Stacie Faggioli, Business Finance Officer at OpenAI, shares insights on how her finance team has transformed their workflows by integrating AI tools deeply into their processes. Her team operates under three core principles: being AI native by design, demonstrating headcount leverage by doing more with fewer people, and deploying AI tools early with rapid iteration. The finance organization is structured into three pillars—strategic finance, finance operations, and enterprise financial technology—with engineers embedded directly within the finance team to accelerate tool development and deployment.
Faggioli highlights several AI-driven tools that enhance individual productivity. One notable example is the investor relations agent built using ChatGPT, which automates responses to investor diligence requests by providing consistent, CFO-grade answers quickly. This tool not only saved significant advisory fees during major equity raises but also helped scale the finance team’s influence by enabling recruiting and executive teams to communicate the company’s equity story effectively. Another powerful tool is ChatGPT for Excel, which can analyze financial reports, build complex models like LBOs, and generate auditable outputs, drastically reducing the time and effort required for financial analysis.
Codex, another AI tool, empowers non-technical finance team members to perform advanced data analysis and automation. Faggioli describes how Codex was used to create a marketing spend dashboard that dynamically reallocates budget based on ROI insights, enabling weekly optimization of marketing channels. Additionally, Codex helps track sales engagement with new products by analyzing CRM data and customer communications, providing early indicators of sales performance. Codex also automates the creation of complex financial presentations, such as compute margin slides, saving days of manual work each month while maintaining rigorous quality checks.
Beyond individual productivity, OpenAI’s finance team has developed AI agents that automate routine organizational workflows. Examples include a procurement agent that handles common travel and spending queries, a credit check agent that rapidly assesses customer credit risk, a contract review agent that scans agreements for non-standard terms affecting revenue recognition, and a vendor risk agent that compiles risk reports for procurement decisions. These agents streamline operations, reduce manual workload, and enable the finance team to scale efficiently without proportional increases in headcount.
Faggioli concludes by emphasizing the importance of cultivating an AI mindset within the team—always considering how AI can simplify or improve tasks before starting work. She advocates democratizing access to AI tools like ChatGPT and Codex, empowering those closest to the data and problems to innovate and develop solutions. This approach has led to unexpected innovations and is helping OpenAI build the finance team of the future, demonstrating how AI can fundamentally reshape finance functions in fast-evolving technology environments.
