In the modern, data-led, artificial intelligence (AI) era, the role of the chief financial officer (CFO) is rapidly transforming. Companies are no longer looking for someone to simply ensure the numbers add up; they want a strategic business partner who will boost performance.
There’s a new raft of artificial intelligence (AI-)powered tools available to support CFOs and finance teams, which can improve forecasting, automate routine processes, and generate insights from large volumes of data quickly and accurately.
Here, four CFOs share the latest tools that have helped modernise their finance function, and the impact of AI on finance teams, both now and looking ahead.
EuroTeleSites
While its financial backbone is SAP, EuroTeleSites has been using AI-powered financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software Farseer since last year. This is a relatively new tool, which is already having a significant impact on improving finance procedures at the firm.
EuroTeleSites manages more than 13,800 mobile phone towers across six countries in central and eastern Europe, including Austria, Croatia and Slovenia. This forms the foundation of digital telco infrastructure across the region, and managing thousands of widespread tower-assets across six markets is highly complex.
“Having up-to-date data is business critical for us operating across such a wide area, and ensuring close collaboration between finance and IT is key to ensuring data quality, system integration and security,” says Lars Mosdorf, CFO at EuroTeleSites. “Our finance teams work closely with other business functions too, to ensure we are linking financial performance with operational and strategic priorities.”
AI is helping to enhance the understanding of data across the organisation. “By consolidating and standardising data from a wide range of sources, Farseer helps us to centralise all relevant financial control information. The tool gives us the transparency we need to take swift decisions,” Mosdorf says.
“By consolidating and standardising data from a wide range of sources, Farseer helps us to centralise all relevant financial control information”
Lars Mosdorf, EuroTeleSites
Using a tool such as Farseer has enabled the company to move away from traditional Excel-based processes. As a single source of truth, it ensures data accuracy and consistency, with all team members working from the same up-to-date information, and able to collaborate seamlessly. Cross-team collaboration outside the finance department has also become more dynamic and effective.
This has resulted in reporting and planning processes becoming around 30% faster, while the risk of errors has been notably reduced, by more than 40% when it comes to planning. Farseer’s AI functionality has been of particular value during the firm’s internal reporting periods.
“As controllers, we know how time-critical these periods can be, and the AI Analyst helps us identify the key drivers behind any deviations across our business units,” notes Mosdorf. “These capabilities are helping provide us with sharper insights into the performance of individual EuroTeleSites units, ensuring that our reporting is not only faster, but also more meaningful.”
PostHog
Developer platform PostHog uses four different tools to manage its finances. For expense management, it relies on Brex – recently acquired by Capital One for more than $5bn – to oversee a permissive expense policy similar to Netflix, asking people to spend money in the best interests of the firm.
“Brex allows us to do that through giving everyone corporate cards, but also having good controls and AI,” explains Fraser Hopper, ops and finance lead at PostHog. “It uses a lot of agent stuff in there to try and track spending, and flag to us any things that are weird, generally fraud prevention, but also just in case someone is not spending in the best interest of PostHog.”
To get money into the company, PostHog built its own billing system, which leverages Stripe for charging customers through either credit card or invoicing. The company has a relatively complex usage-based billing system, with 13 paid products plus additional packages on top, so maintaining the flexibility to grow has been very important.
Since the start of 2026, PostHog has added two new finance tools. For its accounting ERP, it has recently moved to Campfire, an AI-native ERP. And for FP&A, it uses Abacum, which takes all the data from its ERP and connects it to headcount data from its HR system. Abacum lets the firm do all kinds of analysis to build its budget, offering a view of what under and over performance would look like, modelling hiring faster or slower, or spending more in marketing or AI.
“We can easily simulate different scenarios without a huge amount of input due to the flexibility that Abacum brings,” Hopper says.
Since adopting these AI tools, PostHog has been able to give financial data to the business faster and get accurate data much faster. Previously, a company of its size wouldn’t have prioritised getting its accounts published a few days into the month.
“We would have maybe had them towards the end of the month or even creeping into the month after, which meant the rest of the business was flying blind,” Hopper says.
“Tools like Abacum are very crucial for us, as we can get that data in real time. If it wasn’t for the ability to tag that data using AI, we wouldn’t get this out fast enough”
Fraser Hopper, PostHog
The firm can now get accurate accounts data very quickly, as closing its accounts now takes fewer than 10 days rather than the previous 20 to 25 days. “This means we can get better info back to the company as fast as possible so that every team within the business, whether that’s marketing, sales, products teams, they can use that to impact the business in a positive manner faster,” he adds.
It helps the business course-correct much quicker too, as it can now see things happening in real time – for example, hosting costs against revenue numbers.
“If we are getting that information 45 to 60 days after the time, it can sometimes be too late,” Hopper notes. “This is why tools like Abacum are very crucial for us, as we can get that data in real time. If it wasn’t for the ability to tag that data using AI, we wouldn’t get this out fast enough.”
Using these AI tools means the finance team isn’t growing as fast as previously would have been necessary. “We can leverage talent density to keep a leaner team that can do more with less,” Hopper explains.
Instead, the more technical team are using coding agents to unlock faster routes to quicker, more accurate work and building workflows using tools such as Abacum to move faster.
“This buys us back more time to focus on that big ‘How do you grow the business?’ question, rather than just trying to keep the business-as-usual stuff ticking over,” he adds.
Emergn
Anjana Mistry’s remit at Emergn is both as CFO and COO, spanning finance, operations, legal, commercial, HR and IT. She expects all these functions to work together and the data flowing between them has to be trustworthy at every point.
NetSuite sits at the core of the business as its ERP, and provides the data foundations everything else depends on. “That foundation matters more than people realise,” Mistry says. “If the base data is not clean, consistently structured and in a format the systems can actually use, everything built on top of it is suspect – your dashboards, your forecasts, your analysis.”
Moving to NetSuite was a turning point on the finance side. Month-end, quarter-end and year-end closes that used to take a fortnight now wrap up in a few days, and forecasting is no longer something the business braces itself for every quarter.
Alongside the NetSuite foundation is Pulse, a tool built in-house that brings together time recording, revenue forecasting, project management and people management, offering a single source of truth across those dimensions. Emergn uses Power BI for dashboards and operational reporting, while for the hands-on analytical work, it still relies heavily on Excel with pivots.
“Anyone who tells you they have moved beyond it is usually being economical with the truth,” Mistry says.
What has changed is how the company works within the Microsoft finance staple. It has started using AI tools in Excel, which has shifted how fast it can move on modelling and variance analysis. Tasks that used to take half a day now take a fraction of the time, and the quality improves as less time is spent building and more time on interrogating.
Emergn is also using intelligent automation through Microsoft Power Platform for repetitive, time-consuming workflows, project accounting, revenue projections integrated with its CRM, and operational reporting across multiple functions. The clearest early wins are in the rules-based work that had previously consumed so much capacity, such as transaction coding and invoice processing.
While technology can enhance efficiency and support better decisions, Mistry maintains that human judgement, experience and oversight remain key elements of the CFO role.
“Having an AI tool in Excel does not make you an accountant,” Mistry says. “These tools augment the skills of trained, experienced finance professionals, they do not replace the knowledge, the judgement or the professional accountability that sits behind the work. A tool is only as valuable as the person using it, and in finance that person needs to know what they are looking at, what questions to ask, and when the output does not look right.”
Liberty Global
At Liberty Global, where the finance team uses Oracle as its core ERP system, Oracle Hyperion was deployed as its consolidation tool. However, as the business has gone from being a cable company with presence in 17 countries, to being an integrated communications company across four countries, it concluded that Hyperion was not a tool fit for the level of complexity and evolving needs of the group.
It decided to switch to OneStream, prompted by two of its businesses – VodafoneZiggo in the Netherlands and Telenet in Belgium – already using or planning to deploy the finance platform.
OneStream gives the firm the potential to automate large parts of its workflows, in particular the business-as-usual workflows, explains Alex Johnstone, divisional CFO at Liberty Global. “This will evidently result in freeing up time to be far more strategic about what drives value in the business and how to allocate capital better,” he adds.
Johnstone envisages OneStream not just as a consolidation tool, but as its financial system of record. All the underlying management accounts of each of its operating businesses will be directly connected into OneStream, which means there will be a single source of truth.
“It will enable a lot of efficiency for us at the group level to build independent analysis reports for the various operating businesses that we own without having to necessarily go into those businesses,” he adds. “We collect an enormous amount of information from those businesses, a lot of it unstructured. So, think about their internal management reporting, commercial reports, third-party earnings, all that information can be utilised to create very rich reports about how these businesses are performing.”
As a self-confessed recent AI convert, Johnstone feels the technology will have a huge impact on the finance sector. First, all the repeatable rudimentary work that exists will be automated, tasks like journal entries, consolidations, and eliminations. Finance specialists will evolve to direct these tools with their judgment and their experience, rather than just carrying out basic tax or accounting tasks.
“For your finance generalist, your business partner, your FP&A lead that’s looking more holistically at the business, you’re going to have a lot more free time,” he says.
A lot of their time used to be taken up by report generation, and trying to get the context and insight, which can now be covered by dynamic forecasting.
“You’re then a problem solver, you’re a partner to the business saying, ‘This is the insight we have’,” Johnstone says. “And you’re going to be spending much more time thinking about and partnering with these tools to dimension the impact of potential, whether it’s operational changes, strategic pivots or episodic transactions. A far larger percentage of your time will be spent on the strategic elements of finance as opposed to the blocking and tackling.”
Conclusion
Smart CFOs will invest now in the latest AI tools to ensure their departments are equipped to become strategic business partners. By automating repetitive tasks, AI lets finance professionals spend more time on analysis and value creation, moving far away from the basic accounting function of old.
