According to the most recent Crist Kolder Volatility Report, about 15 percent of sitting CFOs have spent time in investment banking, and 8 percent have a degree in engineering. What percentage have multiple engineering patents?
Anand Govind, who checks all three boxes, is a rare specimen among CFOs. “I feel like I may be one of the few CFOs with multiple patents and papers published as an engineer,” he told StrategicCFO360. “But the analytical skills and the rigorous training you get as an engineer translate extremely well to the world of finance.”
A tech background also helps when building a finance team tech stack from scratch. Govind is CFO at o9 Solutions, a Texas-based venture-funded company that has developed an integrated planning platform some notable companies use to manage their supply chains.
Govind and his team have made some early strides in leveraging large language models to analyze the company’s data and deliver insights to leadership. He will discuss that project and other aspects of driving a unicorn’s growth strategy from the CFO seat during his keynote at the Fall CFO Leadership Conference in Dallas on October 7-9.
In a conversation with Govind recently, we dove into o9’s GenAI project and other initiatives in progress.
What kind of model did you follow when building a finance team from scratch?
I had flexibility in shaping how the organization looked. While I’ve adopted the model of having two broad functions—operational finance and planning and analysis—I’ve built various innovations within that theme. We’ve separated the FP&A piece that thinks about how to move the company’s metrics toward its long-term goals. Then, there’s an FP&A organization focusing on budgets—the near-term planning. That group keeps the various businesses at a public company cadence. The two groups have different rhythms: a month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter focus differs from a three-year horizon. We’ve also done many other things, like putting a person in charge of automation across finance.
What kind of tech projects related to finance do you have underway?
I had the privilege of joining the team when it was very nascent and had the opportunity to build automation and efficiency from scratch. A couple of areas of innovation stand out. One is that we’re finding ways to use the platform we’ve developed for our clients for internal planning purposes. So, we’re leveraging some of our own technology.
The second area is we’re very forward-thinking in terms of emerging technologies. Very recently, we started a small team within finance that’s working on taking GPT- and GPU-based technologies and developing engines to provide insight into operational drivers for executives.
One of our big long-term and continuous improvement projects is integrating our core ERP. With all the systems that have been added or upgraded around it as we’ve grown as a company—procurement, equity management, HR and so on—continuing that journey of deep integration and automation is ongoing.
Do you have a budget for the GenAI piece? Or is it just something that happens on the sidelines?
We’ve allocated some exploratory budget, which has unlocked some innovation, leading to greater productivity. For example, in sales and marketing, we’ve automated [tasks] that would have required a person to synthesize certain kinds of analysis into insights. On the finance side, we’re developing [AI] query engines. Executives interact with [the engines] through a natural language [interface]. You can’t produce a report for every executive for every question they ask. You’re better off saying, ‘Here’s an expert; query it for whatever you want.’ And let the engine build the reports the executive wants. Our early experiments look promising, and we want to double down on this.
Lastly, you have competitors, of course. But why are there so many digital planning platforms in the market?
The complexity and volatility of supply chains continue to grow. Covid was a case in point; it made supply chain planning a boardroom topic. But that wasn’t the only external event. There was an ice storm in Texas two or three years ago. The Suez Canal was blocked by a ship in March 2021. Now, the Red Sea disruption is holding up shipping traffic with massive implications for globally connected supply chains. As supply chains become more complex, the need for digital planning and the ability of companies to be agile and nimble and react to disruptions becomes increasingly essential.
There are also “competitive events.” A competitor changes the way it prices or goes to market. We’ve seen digital competitors to traditional companies emerge, like Amazon or Tesla. They shift the paradigm of how business is done and can be significantly nimbler and exploit opportunities.
