Good morning. I sat in on a webinar yesterday where an OpenAI exec casually mentioned that his entire department works with an AI agent—and the more I listened, the clearer it became that the tool was almost beside the point. The real story is what OpenAI’s finance team is being asked to become.
The finance department increasingly has the mandate to help leadership act while the outcome can still change. Within OpenAI’s finance department, led by CFO Sarah Friar, there is a strategic finance team that functions as a cross-functional partner to product, partnerships, engineering, and go-to-market teams. The team’s tool of choice is ChatGPT Work, an agent that can act across apps and files, stay on a task for hours, and turn a goal into a finished product.
The webinar was led by three members of OpenAI’s strategic finance team: Stephanie Struck, head of product finance; Kyle Kober, director of product finance; and Jackson Wang, who leads data science. “Our entire finance department uses ChatGPT Work,” Kober said. Teams combine approved financial data, Excel models, and business context to get frontier-level intelligence that completes tasks two to three times faster, he said.
Struck demonstrated the tool auditing quarter-end materials to catch discrepancies between board decks and actuals. Wang described shifting forecasting “from more of a spreadsheet-based system to more of a statistical-based forecasting model,” improving both accuracy and collaboration. They detailed how the tool automates monthly close by pulling data from systems like Databricks into one validated dashboard. ChatGPT Work speeds up and structures the close, but doesn’t replace the underlying accounting system or a controller’s sign-off.
Newer features include dynamic slide editing, a finance assistant for quick questions, an on-the-go podcast, with a “CFO spotlight” that surfaces the month’s top priorities and biggest variances—a feature the presenters said Friar values.
Regarding data governance, Kober said: “All of it is governed and auditable with controls to lock down the spend and the usage of your ChatGPT work experience.” However, there wasn’t much discussion of who owns the data, or how agent decisions get audited.
The skills that matter now
Struck addressed what OpenAI looks for in finance hires. Accounting, forecasting, controls, and analytical rigor are still required, she said, but they’re now baseline, not differentiators. What sets people apart is comfort with data and AI tools paired with judgment: knowing which questions to ask, challenging an AI’s output, and translating it into a business implication. “Why does this matter for the business?” is the question she wants her team asking constantly. Equally critical is communication — insights only matter, Struck said, if they’re shared quickly enough to change how the organization actually operates.
It seems that OpenAI isn’t betting that the tool alone gets this right. It’s betting on people who know when to push back on what it says.
Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com
Leaderboard
Kevin Kalicak was appointed CFO and treasurer of Portillo’s (Nasdaq: PTLO), the fast-casual restaurant known for serving Chicago-style favorites, effective Sept. 7. Kalicak has decades of financial leadership experience within the restaurant industry, serving in various roles with Darden Restaurants for more than 25 years. Most recently, Kalicak served as SVP of finance for Olive Garden. He has held several positions across various areas of brand finance, business analytics, enterprise finance, and investor relations within Darden’s portfolio.
Carla Chiorazzo was appointed CFO of Adolfson & Peterson Construction, a national construction management and contracting firm. Chiorazzo brings more than 20 years of financial and operational leadership experience. She most recently served as CFO of Conti Federal, a federal construction and design-build company. Before that, she was VP of finance, shared services at PAE, where she supported finance processes for more than 15,000 employees.
Big Deal
Gen Z has the lowest savings-to-spending ratio of any generation—and yet they're spending more, not less. A new Bank of America Institute report finds that despite tight budgets, Gen Z's discretionary spending on beauty, jewelry, coffee, and travel has actually strengthened over the past six months, defying the "K-shaped" pattern seen elsewhere in the economy.
The catch: a tougher labor market for new entrants is pushing more of them into gig work to fund it, with nearly 40% of that gig income now coming through social commerce platforms, according to the report.
Going deeper
Overheard
“We’re taking a small amount of the expertise that we use for rockets and satellites, and applying that to scaling terrestrial data centers.”
—Elon Musk said during SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company on Tuesday, Fortune reported. He believes SpaceX is uniquely positioned to dominate the AI compute race due to its rocket scientists. Data centers are a “trivial problem” compared to what SpaceX’s rocket engineers work on every day, Musk said. The company reported April-June revenue of $7.8 billion, compared with $4.1 billion a year earlier. SpaceX spent nearly $16 billion on AI infrastructure in the second quarter.
