance.

In this episode, you’re going to hear from Isaac Heller, CEO and founder of Trullion, an AI [artificial intelligence] powered software company that helps clients streamline accounting workflows. Our discussion explores the transformative power of technology and how finance leaders can realize new value through AI. So, let’s get started. Isaac, welcome and thanks for joining us.

Heller

Glad to be here. Thanks.

Corson

Isaac, to kick off, can you tell us a little bit about your career journey and how you got to where you are today?

Heller

I’m from the great state of Texas. I studied history. I started my career as a travel agent, and then I went to night school and fell in love with accounting. Actually, I have a big passion for accounting. And then I had one of those internships — I ended up in a finance and strategy internship. And I was thrust into these roles around finance transformation, rev rec [revenue recognition], leasing and pre-IPO at a big travel tech company.

And I loved both accounting and finance but also started implementing it on the ground in terms of reading documents, systems, building spreadsheets, and working with our auditors and our CFO [chief financial officer]. And I thought there was an opportunity to do some pretty cool innovations, I’d say. And in 2019, I started exploring artificial intelligence [AI]. You know, Myles, now it’s all the buzz. But that was the early days about AI.

And I started exploring it and seeing if it could be applied to some of the use cases that I experienced as a finance professional. And fast forward five to six years later, Trullion is one of the top AI-powered accounting companies, with nearly 100 people globally, working with a lot of amazing customers and partners. So, that’s where my trajectory is, and it’s fun to be here today.

Corson

Fantastic work. We’ll get in and explore a bit more about AI and the impact on finance later on, but, again, a fascinating journey, but grounded in finance and accounting. As we start, I was interested, you obviously got this background in finance and accounting, but you’re now a CEO responsible for a rapid-growth company building a business. What do you think is really important about the relationship between a CEO and a CFO in terms of the collaboration? And what particular skills and attributes are you looking for in an effective CFO?

Heller

It’s funny you say that, because working under a CFO as a finance professional, then working as a CEO with the CFO are two completely different perspectives. I couldn’t have imagined the relationship I would need to have with a CFO as a CEO. Yeah, look, CFO, they’re number two, you could even call them 1B, if a CEO’s 1A. CFO is the partner of a CEO. A CFO really protects the blind spot of the CEO.

A CFO should be able to say no to a CEO, maybe in a way where a CEO has — I’ll have 10 good ideas on any given day. I think they’re good, but you know, I have 10 ideas, and a good CFO will help me whittle down three and then help me choose one. So, the CFO becomes this extension of the CEO — kind of the operational overlord, let’s say, of the company. And quite frankly, over time, I rely a lot more on a good CFO for advice as an entrepreneur.

Corson

That sort of role as a true business partner in setting strategy, tracking strategy, I think, is, again, a really important attribute. And yeah, I think improvised comedy talks about always saying yes, and with finance, I think sometimes it’s a bit of a no, but. Maybe no, you can’t do it this way, but, to your point, there’s a history of other different ways of thinking about it.

And it’s being involved early enough in the process to be able to shape and influence, not let things get too far progressed, so that’s really helpful. So, you’ve obviously been on this AI journey for six years, as you mentioned, and you’ve seen the evolution of the finance function. What challenges do you see as being new in this AI world? And which ones sort of endured and have continued to be important for finance leaders to be aware of and thinking about?

Heller

The first thing is, it’s dizzying. It started to trickle in early 2000s, and then at the end of 2022, you had ChatGPT come out. And I would say, since then, it’s been like a haymaker punch of the articles and videos. And if I’m a CFO, I don’t really know what to believe. What’s the right stuff? Hopefully, they’re getting the best stuff from Myles, you, and the podcast and stuff.

But yeah, I would say in terms of the challenges, the challenges that existed yesterday or last week are the same challenges that exist today for CFOs and the team. And I think that’s data. I think that data — we still don’t have a wrangle, you know, full handle on our financial data. It could be in different structures, whether it’s documents and systems and spreadsheets or could be across different entities.

How many times have we done an M&A [mergers and acquisitions] or a transaction or a new team, and you just have a blind spot of that data? So, I actually think that AI is helping solve that challenge. But the challenge is more broad than just being some magic wand with AI. We’ve got to get our data in good shape, whether we’re going to do AI, automation or insights. It’s the same problem today as it was yesterday.

Corson

And just to pick up on that point, Isaac, about how do you stay relevant and on top of all of this technology and all this VUCA [volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity] world of disruption that we’re facing? What are the kind of things that you do to stay up to speed and stay relevant?

Heller

Well. I look over the shoulder of the newest team member at Trullion, and I say, “Hey, what’s that?” And maybe I’ll even ask them what show are you watching? And what book are you reading? Well, it’s usually shows now. What app did you download? I try to stay relevant just in terms of being in touch with kind of the entry-level professionals at our company. I read a lot.

I try not to read too much of the short-form buzzy articles on LinkedIn or Twitter, so to speak. I try to listen to a little bit more of the long-form podcasts and maybe some books or technical articles for practitioners that are in the space that lets me kind of absorb that they did come up with an opinion of all that. But overall, I think the easiest way is just to look at the youth, so to speak. I don’t know if I’m old enough to say that, but kind of look over your shoulder and learn what the next generation of professionals are focused on. That helps the most.

Corson

A little bit of that reverse mentoring and making sure you’re staying connected — I love that. That’s really helpful. Getting back to this question about the problems finance is trying to solve for, and obviously, you talked about the importance of getting data right.

But I think one of the things we’ve talked about a lot here is, again, really understanding what is the vision for the finance organization? What are the problems that you’re trying to solve and how does technology do that? One of the things that we see through the research is this increasing importance for finance leaders to be supporting the value-creation agenda and particularly focusing on growth rather than just some of the traditional responsibilities about cost management, value protection, value optimization.

So again, as you think about how finance can step up and play that more value-creation role, more of that business partnering, what are some of the strategies that you think its leaders should be thinking about to be effective?

Heller

The first thing is I would just re-emphasize that finance leaders are in the pole position in terms of taking advantage of AI and new technologies to drive value, meaning we go back to the CFO as the best partner for the CEO. You’re number one, they are number two, right? And so, if you think about AI being applied to all these different areas of business, well, customer support has their own and engineering has their own and maybe legal has their own. And each of them have these pockets of AI applied to their little vertical within the business. But ultimately, if you’re chief financial officer [CFO], you’re looking at the broader business.

You’re looking at an entire P&L [profit and loss statement] of every type of headcount. You’re looking at broader models of delivery and pricing and packaging. And so, you have purview into the whole business, and you think about the whole business. The only thing that’s limited you from unlocking more value is probably the data — it’s having all the insights. For example, you could have a customer support line, or support line of a P&L, but if you could actually dig into their success rate, their response time — all of that data within one place — you can make more operational decisions for the business. So, the first thing I would say is just double down on the reminder that if you crack this as the finance leader, you can unlock a lot more value across the business.

And then the second, which is kind of your question, what strategies would you implement? Well, first, I would be aware of those different areas across the business, where they either are or can’t implement AI. So, if a product team is implementing AI for, let’s say, a product wiki, you may want to have purview on that and access to some of the things that are coming up with, how they are allocating different efforts to different features.

Ultimately, that could flow into an efficiency conversation or even a revenue allocation conversation. How much I’m making versus costing on all those areas. So, once you start to dip into those, hopefully they’re already doing a lot of initiatives. For better or worse, I find that the product engineering and even sales teams become more advanced with the AI in the early days, whereas finance, because of the accuracy concerns, is a little bit of a late bloomer.

But once you start to get a hold on what they’re doing or what they can implement, then I think you could start to put together a bigger picture for unlocking value.

Corson

That’s really helpful. And this question about data quality is obviously a really important one in the AI context. And obviously, a lot of organizations spend a lot of money on data strategy, data governance, looking at data lakes as structural approaches.

Is there a role that AI can play in actually helping with that iterative improvement in data quality? So, I think for a lot of organizations, obviously they spend a lot of time and effort trying to get to this nirvana about clean data and it’s expensive and it’s time-consuming. And obviously, one of the things with AI is the opportunity to drive impact quicker.

So, I’m just interested in your views on that. And then maybe also talk about how you see the responsibility for data within organizations evolving. Who do CFOs need to be collaborating with to really come together to drive that data agenda?

Heller

Well, I’ll characterize it in two ways to unlock data. The first is bottoms-up, and the second is tops-down. Bottoms-up is how do you get your data into an accessible format. It’s in different structures and different systems. That’s bottoms-up. That’s always been a problem.

Now, tops-down is becoming more and more valuable because, with AI and agentic AI, in theory, you can ask complex questions on the data, like a forecasting or modeling question, and the AI could answer it more quickly or more effectively than multiple days or weeks of iterations with an Excel book. That’s the tops-down. And in order to get to the tops-down, that agentic AI querying capabilities, you got to go bottoms-up.

My recommendation, what I’ve seen work well, is best-of-breed approaches from a bottoms-up perspective. So, the bigger the company, you say data lake, which is the nirvana, right? It’s like one lake, but you’ve kind of got these little ponds and puddles all across the organization.

And so, you have to start very, very small. If you’re a finance leader, you’re probably looking at what are turnkey areas, where I could get my data into a structured format. Maybe it’s documents, maybe it’s a bunch of spreadsheets, maybe it’s a CRM [customer relationship management] system.

Then, once you identify those systems, you should start to bring them into, not necessarily the data lake, but start to see how AI can bring them into one format. Just to hammer it home, historically, building a data lake, or building a data warehouse, so to speak, it was a data mapping exercise.

I have data element ABC in this, call it, file or system, and I want to put that in the warehouse A, B, C, but A needed to map to A and B to B and C to C. AI is changing the game; you can look at a document and turn all that into a structured data format. You can look at multiple spreadsheets and do matching and reconciliation and cleansing to ask if-then questions to decide whether to put that data in a spreadsheet.

So, in order to get — you can’t get to nirvana anytime soon, but to get close, you got to do those best-of-breed bottoms-up data exercises to get it closer to a lake, let’s say.

Corson

You talked there, again, around AI sort of connecting the dots across the tech ecosystem within organizations. And there’s obviously, I think, this role that AI is one tool in the toolbox that you have to think about in terms of your overall technology stack as well. Are there other technology advances that you see as being really important as we go on this journey that will be important alongside AI?

Heller

Wow, it’s a good question because there’s just so much to catch up with when you talk about AI, and specifically things, like NLP [natural language processing], that are very interesting to me. I think the biggest unlock is going to be agentic AI, so, applying agentic principles on top of your data.

What does that mean? Being able to deploy agents to answer questions or to automate tasks that were not previously available yesterday or last year. Classically, to put it in a box, you could think about it as robotic process automation (RPA). RPA is high-volume process automation.

The difference with RPA versus agents, is RPA needed that A2A, B2B, C2C mapping — what you would call deterministic in agent theory; whereas with agents, you can ask them complex questions, and force them to reason and find the tools to answer those questions within the data and present them back to you.

So, I think agentic AI is a massive advancement. And I know it’s already here, but I would say it’s got another 10 years to just sort of materialize, and that’s going to be like a copilot or a best friend for CFOs in the next decade.

Corson

Can you explain some of the different areas that you think organizations should be looking to start to think about implementing AI now? Because one of the questions we get a lot is, you know, what are the tangible use cases now? Obviously, there’re incremental things, but it’s important to be putting the foundation now for some of the more transformative things that will come down, particularly with agentic AI, as you mentioned. So, what would be your thoughts on areas to prioritize?

Heller

I’ll give two perspectives. One, you’re the CFO of an organization, and the other is you’re the CFO of the finance organization. Of the broader organization, you should absolutely have AI and agents implemented in your customer support. Even for complex responses and ticketing, that should absolutely be implemented in your IT management — AI and agents should be implemented — so that’s for your internal support around IT service management.

I think that if you have a sales force team, like literally a sales force, you know, account executives and sales development, business development, those teams should be using advanced call recording, advanced coaching and all of those, because you, as a CFO, could actually get insights into key deals without having to bug the sales team and that all triples up. Those are broader operational areas.

From a finance perspective, look, you’ve got to get all of your contracts flowing through a system. From a finance perspective, I know there’s a legal perspective as well, but whether it’s sales orders, revenue contracts, partner contracts, vendor contracts, leasing agreements or fixed asset agreements, all of those should be flowing in through an AI-enabled system. All of your subledgers, so, if you’re doing anything offline, whether it’s equity revenue recognition or lease accounting, all these things, those subledgers should not be in Excel or in legacy systems or point solutions.

Those should be in AI-enabled systems. I think that’s the place to start because that’s the data that is before you go into the general ledger. Even if you want to put AI on your general ledger data, which is certainly feasible, you’re going to be limited to the amount of insights you could get out of that because that’s the endpoint, not the beginning point. The beginning point is the contracts, the subledgers, a lot of the broader inputs.

And so, as a finance organization, I would jump into that unstructured data specifically related to accounting and finance. As you can tell from Trullion, we do a lot with accounting and technical accounting, and the reason we like that stuff is because we feel like it’s compliance related. We feel like it’s almost a mandatory investment.

So, when you’re fighting for budget, whether it’s for, I guess yourself, if you’re the CFO, or, you know, cross-department resources, you need to be compliant, and you need to be accurate in your financial reporting. And if you can use that budget to unlock more AI innovation in the finance area, that’s like a practical win for us with the contracts and subledgers.

Corson

You raised the question of budget. I think one of the things we’re hearing right now is people are starting to, like, all technology adoption, figure out this actually may be a bit more expensive than they thought originally.

I think this big question about how do you measure return on investment (ROI) for new technologies where it’s unclear what the return is? You can measure the investment pretty clearly, but they are maybe more difficult. And you’re talking to customers about this. How do you help clients make the business case for the investments they should be making?

Heller

I think it’s tough. I wish I had a magic wand, but look, AI is unlocking efficiency and insights, and that’s some of the hardest ROI to qualify. If someone saves me money, I can unlock budget for that. If something makes me more revenue, I can unlock budget for that. I have a business case.

I’ll get that much incremental revenue. So, when it comes to AI and incremental revenue, if AI can automate your front office, your strategic areas, so let’s say, you’re a manufacturing supply chain or life sciences doing really costly research, if it can implement your core areas, that’s a revenue uptick, but otherwise it’s really hard.

So, again, I go back, look, I’m — call me conservative or old school now, but I love compliance. I love financial compliance. I love broader compliance. If you have to invest in compliance and security for your organization, whether it’s financial, cybersecurity and you’re the CFO, you should work with an AI vendor or an AI-enabled partner like EY to make sure that within that investment or compliance and reporting, you’re getting a taste of AI because you don’t have to — I just don’t think that’s the kind of budget that you need to spend that money.

It’s critical. It’s a huge risk deterrent. And so, I’m really big instead of the big, multi-million-dollar AI overhaul. Let’s focus on these compliance and finance automation projects that will deliver incremental value tomorrow with the AI.

Corson

I think that’s really smart and I think back to this point that human behavior, we’re programmed to focus on risk aversion and loss avoidance rather than capturing upside. So, I think you’re right. I mean, obviously, compliance activities give you an opportunity to make the case that people will not want a shortcut where there’s risk associated with that. So, that’s a great point.

Heller

Myles, I’d be interested in what you think. Because I always get this sense that CFOs and finance and accounting professionals are more quantitativly savvy than we give ourselves credit for, meaning if you look at the history of automation, companies, like Intuit and SAP, some of the early use cases for tech innovation are around debits and credits and ledgers and people talk about Excel like it’s not technology.

That’s a piece of technology. It’s a beautiful piece of technology, right? And we’ve all mastered it in different ways. So, I don’t know, do you see some sort of renaissance or new wind of energy coming from the finance professional as it relates to the technology?

Corson

I love your example of Excel because when people say, oh, finance people can’t innovate, well, show me a problem finance people can’t solve with Excel. We’ve been innovating for a long time with that, but I do think the exciting thing and where the opportunities for finance are getting more engaged in the commercial activities, and you mentioned things like CRM systems.

The ability to connect the historic insight finance executives have from the historic data, put that together with CRM information and drive better, more real-time commercial decision-making pricing, which customers you need to be focused on — that, I think, to me, is where finance teams and finance professionals can really start to demonstrate the value they can bring.

And I think some of these concerns about, well, if we’re going to be automating elements of finance roles, it’s the time that gets freed up to do these more interesting, value-adding roles. We talked a lot about the technology side, but I did want to come back, and as we wrap up, talk about the human and talent aspects and, again, this point about creating an innovation mindset in finance and sort of joke about the people using Excel.

But I think one of the big challenges for finance leaders is do you have enough of that innovation mindset within finance organizations that historically, in many cases, particularly around accounting, have been very focused on compliance, zero tolerance for failure to eliminate risk and focus on controls? We’re now asking them to take on a different role. So, I’m just interested, from your perspective, how do we help bridge that gap for finance professionals to take on more of these expanded roles?

Heller

I think you encourage, and you push, because if you look at the history of tech and tech innovation, AI is here; it’s not coming. It’s here. And the skills of being a prompt engineer for an AI tool are going to be some of the most powerful skills of the next generation. We’re already seeing it. So, a lot of the tech will play catch up, but the mentality, the people they grew up on apps versus the previous generation, like that’s already here.

So, I would just encourage and nudge a little. Let me give you an example: I saw all these cool tools in marketing coming out — AI for marketing, you know, content and design and creative and videos. And I wanted to encourage our head of marketing to use those with the team. But I was a little bit hesitant.

What if I say, “Hey, could you use a little bit more AI?” And then there was some sort of, “Why is Isaac, why is the CEO talking about more AI? Should I be worried? Does he not think we’re doing a good job? Is there cost?” You know, those types of things. Eventually, we rolled out some of these initiatives in terms of just, how you could use AI within your organization.

And you would have been shocked at how many people came back, some that I had never interacted with much and said, “I’m just so happy that this company is encouraging the use of this.” There’re a lot of people who are coming into the workforce who’ve been working the past five to seven years that are eager to use more AI in their role. They’re eager to adopt this. They have no fears.

This is how they operate. And I think us as finance leaders, we don’t want to get stuck in the middle. We don’t want to be the one who’s trying to please the past and the future. We want to be the one that’s preserving the future. And so, in order for us to be future, to be the leader of the future, I think we embrace that next cohort of prompt engineers and AI enthusiasts as we support it and then that propels us as leaders.

So, I just think it’s as simple as jumping in. It’s not going to be revolutionary. We’re going to desperately need risk assurance. We’re going to desperately need all of these advisory and audit and real strong partners to advise us on those areas.

But we’re going to need to do it within the context of AI. So, I think there is just this general encouragement and nudge to jump forward that everyone needs. I guess a kick in the butt is one way to summarize.

Corson

I love that example, and I think what you’re describing in terms of tone from the top and actually letting people know it’s okay to embrace these technologies and experiment is really important.

I think that’s one of the key attributes of effective leadership through these disruptions. So, as we wrap up Isaac, what recommendations would you have for our listeners as they think about embarking on an AI-adoption journey and getting started on this?

Heller

Well, I think make a list. Let’s use a rule of three. Choose three areas of your business where you feel like AI could provide an impact and task your teams with providing a strategy in 2025 or the next six months on how they could implement AI in that area. And they should have the choice between working with the best-of-breed AI vendor or building internally.

There’re a lot of powerful foundational models and tooling that you can use to build internally. There might be some data concerns, so I think that’s it. Write those notes of those three vendors, maybe five, if you’re in a big organization. Maybe if you’re in a multicountry enterprise, task your chief information officer [CIO]with maybe that project for each of these teams and then track the ROI for the next six months or the next year.

Corson

Fantastic. So, as we wrap up, we’d like to close with some rapid-fire questions to get to know you a bit better. So, is there an all-time favorite quote that you refer back to, and if so, why?

Heller

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” It’s an Albert Einstein quote. I saw it on the wall in my freshman year orientation at the University of Texas. And I love it because it frames the idea of not assuming that you have any special, innate, unique qualities, except the fact that you want to keep learning. And that’s served me well as I’ve gone through a lot of changes in my career.

Corson

Fantastic. Well, anything that encourages curiosity, I think, is a good one, so I appreciate you sharing that. As you reflect back on your career and your journey so far, has there been a piece of advice or mentoring that’s been most impactful for you?

Heller

Yeah, definitely. It’s simple: It’s get a mentor or get many mentors. And I’ll double down because I think that we fall into a bit of a trap nowadays where there’s so much content online about all these subjects, whether it’s AI or wellbeing or whatever it is.

But there’s a lot of wisdom in having one or two or three people that you really trust that you talk to on a monthly basis, because they’re going to share that similar information with you, but it’s going to be tailored to who you are uniquely as a person.

And so, I just want to remind people that it’s better to have someone who knows you as a mentor than a self-help book that 100,000 people are reading. Getting mentors that actually know you and can actually go on the journey with you — that’s the best way to grow.

Corson

That’s wonderful advice, and again, it’s that sort of comment around, you’re the sum total of the five people that you spend most time with. And so, pick them wisely. That’s great. And you mentioned, wellbeing in terms of all the stuff that’s out there online. Is there anything you do to maintain your personal wellbeing and balance?

Heller

Oh, good one. I don’t necessarily believe in balance. I think when you strive for this idea of work-life balance, you just end up perpetually disappointed. I have a wonderful wife and four kids and so that is the core of me and that’s who I am.

And as long as I put that first, then everything else fits within the picture, you know, whether it’s friends or career or community or anything like that. So, very grateful for my wife and family, and that gives me, you know, whatever balance I allow myself.

Corson

Keeps us all grounded. That’s great. Well, Isaac, it’s been a wonderful conversation. Really appreciate you sharing so many great insights. I’m sure the listeners will appreciate it. So, thank you again and I look forward to speaking to you again sometime in the future.

Heller

Thanks, Myles. Thanks for your time. Good to see you.

Corson

If you’ve enjoyed this or any episode of The EY Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast, please leave a rating review and don’t forget to subscribe so you get access to future episodes. You’ll find related links in the show notes or at ey.com/betterfinance.

As always, thank you for listening and if you have ideas or topics you would like to see covered or guests you’d like to see featured, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I look forward to speaking to you next time on the EY Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast.

Presenters

Myles Corson

EY Global and Americas Strategy and Markets Leader, Financial Accounting Advisory Services

Podcast

Season 8, Episode 1

Duration

29m 23s

In this series

series overview

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.

Insights

Highlights

Services

Spotlight

Industries

Case studies

Careers

Spotlight

About us

Top news

How CFOs can harness AI to transform financial decision-making

Key takeaways:

Presenters

Myles Corson

In this series

Presenters