When AI Changes the EPM Decision | David Den Boer, CEO, Column5 Consulting

AI is rapidly changing not only what finance technology can do, but how CFOs should think about the technology stack itself.In this bonus episode of CFO Thought Leader, David Den Boer, CEO of Column Five and Darwin Analytics, joins Jack Sweeney to explore how AI is reshaping enterprise performance management—and why finance leaders may need to rethink long-held assumptions about EPM platforms, data systems and analytics.Den Boer describes a market in which capabilities once associated with EPM are increasingly emerging from multiple directions. Large language models, data platforms, business intelligence tools and EPM vendors are all extending their reach into finance. For CFOs, the challenge is becoming less about selecting a single application and more about understanding how different technologies can work together.That changing landscape is also behind Den Boer’s EPM Summit, taking place November 16–19 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Rather than centering on a single vendor, the event brings competing EPM providers, consultants and customers together, giving finance leaders an opportunity to compare approaches and question vendors side by side.Den Boer argues that AI will also lower the cost of experimentation. Instead of making technology choices that effectively lock finance organizations into decade-long commitments, teams may increasingly be able to test new capabilities, evaluate new data sources and quickly determine what creates value.His message to CFOs: AI is expanding the choices available to finance—but realizing its potential will require leaders who understand the entire technology landscape and know which questions to ask.

At Aledade, CFO Jessica Somers is helping finance navigate a business where investment decisions can take years to fully reveal their value.The technology-driven, physician-led company works with more than 3,000 primary care practices and touches more than 3.6 million patients, using data and technology to support proactive, preventive care. Its value-based model also creates an unusual finance challenge: connecting better patient outcomes with healthcare savings and, ultimately, financial performance.That long-term orientation shapes how Somers approaches capital allocation. Aledade has built its own technology platform rather than relying on another company’s roadmap, reflecting what Somers describes as a desire to “control our destiny.” Today, that same thinking is influencing the company’s approach to AI.Rather than viewing investments as isolated projects to be stack-ranked strictly by ROI, Somers wants leaders to understand how different investments interact and compound. That became particularly important as Aledade weighed continued progress toward profitability against the opportunity to make larger AI investments. The result was a willingness to make bigger bets where leadership saw the potential to extend the company’s advantage.Somers’ perspective is shaped by an earlier career in investment banking, private equity, and corporate development. Moving from advising on transactions to operating inside the businesses themselves taught her that financial results reflect countless everyday decisions—and that finance creates the most value when it deeply understands the business behind the numbers.Her agenda now extends that philosophy to AI: not simply using technology to make finance faster, but reimagining work so the team has greater capacity for judgment, insight, and strategic partnership.

For Jack Gordon, the CFO role at Harri increasingly extends beyond finance—and into the mechanics of how an AI-powered business scales.Harri, a workforce operating system focused on hospitality, has evolved from a point solution into a broader platform spanning talent acquisition, workforce management, and employee engagement. Gordon says the company’s opportunity rests partly on years of data accumulated across mission-critical workflows, an advantage that becomes increasingly important as AI reshapes workforce technology.That evolution is also reshaping Gordon’s finance agenda. As Harri rolls out its AI platform, understanding the changing unit economics has become a priority. AI introduces new questions around usage costs, margins, pricing, and monetization. Inside finance, meanwhile, Gordon is pursuing “automations everywhere,” with the goal of eliminating much of the routine work performed by his team and creating more capacity for insight.His operating philosophy begins further upstream. Rather than waiting for financial results, Gordon watches customer satisfaction, usage patterns, support activity, and customer outcomes. “Financials are outcomes of a good product and happy customers,” he explains.That emphasis on leading indicators is accompanied by an acute awareness of downside risk. After a planned Series B financing unexpectedly collapsed in 2023, Gordon restarted the process and ultimately helped secure new funding four months later. The experience reinforced a principle he carries forward today: understand the downside and build contingency plans.Now Gordon is stretching the CFO remit again—working as a product owner alongside Harri’s product and engineering teams. For a finance leader who has deliberately accumulated new operating experiences throughout his career, building and launching a product represents another capability still to be added.

When Martin Uhrik compared the margins of two visual-effects brands at Technicolor, one appeared far more profitable than the other. Uhrik tells us the reported difference prompted him to investigate. One brand showed project results only to the direct-margin level, rather than revealing fully absorbed profitability.Uhrik says he asked the business-unit CEO why the company was not showing creatives “the true state of the business.” The response was resistance: management feared that exposing weaker bottom-line results could cost the premium brand its talent and luster.Uhrik insisted. According to him, the business began showing creatives the profitability of roughly 3,000 projects a year. Teams then examined pricing, rate cards, utilization, client requirements, and whether changes requested during projects were being captured and passed along to customers.Within six to 12 months, Uhrik tells us, margins improved substantially. The feared loss of creative talent did not materialize. Instead, he says the information “lifted the energy” inside the organization because employees had not realized their work was less profitable than they believed.For Uhrik, the experience reinforced the value of challenging the status quo. He says finance leaders should not stop when they encounter pushback; tension, opinion, and conviction are part of reaching better outcomes.It also challenged management’s assumptions about people. As Uhrik observes, leaders should not be too quick to predict how others will respond. Given the unvarnished economics, the creative teams did not retreat. According to Uhrik, they surprised the CEO—and then helped improve the business.

Shortly after Dan Barzily became CFO of Tipalti, a go-to-market transformation altered the company’s working-capital profile. One quarter later, Barzily tells us, the company missed its forecast across multiple parts of the P&L.The surprise reached back to a subject he had barely considered since his university accounting class. “It really hit me,” Barzily recalls. “I’m now the CFO, and I’m in charge of those things.”Until his appointment, Barzily says, he had never expected to become a CFO. He studied engineering, where he developed skills in analytics, accuracy, modeling, forecasting, and making assumptions about the future. According to Barzily, consulting then taught him to work with people ranging from individual contributors to company executives, while business development exposed him to dealmaking, legal matters, contracts, and the many participants required to bring something to life.At Tipalti, Barzily says, the chief-of-staff role initially involved running executive-team agendas, surfacing important decisions, assigning action items, and sometimes playing “bad cop.” As he learned the business, he began initiating programs and eventually owned pricing, the data organization, and strategy for centers of excellence outside the United States and in Tel Aviv. That expansion, he explains, moved him into the chief strategy officer role.Barzily describes a career as something that is “not linear.” People build, try their best, produce results, and—if the right people notice—receive larger opportunities. His working-capital surprise added another turn to that path: the moment when a strategic operator encountered the full weight of the CFO’s agenda.

Jonathan Ma recalls being at his parents’ home in Nebraska one Saturday when his Morgan Stanley boss called with advice: pursue an opportunity at Sutter Health. After nearly 15 years, the mentor believed the retiring treasurer’s position could be Ma’s next step.Ma tells us he had not considered the opportunity. Although he knew Sutter Health’s mission and some of its people, he says the call “planted” the seed. His mentor had seen something in him that he had not yet recognized.That moment echoed the way Ma describes his development at Morgan Stanley. He credits leaders in San Francisco and New York with teaching him to take his work seriously without taking himself too seriously. According to Ma, that meant remaining curious, asking questions, and admitting when he did not know an answer.Ma says trust arrived gradually rather than through a breakthrough. Clients gave him room to learn because they saw that he would work hard, uphold values and ethics, and protect their interests. He moved from mentoring interns to leading financings and presenting before boards.At Sutter Health, Ma applies that same emphasis on trust. He tells us finance must balance growth, expenses, and margins so the not-for-profit system can continue reinvesting in its communities. Budgets, he says, should represent shared accountability across the organization rather than a finance exercise.For Ma, leadership emerges incrementally: through questions asked, credibility earned, support accepted, and difficult decisions made while an organization still possesses both “the means” and “the will.”

Six weeks before Lehman Brothers went under, Shiv Verma tells us, he joined a hedge fund as the world felt like it was falling apart. After building structured-credit and CLO models at J.P. Morgan from 2006 to 2008, Verma says he helped buy back assets originated at par for five cents on the dollar.A mentor there supplied a rule Verma still carries: “The best trade you ever make is often the trade you don’t make.”For Robinhood’s CFO, the line offers a double meaning—and a little fun. In the interview, however, Verma applies it to corporate resource allocation. According to Verma, it is easy to make an investment, become excited, and sell yourself on the idea. The harder work is asking the right questions and “knowing when to say no.”That standard reaches beyond securities. Verma says he applies it when Robinhood considers funding an investment, approving a marketing campaign, or pursuing an acquisition. Restraint is not timidity: Robinhood wants to grow and say yes to many opportunities, he tells us, while balancing business enablement and controllership.According to Verma, acquisitions must offer technology, talent, or greater speed to market, generally accelerating Robinhood by 18 to 24 months. They must also pass the company’s IRR, NPV, and internal thresholds.The title may wink playfully at Robinhood’s trading platform, but Verma’s underlying finance lesson is serious: sound capital allocation is ultimately defined not only by the opportunities a CFO pursues, but also by those finance has the judgment to decline.

Ross Grainger remembers an early chapter of his career when finance was only one part of the job.After stepping outside a traditional finance path to own and operate a Mako auto-body franchise, Grainger tells us he learned what it meant to “act like an owner.” That sometimes meant cleaning toilets, learning to paint cars, welding, doing body work, handling customer service, and making outside sales calls. But the experience also taught him another lesson: even if a leader can do everything, “you shouldn’t do those things forever” if they pull you away from where you can provide the most value.That owner’s mindset later followed Grainger back into finance. At a healthcare software company, he tells us he was passed over for a CFO role he wanted. The executive hired instead brought a different perspective—one that showed Grainger how finance could move beyond “the debits and credits” and help shape company direction. Grainger says he ultimately became “extremely happy” they hired someone else because the experience accelerated his development.Years later, that broader view surfaced again when Grainger helped lead a pricing overhaul at a prior company. According to Grainger, management initially proposed a 7% increase after nearly 10 years without one. Challenged by the board to reconsider “the art of the possible,” the team ultimately achieved a 22% to 23% increase in average ACV.For Grainger, finance leadership repeatedly returns to the same idea: understand where value is created, and focus your effort there.

Cal Brouilette recalls a sleepless night in Houston, speaking at 3 a.m. with someone from Blackstone about a purchase-and-sale agreement and transition-service agreements. It concerned a power-plant portfolio sale at Direct Energy, a Centrica subsidiary, that Brouilette places in 2013.According to Brouilette, the assignment arrived in late September, when the CEO wanted the portfolio sold and announced before year-end. That left at most 120 days. Brouilette says he was managing finance and accounting, functioning as a business-unit CFO and loading up on MBA classes at Rice because his job had seemed stable.The new assignment changed that calculation. Brouilette says he ran its finance work “soup to nuts,” covering the valuation taken into negotiations, management presentations, purchase-and-sale terms, and transition-service agreements.The transaction presented him with what Brouilette describes as a $700 million “go or no go” decision. “Yes, this was hard,” he recalls thinking, but the experience prompted this realization: “I can do this job. I can make these decisions.”Brouilette says the moment gave him confidence to make high-stakes decisions quickly while recognizing that he could “still keep learning.” He describes it as his shift from operator to strategist.At Flatiron Health, Brouilette says his focus as CFO is not to “make a decision and let it ride,” but to consistently track results before the organization travels too far down “the wrong path.”His remarks present strategic confidence not as certainty, but as the discipline to decide, keep learning, measure results, and correct course.

Jamie Schroeder’s finance career began on the shop floor at Ford Motor Company. As part of Ford’s rotational development program, Schroeder tells us, he spent a month working in the paint shop at an assembly plant outside Cleveland. The experience was designed around “learning the business and getting your hands on the business” so that finance could become an informed partner to operations.That operating mindset followed Schroeder to Scotts Miracle-Gro, where unfamiliar assignments became a recurring source of development. According to Schroeder, he was repeatedly placed in situations involving ambiguity, collaboration, and the need to “create something brand new that didn’t exist before.” Over time, embracing discomfort became part of his professional identity.One experience taught him what it meant to be a growth CFO. According to Schroeder, stagnant category growth had led finance into a “profit preservation” posture when leadership changes at a major retailer created an opening for Scotts to pursue a more aggressive commercial program.The proposal involved aggressive pricing, promotions, and products—and considerable risk. Instead of retreating, Schroeder tells us, finance supplied data and scenario analysis, quantified the risks, and developed playbooks for possible responses. Transparency ensured that operating partners understood both the opportunity and the guardrails.According to Schroeder, the resulting market-share battle produced category growth that Scotts had not seen in ten years, while sales and profits rose across the category.Now CFO of Premium Guard, Inc. (PGI), Schroeder brings that lesson to another transformational setting: Finance can help a company pursue disruption without ignoring risk. The discipline lies not in avoiding uncertainty, but in understanding the business well enough to move through it together.