About Session
Most controllers asked to “do something about AI” reach for the familiar genre — the capital request, the return-on-investment model, the payback period — and then watch the conversation with the CFO stall. This session offers a different frame: AI adoption is not a capital decision but an investment of qualitative capital, measured in the discipline you bring to it, the governance you build around it, and the time your team reclaims for work that matters. Drawn from a year leading AI adoption as the chief financial officer, the session walks through three concrete tiers of action a controller can begin the Monday after FATE: personal use that collapses real tasks from hours to minutes, a 90-day team pilot governed by a one-page charter, and the operating-model conversation that actually earns a CFO’s sign-off. Every tier is grounded in production work rather than theory — including a live monthly-close analytics agent that moved a finance team from a six-day close-to-insight gap to same-day.
Controllers leave with four ready-to-use takeaways:
- Monday-morning use-case checklist,
- pilot charter template,
- CFO memo template, and
- five questions to put to every vendor
Mike Cordova, CPA, CGMA, is Chief Financial Officer of Anvil Corporation. Prior finance leadership includes McCann Worldgroup, the flagship agency network of Interpublic Group (NYSE: IPG) and vice president, controller, AAA.
