Real Leadership Starts When Certainty Ends

Every department now has access to AI tools. Your colleagues are running their own accounting research and arrive at your desk with generated answers. The problem is that those answers often miss the specific regulatory context at hand and you are left spending valuable time explaining why an AI output does not apply to the current business reality.
At Workiva Amplify 2026, leaders from Franklin Templeton, CBRE, UPS, and MCR Hotels sat down to discuss the real barriers stalling enterprise rollouts. They explain why the actual bottleneck comes down to trust. Luckily, they joined the Pre-Read to break down the exact strategies their teams use every day to verify outputs and build a reliable data foundation.
The executives cover a range of practical solutions for modern finance leaders:How to handle business partners who act like armchair CPAsThe reason human oversight must happen before a model ever touches your dataWays to expand team capacity and cut manual reporting without adding new headcountWhy an idea that failed five years ago might actually work todayThe process of teaching critical thinking to junior accountants who skip manual data entry
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If you assume AI was the biggest shock to finance teams this past year, you’d be in good company. But there’s more to that story. When we caught up with leaders at Amplify, almost nobody pointed to AI by itself. The real surprise is the constant, steady drip of volatility. For part one of our Workiva Amplify series, The Pre-Read brings together four executives to talk about how they lead when the chaos feels constant. Three of our guests believe this rapid churn is the new normal, while one is betting the dust will eventually settle. Join Lindsey Oshita (Franklin Templeton), Jeff Driggs (CBRE), Mike Callino (UPS), and Brandon Buhler (MCR Hotels) as they break down how to actually plan for the unplanned. In this episode: Why managing strictly for today sets your team up to fail The case for why the rapid pace of change brought by AI will actually slow down How to build a proactive team that constantly asks what could go wrong?Why you need to question the “why” behind every new request before doing the work Subscribe to The Pre-Read on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Chief sustainability officer headcount fell about 10% in the 2026 Chief Sustainability Officer Report, the first decline in 16 years. At the same time, sustainability headcount inside business units grew 42%.The work is spreading across the business, and CSOs are moving closer to the CFO.Mandi McReynolds, Chief Sustainability Officer at Workiva, sits down with Ellen Weinreb, author of the Weinreb Group's 2026 Chief Sustainability Officer Report, and Sophie Beckham, Chief Sustainability Officer at International Paper, to discuss where the headcount went and why more CSOs now report through finance.In this episode:Why a leaner corporate sustainability team can carry the same scopeHow headcount reporting lines shiftedWhy CSOs are reporting to financeWhat research says CSOs need beyond budget and headcountWhich skill CSOs should build heading into 2027Subscribe to The Pre-Read on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There is a version of the "AI in audit" conversations that claims AI is replacing practitioners and the profession is being disrupted overnight. Former AICPA Auditing Standards Board member Jeff Rapaglia reframes the AI hype: stop worrying about falling behind, and start worrying about over-relying on automated tools. Jeff joins Steve Soter and Alyssa Zucker to reframe the real threat of automation bias, and blindly trusting automated tools while failing to challenge the results. He breaks down why automated platforms taking over routine processing actually elevates human skepticism, making auditor judgment the most vital asset in the room.

In this episode:Why automated platforms doing 80% of routine workflows makes the remaining 20% of human critical thinking essentialWhy regulators like the PCAOB will always demand auditors explain the "why" behind their testing, whether using Excel or an AI model Why you should stop worrying about being left behind and start worrying about accepting unchecked AI outputsWhy young auditors starting out in an AI-native environment have a structural edge over legacy habitsSubscribe to The Pre-Read on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Most leaders wait for certainty before they make decisions. Tracy Nolan, SVP at Humana, says that is the biggest mistake a leader can make in a crisis. Tracy has led through some of the highest-stakes moments in corporate crisis management, including one of the largest mergers in telecom history during the COVID-19 pandemic. She joins The Pre-Read to talk about what leadership actually requires when the answers aren’t ready yet.
In this episode:• Why clarity matters more than certainty in a crisis• What Tracy learned about the personal cost of leading through crisis• Why she interviews for curiosity and adaptability over experience• What CFOs and their teams need most when volatility becomes constant• How to protect yourself from burnout when crisis is the baseline, instead of the exception

74% of S&P 500 companies revised their GHG emissions data at least once over a decade of voluntary reporting. That's the assurance gap in practice.Deloitte's Sarah Digirolamo and Kristen Sullivan join The Pre-Read to break down what it takes to get assurance-ready before regulators require it, and why having the data isn’t enough if it isn’t in scattered silos.In this episode:• Why assurance readiness is a precondition for any assurance engagement, not a step within it• Why companies consistently believe their data is sufficient when it is scattered across systems, geographies, and methodologies with no central governance• How the cultural difference between sustainability teams and audit teams creates friction, and how successful organizations work through it• Why the linkage between sustainability and financial reporting is where investors are paying close attention

Finance leaders build judgment and gain experience by doing the work throughout their career. But what happens when agents do the work instead?Workiva CFO Barbara Larson joins The Pre-Read to talk about her first six months in the role and the talent pipeline risk she thinks is flying under the radar: a generation of finance leaders who are skilled at directing AI but may not have the experience to recognize when something breaks.In this episode:• Why the path to CFO is about doing work and growing financial skills alongside AI• How to build a finance culture where people are ready to lead• What the CFO of 2035 will need to prove to compete against AI numbers• Why finance leaders should focus less on pursuing the CFO title, and more time learning the skills necessary to identify and respond to risk
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AI transformation is a problem of governance, not technology. Anthony Habayeb, CEO of Monitaur, argues that organizations don’t need to spin up a new AI governance framework, but they need better use of the controls CFOs and auditors already own.In this episode:-Why AI pilots stall and what it reveals about governance gaps-How to build an AI governance framework from structures you already have-Why the agent isn’t the risk, but the use case is-Who owns accountability when an autonomous system takes action?-How CFOs and audit teams are becoming the forcing function for AI qualitySubscribe for episodes on the issues shaping finance, audit, risk, and sustainability at the C-suite level.

Most climate risk assessments are missing hazards, scoping too narrowly, and leaving physical climate risk under-analyzed. Linda Romanovska helped write the rules, and she’s here to explain what better reporting looks like.
As co-author of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards and a member of the EU Sustainability Reporting Board, Linda has spent 20 years working on climate risk assessment across sectors and jurisdictions. She joined The Pre-Read to break down what mandatory climate-related financial disclosure requires.In this episode:Why most climate risk assessments assess too few hazardsThe key differences between physical climate risk and transition riskHow to scope scenarios and time horizons without cutting cornersWhat climate-related financial disclosure users want to seeWhere AI is making climate risk assessment faster and more audit-ready

The M&A market is heating up, and AI is compressing deal timelines from weeks to days.In this episode of The Pre-Read, guest host Josh Gertsch and Troy Hooper of Mergermarket provide a capital markets update that touches on the SpaceX IPO, the quiet M&A surge, and why quality assets with resilient cash flows are winning. Then, guest host Esther Toth talks with Latitude Financial Services CFO Guillaume Leger about leading finance teams through change, AI, and why sustainability reporting is a frontier CFOs can’t ignore.0:00 What’s in this episode1:56 Capital markets & M&A update with Josh and Troy3:32 The IPO boom and M&A recovery4:39 Trends driving M&A13:18 Esther asks Guillaume about guiding finance teams through change16:55 Upsides and downsides to AI in finance19:48 The new frontier of financial reportingSubscribe to The Pre-Read for weekly conversations at the intersection of finance, sustainability, audit, and risk.