Name: Former tech CEO believes AI will bring more jobs to the finance department— and to business as a whole
Uploaded: 2024-02-29
Duration: 13 min 11 s
Description: Niccolo de Masi, chairman of the Futurum Group, compares AI to the advent of Excel and ATMs. He also points out that trucking, once feared to go extinct due to AI, is now thriving.

Niccolo de Masi, chairman of the Futurum Group, compares AI to the advent of Excel and ATMs. He also points out that trucking, once feared to go extinct due to AI, is now thriving.

Former tech CEO believes AI will bring more jobs to the finance department— and to business as a whole

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Former tech CEO believes AI will bring more jobs to the finance department

For starters. Can you just please tell us a little about yourself and your uh relation with this topic? Because you've been on it for a long time. Yeah. Uh So let's see, I'm a physicist originally. Um my claims to fame that are relevant to this esteemed CFO group are uh I run two public companies before I was 30 years old. I've helped run 12 public companies. I've probably signed, oh, definitely a triple digit number of quarterly accounts as probably many of you have and evolving r landscape on both sides of the Atlantic. Um But I've, but I've played a, a pioneering role in uh industries as diverse as quantum computing, uh satellite data, consumer, internet gaming, et cetera. And, and every one of these has of course, been plugging away at what we used to call machine learning. But in the last 18 months, we realized there's a lot of enterprise value uh sizzle anyway to come from relabeling that, you know, A I, right. Um And so I, you know, I think it's safe to say that, you know, throughout the evening I look forward to meeting more of you. I, I'm of the sort of brass tack school of, you know, how, how can we actually take advantage of these things for people who actually run businesses in diverse sectors? Um, and, you know, let's talk about specific examples as opposed to, you know, my, the firm that I chair uh in Osti Fusion Group does all the market studies and I can give you big numbers about various fields. But I always find when you're running a company that that's sort of important but not as important as what I'm gonna actually do, you know, this year to beat my plan. OK. So what's the status of the tech right now? It's advancing incredibly fast? Um How can CFO S who may not have a background in technology? Understand, make it, let's say, render an opinion on whether a particular use of gen A I is gonna be good or not. Yeah. And I would broaden that question to be, you know, machine learning techniques generally, right? Like gen A I is, is a great, you know, thing to play around with, but not everything will not be solved through a, through a chat bot that occasionally, you know, hallucinates, right? Um You know, your, your, your job, look, the CFO role has had a, you know, a relentless march and increase in power, responsibility influence, you know, general importance for the last few decades. And I actually think that you've watched moments like, uh you know, Excel being rolled out and ATM S happening, you know, impact bits of the of the finance function for decades. And so, you know the predictions I will, I will give this room are it's going to be a net job creator for this function. It's going to increase the power of this function. It's going to increase the importance and the criticality of, of everyone who's in the in the profession being kind of the systems integrator of all things, data, the supply chain to of course compliance, right? Uh And I think that, you know, one of the, one of the questions and challenges that we all have to navigate is, you know, how do you find trusted people to work to each one of these things? And how do you integrate these things because you will be the Fulcrum if you're not already of galloping opportunities. Um But, you know, wisdom and judgment, I think will rule the day. And I also think uh this is near, near to my heart from, from companies, I've, I've helped run uh avoiding, you know, the traps, pitfalls, own goals. And frankly, you know, succumbing to the, the threats that everyone who runs a firm of size uh or senators these days encounters is kind of first and foremost, right? Like first don't go backwards uh and take the Hippocratic Oath about, you know, making sure that we do no harm. Uh Did I understand you properly to say that you think generative A I will increase employment in the finance function. Yeah, I think it will, I think it will increase employment in general, by the way. I mean, and, and I've been on the, I think, correct side of history in this one for the last decade. Um, II, I can remember sitting at Stanford last decade, uh, with a bunch of professors really demoralized about, uh, how a million truckers would be out of work, you know, within two or three years, 2015 or something. And I said, like, look, I doubt it. And here's why, right? Like one, you know, 10,000 years of recorded history. Ok. So we've been pretty good as a species at removing things and supplanting them with 10 times more of something that's more interesting for the people working inside to do two people forget that, you know, a I will grow the economy, which means you'll have more consumers and more services. And by the way, truckers, you know, paid more better benefits than ever today, it's a scarce, you know, Amazon, like scarce, you know, supply of labor, right? So, yeah, so, so I, I do think that you guys, you know, CFO S at the center of, you know, data, information, integrity and everything from how we hire to who we hire to, how we think about asset lifetime supply chains. Of course, you know, Starbucks and of course, you know, forecasting all of this will be, is being touched by machine learning A I, etcetera. But your, your roles will, you know, will be about how you integrate harvest and ensure integrity of the system. Because people's reliance on this will only increase. And at the end of the day, you know, the integrity of what you construct and what you insource and outsource will be kind of the mark I think of, you know, the best CFO S and the even better CFO S. Uh yeah, the integrity part is crucial as, you know, as everyone here knows, especially in the finance function along with uh reliability, uh obviously, security accuracy and so forth. And then you read the story about the unnamed multinational corporation where a guy in the finance function is invited to a Zoom call and is told by the CFO to deposit $25 million in five accounts that he'd never heard of before. And of course, he was the only real human. The guy was, uh on the, everybody else was a deep fake. Um, and he said afterward after it became clear what really happened, he said, well, I was kind of suspicious but all the guys on the call looked and sounded exactly like the guys. I know. So I did it. I, is this a potential threat to CFO H hun 100% structure of companies? Right. And for look, II, I, I'm, I'm on a four or five public boards and I've been on 12 in, in my life. And I think I've been on a lot of audit committees. At least half of them are more. Um, you know, how, how many of you, your firm have, you know, has significant fishing issues, have had data taken hostage. I've had both, you know, eight years ago, my firm was running Blue Mobile. I think, you know, we've, we've had data hostage, we've paid ransom, you know, with, with the, uh, with the higher integrity cyber criminals that release the data after you pay them. And you can, you can, you can, and you can figure out some of the higher integrity criminal organizations at time if you work with the FBI. Um, but we had a, we had a terrible, I had a terrible fishing uh disaster in the era. You remember when Seagate's CFO resigned over sort of the, the wire to Belize or whatever it was and there was a raft of these email threads going, starting with sort of the VP of finance, you know, to the SVP, to the treasurer, to the CFO and like some or rather back down, I guess. And someone sent the wire, you know, I woke up, uh, in May 2016, my wife's birthday. That's why I remember this in, in, in, in Napa, California and I have this email from the head of payroll, right? And he goes, you know, and there was a thread and he goes like Nicola, you sent this to me, right? And I read and I look down, you know, seven o'clock in the morning on Saturday and I go, oh God, like this is going to be such a bad weekend, week, month quarter. But you know what happened was uh someone sent, you know, bad actors sent emails into my organization and the head of payroll got one that said from me. Um uh I'm just doing some research for the com committee. Please. Uh upload uh all of the W twos for our US employees to this dropbox folder. So, I mean, what happened obviously was, you know, we had 1000 people on Lifelock for, you know, the next whatever it is 567 years, I think I've just gotten off of it and you're doing those special tax returns where you have the code to prove that it's actually you and, you know, and of course you have all of the board and, you know, and people get fired over this and, you know, all that stuff. Um But, you know, I, I actually think one of the lessons I can contribute to this room as pertains to A I is, you know, the tight interlinking with cyber security phishing and this function, right? This function tends to control, you know, people who are in charge of not just wires but also information, right? And what I remember, you know, being so frustrated by, with my own company and companies in general are, you know, usually we bring in all cyber secure, like bring in the consultants. We're gonna, we're gonna do fishing training for the whole organization. And you get this report, how many, you get the report? Like five people opened the thing this morning. Everyone, like the percentage is down. We're at 4.8 we're making progress and what everyone forgets and I will sort of start and finish. Maybe my comments on, you know, the importance. You see if a judgment and, and, and power is, it doesn't matter if the Q A department, right, get fishing training or not. There's nothing they can do in my episode of Glu Mobile. What amazed me about what happened was Niccolo couldn't have done this, Niccolo himself as the chairman CEO, I wouldn't know where in God's name to go to find thousands of W twos to upload. Even if I wanted, I'd be like, you know, I'd be scrambling to ask five of the people to do. And so, you know, dawned on me that the one of the grand errors in everything from A I to cybersecurity to most companies governance and, and the way that we train people is we just peanut butter, right? We, we sort of go like, oh, we've trained 10,000 people. The phishing report opening email thing is lower. That doesn't matter what matters is the 5 to 10 people in your function having 100 to 1000 times more training than everybody else. One because they can actually upload the W twos or send the wire and, and two. I hate, I hate to break it to all of us, like in a world where that time it was zoom. We're going back to the Cold War with the two guys with the punch cards that have to stick them in at the same time and can't do it themselves. Like that's, that's where this is going pretty quickly. To be honest. Uh We only have time for one more before we sit down and involve everyone in the uh discussion. But um this uh I mean, generative A I is advancing so fast. People are going to wonder, should I just jump into it now? So we get some uh experience or should we try to wait until it's a little better than it is now and we can do more with it? Well, look, it's, it's commoditizing, right? And I, I made this prediction, you know, a year and a half ago and I was like, look, there's three or four companies that can afford incredible investments. It's also getting cheaper to train your own LLM I mean, exponentially cheaper, right? So you're gonna have the choice this decade on, do I wanna work with this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy who I'm gonna, is gonna charge me a cent to query or whatever or do I wanna train my own for the amount of money that some of your firms, most of your firms can probably afford. Um, I, I actually think, and, you know, either heard it here first and we'll see if it's genius or insanity, as they say, based on the outcome of results, I think this will be integrated the same way that, you know, Excel has been in, in this function, a vast productivity improver but not a panacea. And my prediction, you know, is that by the end of this year, people will, you know, you, you'll just be including this in part of your sort of vending conversations in a lot of ways. Um And we'll turn and we'll turn attention back to what optimization problems can we actually solve? What can we do with this data that we couldn't before? Right. Uh We gotta stop, right. So we're gonna sit down and then we'll keep talking, but this is a lot of real world information that's been very helpful. Nicolo. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thanks. Thanks to our host.