What building an AI-native finance function taught me

A finance leader at OpenAI describes five lessons learned while redesigning the finance function around artificial intelligence. The changes aim to make finance real-time by automating manual tasks like data gathering and reconciliation, enabling faster business decisions. Key approaches include giving all employees access to AI tools to experiment with, redesigning entire workflows around important decisions rather than just adopting new technology, and allowing finance professionals to build custom solutions for their own work. The underlying goal is to shift finance from closing books and updating forecasts as static periodic tasks into a continuous function that helps leaders see how the business is changing and act while outcomes can still be influenced.