“In the past, there were 50 million people in the world who could code,” Cherny said during a conversation with Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn. “And now everyone in this room can code. Everyone in the world is starting to be able to code.” We’re only beginning to understand the implications, he said.

For CFOs, those implications are immediate—and financial.

Rethinking the ROI framework

The most actionable insight Cherny offered centered on cost justification. Early Claude Code customers balked at the price compared with $20-per-month AI subscriptions, wondering whether Claude was really different from other products.

“And then, six months later, everyone just kind of realized, ‘Okay, I guess it’s not the same exact thing,'” he said.

Cherny offered two pieces of advice. First, don’t compare the ROI to legacy coding tools because Claude Code is fundamentally different.

“Compare it to what the cost would have been if an engineer had done this work,” he said. “That’s the benchmark. That’s what you should be thinking about.”

As an example, he described a developer who recently rewrote an entire codebase from one programming language to another in six days—a project Cherny estimated would previously have required a year of engineering time. Salesforce, Ramp, and Airbnb have reported similar results, he said.

His second recommendation was to evaluate adoption through internal pilots: have one team use Claude Code and another work without it, then measure differences in speed, security, and output quality. Let the data make the case.

“I think this also helps build the ROI case internally,” he said.

The key, according to Cherny, is shifting the reference point. The comparison should be against the cost of engineering labor, not against other software subscriptions.

Managing AI agents at scale

Cherny himself manages hundreds—sometimes thousands—of AI agents on a given day. The key insight for operations-minded executives is that the bottleneck in any AI-augmented workflow is constantly shifting.

At Anthropic, once code generation was automated, code review became the constraint. The company responded by automating that process as well, deploying teams of AI agents with distinct personas to collaboratively review every pull request. Security scanning followed. Each solved bottleneck reveals the next—a dynamic familiar to any CFO focused on operational efficiency and continuous process improvement.

When asked what he has learned about himself through his work with AI, Cherny offered a candid response: “One thing that I’ve learned is I am just often wrong.”

At a time when long-held assumptions about building and managing engineering teams are being challenged, intellectual humility may be one of the most underrated competitive advantages.

“We take Claude and put it at the center of everything that we do, of every single process,” Cherny said. “When new people are onboarding at Anthropic, if they want to file an expense report, they don’t look it up in a wiki. They ask Claude: How do I file an expense report?”

The desired skill sets of new hires

Cherny’s hiring criteria are instructive for any executive building AI-native teams: generalists over specialists, low-ego collaborators, and empiricists who defer to customer data over internal conviction.

“We treat everyone on the team as essentially a CEO,” he said. “Their job is to talk to customers and gather signals to figure out what to build next. We’ve been rethinking every part of the engineering process, and it’s been humbling.”

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

*Quick note: Later this summer we’ll be publishing our third annual list of the 100 Most Powerful People in Business. Think you know someone who should make the list? Nominate them here! You can also learn more about our methodology and see last year’s list.

Leaderboard

Dave Lowrance, chief financial and administrative officer at Savara Inc. (Nasdaq: SVRA), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, is stepping down due to health-related reasons, effective July 15. As part of this transition, the financial and administrative responsibilities of the role will be separated. Robert Lutz, the company's chief operating officer since 2023, will assume the additional role of CFO.  He brings more than two decades of operational leadership experience. Before joining Savara, Lutz served as chief financial and business officer of iBio, Inc.

Abhey Lamba was appointed CFO of inDrive, a global mobility and delivery platform. Most recently, he served as CFO at RingCentral. Before that, he was VP of infrastructure finance at Amazon Web Services. Earlier in his career, Abhey held senior finance leadership roles at Cisco and Autodesk, and spent 15 years as an equity analyst at Mizuho Securities, UBS and ISI Group. 

Big Deal

ChatGPT maker OpenAI has filed confidentially for an IPO. The company announced on Monday that it submitted paperwork for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

"We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it," OpenAI said in an X post. "We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."

Last week, Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the SEC for a proposed public listing.

Going deeper

The Bank of America Institute's May 2026 employment report finds the labor market remains broadly resilient, with payroll growth picking up last month. Bank of America customer deposit account data suggests much of that strength is concentrated in lower-income job gains, while slowing growth in unemployment payments points to continued labor market health.

The report does flag a persistent wage disparity, though there are early signs of narrowing. Lower- and middle-income households saw after-tax wage growth of 3.1% and 3.5% year-over-year in May, respectively, while higher-income earners still outpaced them at 5.6%—a gap that remains wide even as it edges closer.

Overheard

"The era of learn once and then you’re done for life is over."

—AI Campus founder and chancellor Tade Oyerinde said during the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday. Oyerinde predicts organizations will soon staff permanent “continuous learning, continuous development, continuous evaluation” departments, as standard as operations or finance.