Tried AI on real finance work and got back something you would never send?

Can you point at an example of good, or can you only describe one?

Ever written off a tool on the strength of one bad Tuesday?

HIGHLIGHTS OF EPISODE

The first time I opened Microsoft Copilot for Excel I gave it three months of revenue data and one sentence, asking why a line wasn’t working, and when it handed back something unformatted and generic I decided the tool was junk and didn’t open it again for two months.

I was the problem.

A new analyst gets weeks of context before anyone judges the work, and I gave the model a sentence. This episode is the three things missing from that handoff: context, standards, and the job you picked. Adding context took my output up about 80%. Attaching one report my leadership had liked took it to 95%.

If you work in FP&A and AI has burned you once, this is the fix, and it takes about 10 minutes.

RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED

Microsoft Copilot for Excel, the tool in the story

The 3 questions to run before your next prompt, covered at 12:40

The reversibility test for choosing what to hand over, covered at 11:17

The F9 Finance AI Library, free prompts and templates: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Contact -> hello@f9finance.com

Podcast -> https://www.f9finance.com/podcast

Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Instagram -> @f9finance

TikTok -> @f9finance

Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

Next Steps:

Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/

Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro, executive, and CFO looking to take their work to the next level. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and beyond to reduce hours and prevent burnout. If you’re ready to break free from burnout in corporate finance and FP&A, it’s time to invest in AI for Finance.

What if the AI win you keep bragging about isn’t actually finished?

Why can a 30% drop in your exception count mean nothing got fixed at all?

What happens when your AI report quietly stops working, and your CFO finds out before you do?

Eighty percent took minutes. The rest took weeks. I’m sharing how I built an AI-assisted reconciliation that looked finished in eleven minutes, then broke the moment I tried to run it again, and what it actually took to make that automation hold up under a CFO’s scrutiny. If you’re an FP&A team already bragging about your AI win, this is the test to run before you promise anyone a repeat performance.

• The 20-minute drift test, for checking whether your AI output holds up before your CFO sees it
• The three questions to ask before you promise a delivery date on any AI in finance project

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

• Contact -> hello@f9finance.com
• Podcast -> https://www.f9finance.com/podcast/
• Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/
• Instagram -> @f9finance
• TikTok -> @f9finance
• Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

• Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/
• Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/
• Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro who wants AI to actually hold up under a CFO’s scrutiny, not just look good in a demo. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools used in FP&A, reporting, and automation, to cut hours and avoid burnout.

Why did the finance teams who called themselves most mature at AI cost control do worse than everyone else?

If Technology says it owns AI cost 55% of the time and Finance says 53%, who actually owns it?

Why does 40 to 60% of what an AI feature actually costs never show up on the vendor invoice?

AI spend stopped being an engineering experiment and became a real line on your budget, and in most buildings nobody, not Technology and not the CFO’s office, actually owns it. Nobody owns the number. In this episode, I break down why your pilot number was never going to survive production, the mechanical reason AI cost grows like a triangle instead of a line, and the three levers, ones you already know how to pull, that bring it back down.

• FinOps Foundation, State of FinOps 2026 and the Token Economics guidance
• Deloitte CFO Signals Q2 2026 (200 CFOs at $1B+ companies)
• DoiT and Sapio Research AI spending survey (500 finance leaders)
• Flexera 2026 State of ITAM (512 IT asset managers)
• Datadog State of AI Engineering 2026
• Anthropic prompt caching and batch pricing documentation
• Finance AI Insider, the free weekly newsletter: https://www.f9finance.com/newsletter/

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

• Contact -> hello@f9finance.com
• Podcast -> Apple Podcasts and Spotify: https://www.f9finance.com/podcast/
• Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/
• Instagram -> @f9finance
• TikTok -> @f9finance
• Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

• Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/
• Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/
• Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro who wants AI to actually hold up under a CFO’s scrutiny, not just look good in a demo. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools used in FP&A, reporting, and automation, to cut hours and avoid burnout.

What good are a couple hundred saved prompts if you’re still losing your afternoon to month-end?

What do you do when an agent hands you the end of 12 steps you never watched?

What are the three questions to run before you hand any finance job to an agent?

Last month I watched an AI agent take a job I would have broken into fifteen separate prompts and just run it, start to finish, while I got a coffee. Fifteen prompts, one brief. This episode hands you the skill that replaced prompt engineering for finance automation, the three shifts and three questions that took one reconciliation from a full afternoon to about ten minutes.

• Finance AI Insider, the free weekly newsletter: https://www.f9finance.com/newsletter/

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

• Contact -> hello@f9finance.com
• Podcast -> Apple Podcasts and Spotify: https://www.f9finance.com/podcast/
• Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/
• Instagram -> @f9finance
• TikTok -> @f9finance
• Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

• Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/
• Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/
• Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro who wants AI to actually hold up under a CFO’s scrutiny, not just look good in a demo. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools used in FP&A, reporting, and automation, to cut hours and avoid burnout.

What is “workslop,” and are you already passing it downstream without knowing?

Why did 40% of workers get handed broken AI work in a single month, and could you already be one of them?

Why did 95% of enterprise AI pilots return nothing measurable?

The same AI tool, in the same week, saved me a full afternoon on one job and cost me one on another, and this episode draws the line between AI tools that pay you back and the ones that just add more work with a nicer font. Same tool, opposite results. I’m grounding the split in fresh 2025 and 2026 research and a rule I call the verification tax, so you can tell checkable work from judgment work before automation touches either one.

• Finance AI Insider, the free weekly newsletter: https://www.f9finance.com/newsletter/
• BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab research on “workslop”
• MIT’s 2025 State of AI in Business report
• The 2026 Journal of Accounting Research field study
• The “Ironies of Generative AI” research

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

• Contact -> hello@f9finance.com
• Podcast -> https://www.f9finance.com/podcast/
• Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/
• Instagram -> @f9finance
• TikTok -> @f9finance
• Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

• Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/
• Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/
• Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro who wants AI to actually hold up under a CFO’s scrutiny, not just look good in a demo. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools used in FP&A, reporting, and automation, to cut hours and avoid burnout.

What do you do when the AI tool your workflow runs on gets pulled by the government with zero notice?

Why is betting on a frontier AI model actually a concentration risk, the same kind you already manage in a portfolio?

What are the three moves that keep a vanished AI tool from blowing up a deadline you already promised your CFO?

On June 9th, the most powerful AI model on the planet launched, then the US government pulled it three days later, and it came back three weeks after that. Gone in three days. In this episode, I break down what the Claude Fable 5 saga means for AI in Finance, for any finance pro building AI tools into real work, and the three moves that keep a vanished tool from blowing up your deadline.

• Finance AI Insider newsletter, one email a week with the AI workflows worth your time: https://www.f9finance.com/newsletter/
• Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@F9Finance

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

• Contact -> hello@f9finance.com
• Podcast -> https://www.f9finance.com/podcast/
• Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/
• Instagram -> @f9finance
• TikTok -> @f9finance
• Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

• Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/
• Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/
• Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro who wants AI to actually hold up under a CFO’s scrutiny, not just look good in a demo. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools used in FP&A, reporting, and automation, to cut hours and avoid burnout.

Why “tool first, not job first” kills most AI rollouts before month 3?

What’s the one question that separates pilots that ship from pilots that stall?

Is the CFO mandate actually enough to get an AI rollout across the finish line?

Every vendor sells AI. Most pilots stall anyway. In this episode I break down the three failure modes I keep seeing across real finance functions, why each one happens, and the exact set of questions I’d ask before any AI tool gets a CFO’s sign-off. If you’ve watched an AI pilot go quiet in the last year, or you’re staring down a vendor deck right now, this one is for you.

• The three questions to ask before any AI tool gets bought in your finance org
• Finance AI Insider newsletter (free, prompts, workflows, and tips each week): https://www.f9finance.com/newsletter/
• F9 Finance on YouTube (full episode video plus screen recordings for build episodes): https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance

This episode’s sponsor is Finance AI Lab. Members who finish their first four roadmaps get about seven hours a week back. Fifty-nine dollars a month, cancel anytime. https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

• Contact -> hello@f9finance.com
• Podcast -> https://www.f9finance.com/podcast/
• Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/
• Instagram -> @f9finance
• TikTok -> @f9finance
• Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

• Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/
• Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/
• Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/

Excel at AI in Finance is for the finance pro who wants AI to actually hold up under a CFO’s scrutiny, not just look good in a demo. Mike is a senior finance leader breaking down AI tools used in FP&A, reporting, and automation, to cut hours and avoid burnout.

The AI playbook for finance pros who want their nights back.

The finance job is getting bigger every quarter. The day isn’t getting any longer. Every week there’s a new tool, a new LinkedIn post about someone who automated their entire close, a new AI conversation happening around you.

If you’re the finance pro trying to keep up without giving up your evenings, your weekends, or the life you have outside the work, this show is built for you.

Excel at AI in Finance is a weekly podcast for corporate finance pros learning AI tools without the hype. Each week you get one thing you can take into your finance job right away:

• An FP&A workflow you can rebuild on Monday
• A frame for handling AI when your CFO asks
• An honest read on the trend everyone’s talking about
• A conversation with someone who’s already done the thing

Every episode opens with a real story from Mike’s desk or a finance pro he’s worked with. Not a hypothetical. Then a breakdown of what actually works. And an honest counterpoint at the close, because the AI advice you’re hearing everywhere else has almost never touched a real finance function.

The rule: if a workflow only ships in a vendor demo, it doesn’t ship on the show.

Because the finance pros who learn AI skip the burnout and keep their jobs. They become the ones their company can’t afford to lose.

New episodes every Tuesday.

Mike runs F9 Finance and is a senior finance leader working in the trenches with AI tools, automation, and the FP&A work that has to hold up under a CFO’s scrutiny. He writes the Finance AI Insider newsletter and runs the Finance AI Lab community for finance pros learning AI without the hype.

• Contact -> hello@f9finance.com
• Podcast -> https://www.f9finance.com/podcast/
• Connect -> Finance AI Lab, the private community for finance pros learning AI: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/
• Instagram -> @f9finance
• TikTok -> @f9finance
• Resources -> https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/

• Step 1: Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance/
• Step 2: Get a free set of ready-to-use AI prompts and templates for finance work with the AI Library: https://www.f9finance.com/ai-library/
• Step 3: Ready to launch your finance team into AI? Join the Finance AI Lab: https://www.f9finance.com/lab/