AI Finance Club: What three members learned from the experience with Eve, Jurgen & Bukie

I started with a provocative explanation. I said initially 90% Excel, now 90% Cloud Codex. That means 10% Excel. That's probably not fully true because I still using Excel. Yes, I do not longer do is a manual work. I use Codex and Cloud Code to play around and excel, to modify all the stuff I want. I give to specifications and the AI is doing the changes in Excel. Of course, I have to look at it. I talked about Godres and stuff like that. In edge cases, that's very important because you are the human gate in the end. But yes, the manual work, the manual building of an integrated model is no longer the case I'm doing because also clients, they do not pay you anymore for it. Hello, everyone. Welcome to FPNA on lock. Thrilled to have you with us today. We're going to go ahead and talk about where finance meets strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FPNA guy. And each week, we bring you conversations and practical advice from pot leaders, industry experts, and practitioners who are reshaping the role of FPNA in today's business world. And it's changing rapidly. That's why I'm super excited to have this episode about AI. We're going to talk in quite a bit about AI, the AI Finance Club. And I have with me three guests that are joining me this week. So we have Eve, Eve, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Excited to have you. We have Jürgen with us. Welcome Jürgen. Welcome. Thank you. And then we have Boogie with us as well. Welcome. Thanks, Paul. Thanks for having me. So we're going to start. I'm going to give each of our guests just a minute to introduce themselves versus you listening to me read something. I think that'll be much better here. So why don't we start with Jürgen this time? If you can just take a minute and introduce yourself to the audience. I'm Jürgen. I'm based in Hamburg, Germany. I work as a fractional CFL mainly in sports, hospitality and tech and SOS too. I have before, prior to founding my own firm almost five years ago, I spend more than 15 years in leading finance positions at EY, Deloitte, and the sports marketing industry. And yes, the path matters most for today is probably the last two years. And I had to use a go a conversation with Nicolas Boucher. He's the founder of the AI Finance Club. It was my, let's say, personal AI moment. I like to call it like this. I saw that time two things. AI was posing a rear-risk for my solo business and a huge opportunity. And then what I did, I went all in. I stopped building my whole AI expertise. I've spent roughly 30% of my whole time of my available time on building AI expertise and building my let's say, I'd agent harness. I'd like to call it like this. During that time, I also joined the AI Finance Club and the accelerator and up in the meantime, now I'm part of the coaching team. Yes, during the last 1.5 years, the work changed dramatically. I like to call it from 90% Excel to 90% Claude Code and Codex. That's currently what I'm opening first in the morning and closing rest, and evening. I think a lot of people. So thank you for the introduction. Fun fact, when you mentioned sports marketing, graduated from ASU at the time. They had the number one MBA program in the US for sports marketing. Oh, nice. I had several students I graduated with that are multiple big sports marketing roles all over the globe. So fun area. When we go to Boogie next and let you go ahead and introduce yourself. Thanks, Paul. Thanks again for inviting me. Hi, everyone. I'm Boogie Fafiriji. And I chuckled out, Juggin, because of what you said about Claude and Codex. You can be very addictive because I fund myself also, but in all of my time, it codex and Claude. But I'm an FDNA professional. 15 years of experience, supporting businesses. I mean, FDNA go to market on business analytics, work then verticals like SaaS, manufacturing, professional services. And more recently, similar to Juggin, I have been doing a lot of building, vibe coding, AI. And so my journey AI also started about two and a half years ago, where I was kind of like exploring, especially when the GPT came out. And I was like, OK, how could I level up? How can I start to use this in my workflows and all of that? So that arc has been very interesting, two and a half years later, things that I've been able to accomplish with AI. Most recently, I built from scratch. So from concept in my head, all the way to production, deployed software, I built my AI pilot financial intelligence platform, called CFO Intel. And what it does is it provides CFO grade insights with a paper trail. And so that has been really valuable. And I'm fulfilling for me to accomplish with AI. I'm really excited about what the future looks like, what else I can keep accomplishing with it. And that's it. Happy to be on this episode. I'm looking to having a great episode with the rest of the folks. So thanks again for having me, Paul. Thank you. Eve, go to you next. Hi, my name is Eve Breiter. And I live in New York City in Union Square, Manhattan, great location. And I'm a little different. I am not an FPNA. I am in procurement. I'm a little procurement leaders. I stood up, functions, done everything from cost savings, risk management, governance, anything, finding new suppliers. But I've always worked in finance very, very closely with FPNA. So very relevant. And AI has the same application. I'm getting my procurement buddies to all join the AI Finance Club because to help with the analysis, unlocking insights, building automations, being able to teach, clawed, I love the idea of these skills, creating the building blocks, and then pulling it together into a monthly workflow. It's just amazing. It's light-changing. It's bigger than Excel. Bigger than Windows or even the internet. So I'm enjoying every moment. And my background is Amazon, American Express, and State Street. And I'm doing some interim fractional work right now with a variety of mid-sized firms and looking at full time, but also considering doing fractional longer term. And also, maybe-- I'm not creating. Got it. Appreciate the introduction. I'm not sure we can allow a procurement person on the ship, kidding, because I started my career in procurement. I know. I'm nipple. I spent four years as a contract specialist with the Navy before I went back to grad school. And switched careers. I've done my procurement stint as I like to call it. I also did Time at American Express. So I worked there as well. Have a few things in common there. All right. So this is the question I like to start every episode off. And I'm going to throw this one to Bookie here. And then you're going to leave if you want to add some thoughts you can. But if I was to ask you what grade FPNA looks like, I know you spent a lot of years in the FPNA chair, what would you say? How would you describe it? Thanks, Paul. So for me, if you say great FPNA, I would say great business partnering. And if I was going to kind of clip down on that, I would say for any great finance business partner, you have two muscles. Right? You have your strategic muscle. You have your tactical muscle. And you can do without either of the two. So when I talk tactical, or you're talking about your technical skills, so financial modeling, building dashboards, your critical thinking skills. So the things that make you actually do your work, data mining, can you get a bunch of data and then squeeze insights out of it? So can you use Excel? Can you use? Can you write queries? So from that aspect, you need great technical skills. So even just do the job. That's just like the cost of admission and doing the role. And then the other side of it is the strategic piece of it. So that's where-- OK, now you have all these great data. You've got some insights. Now what do you do with it, especially with regards to the business? So you then need to help translate what those numbers mean. So the business doesn't care that you build a 40-tab Excel spreadsheet. It doesn't care that you use power query. It wants to know, OK, what does the number-- what do the numbers say and how does it impact the business? And if you cannot communicate that in a way that they can actually-- that is actually able to the business, then you're not really doing the other side of the role, which is being strategic and using those soft skills that make you a full complete FBNA business partner. So having those strong technical skills and then having the soft skills to together have you as a full business partner to the business. And the only way you can literally drive influence is showing up translating the results, communicating what it means, and letting them know how it impacts the business so that the business can then go on and execute on it. So in a nutshell, start being a business partner with your muscles, your strategic muscles, and your technical muscles. I call it this way that being an FBNA business partner is part art and part science. You need to be a great FBNA business partner. So that's what I feel that great FBNA is. Appreciate that answer. Jürgen, anything you'd like to add or any thoughts there? All is enough to bring additional value to that really profound answer that Ruki already gave. But what's pretty clear for me that FBNA is not a report. It's not a report. As Ruki also said, it's a decision behind it. The report helps you make. I think we'll talk about it later. You can build beautiful decks, especially in the age of AI. It's so easy doing that. It almost at no cost. But if nobody can act on it, then just it has failed. And. And what's also important for me, figures, they have to be, let's say, a defensible. You have to make them defensible. You need to show where every number came from that you present. Because great FPNA turns numbers into decisions. People can actually stand behind them. And yes, I think that's more important, the age of where I have it before. Great points. Appreciate that. Eve coming from the procurement side of things. Anything you'd like dad. I mean, I think at the end of the day, we're here to make teams. Seth Boating quote, we're not here to answer email through to reporting. It's like, what difference did we make? And AI can't replace that. So it's the human judgment. What so what now? What? What are the insights? And we'll get into that AI finance club has really helped me unlock that from AI as well. So helping the business drive margin, find the right suppliers, the right capabilities, mitigate risks and try growth. Love it. I thank you for that. So we're going to spend most of the rest of the time talking about AI. I'm going to ask you some questions about your experience with the finance club. I'm going to give a little bit about it. And then I'll turn to one of you to give a little bit more. So this is run by Nicholas Boucher. I know he has over 3000 members in it now. There are several other instructors that help has master classes, a circle community courses you can take webinars. And just a number of resources designed to help you get up to speed with AI to be more productive. So that's how I describe it in that shell. I've spoke at it before I have access to the community. I know Nicholas and I have been friends now. I think we met for the first time probably five years ago now. So it's been it was before AI even came out that we, we've been connecting with each other and all each other. So I know he's doing a lot of good work there. But Eve, let's give a little more of a description. How would you describe the community and kind of how it works? Finance club is 3000 CFOs, fractional CFOs, finance pros. And if you procurement people to snuck in all learning how to leverage AI, hands on practical knowledge. And it's everything from knowing the tool, whether it's Claude, open AI, co-pilot chat to you, T, but what does it mean for finance? How do I use it for analyses unlocking insights, creating interactive dashboards, automations so that we free up the day to day and have more time on the analysis, the release, the building and the so what? What are we going to do with this information? What should change in the next tiny days? So you learn from each other. There's excellent master classes. There's constant updates. So every time there's a new update like these these LL fun tools are constantly upgrading their models. You'll see a really great post about what it means for you and some tips and tricks and some examples. And then there's the AI accelerator, which is a six week intensive course. Cam's on helps to build so you do 30 live muscle, you know, building exercises, six projects so that you sit and I know we're going to get into this here again with the star of our cohort one and Boogie. I know you were already creating your own tools, even before this. And I think you're both coaches, but amazing, amazing opportunity to learn from people today today. Thank you. So I'd love to know and we'll start. I think we'll start with Boogie and we'll work around here kind of what made you decide to join? How did you come to that decision that it made sense to join the community? So we'll start with you on that. Yeah. Sure. Well, so yeah, like I said earlier, when Chad G PT came out like that was the first of the year. LLM's that came out. I was kind of doing it on my own, right? So we kind of experimenting, push it. The envelope, okay, how far can I go with this? You know, but I was only so much I could accomplish on my own. And I'm a component of joining communities where I can learn with other professionals, right? So I kind of had a sense of I was already scouting for okay, is there any community where, you know, we can learn AI together, AI and finance together? And so when I discovered AI and finance, I'm like, okay, let me check out this community and see, right? So it helped also because I think when I joined the first informational class, there was something about if you joined like, you know, 30 days, we found or something like if you were on there for a while, I didn't really, you're not feeling the community, you could get it in person. I'm looking, well, let me check it out. And I joined and I've been having in the club for like almost a year now, because the value has been, you know, immense. To each point, there are a lot of high players in the community. There's a lot of sharing. There's a lot of learning as well. So you're not just consuming, you're also contributing back to the community, right? You can define how you want to engage. There's a lot of resources on there as well. So for me, it's been validating in a way because I wanted to kind of grow along with people, right? So you know, the saying that says, if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together, right? I feel like we are all alleviating each other. We are all kind of pushing each other to be okay, hey, someone would do something and say, this is how I kind of put this workflow together. And this is these are the results I got. And the people I hold great, you know, and they'll take that same example back to their own work as well to go implement. And the same way someone would say, Hey, I'm struggling with this. And they're so much to jump in and say, Hey, we tried this. Have you tried that? You know, so just having that kind of community and it's a community of CF was a semi-finance need us to is a global community. So right, if I think about 85 countries, so yeah, it's a great place to be, I think, you know, I say, you know, but that's been my experience so far. They enjoyed, you know, being in the club and I'm excited to see the other things we keep doing. I'm pushing in there as well. Eve, how did you end up joining the community? What was kind of your story? So I was on LinkedIn and I see a post from someone named Nippos Boost Day. And he's like, free AI master class, see a post for see a post. And I'm like, should I do it? I'm not a CFO. And so finally, I got over it. I I signed up. I'm like, I hope you accept me. And then I signed up. This was really, probably, yeah, spring of last year. And then learned about the class signed up immediately and joined May of 2025. There are about 500 members. It's now grown to 3000 members. And it's been amazing ever since. And then I also joined the first accelerator in January of this year. Got it. All right. Thanks. How about you, Jürgen? What's your story? How did you end up by joining the community? As I already said, my my story was really personal related. I met Nikolás roughly a bit more than two years ago. And then we had just just a virtual discussion about the chances that Tachy PT that was. He's in Germany now, isn't he? He is. Yes. He's he's in Southern Germany and we met in Germany. Yeah. When he said there are some huge changes coming and I asked as a solo entrepreneur, I as I said, I saw some risks at first. And I was a bit skeptical, skeptical too, because this whole new world seemed a bit strange to me as an exxel guy, exxel guy. But as I said, I saw an opportunity and this was the reason why I really heavily invested. I invested really 30% of my available time as a fraction of CFO for a really expertise building over the last two years, not only last half a year, also the time prior. And at the same time, I decided, okay, you do do it by yourself. Why not exchanging with other people? And then I talked again to Nikolás and he said, you come join my group. Join the A-Fine Club. And I did that and for me it was more or less not being the only guy. I want to search out for people who face the same issues, who face the same challenges, who face the same. Yes. You see the same risks probably and chances. And that's why I joined. Yeah, it was a great time. As I said, and I participated in the accelerator too in January in the cohort one. And now in cohort three, I'm one of the coaches. Yes, it was a great journey and a great exchange. Thank you for that. So I want to ask a question. This isn't wasn't necessarily in the list, but I'm curious to see the answer here. So before kind of joining the community and now how much time did you spend in Excel versus how much you're spending now? I want to see something. So Boogie, kind of rough, rough estimate. How much does it change? Would you say I don't really spend time in Excel anymore to be honest. Like I said, I've kind of like graduated to the level of always thinking of, okay, automate, automate, how can I make, how can I reach the gap from A to Z in the fastest, quickest, most defensive way to Jurgen's point? So I'm also always obsessed, obsessed about can I defend this? Can I defend this? That's like my non-negotiable. But in terms of my spinning my wheels in Excel formula and all of that, I don't spend too much time in that anymore. I pretty much kind of start from a workflow standpoint. Okay. Okay. And I do this and what are the tools I can build together to make sure that it's giving me the output that I want and is serving it in a manner that I can defend it. I would say in a nutshell, to answer your question for all, it's been there's been a vast difference from an AI application standpoint for me. Okay. In my introduction, I started with a provoked, rather provoked, a provocative explanation. I said initially 90% Excel, 9, 9% Cloud Code codex. That's probably not, not fully true because I still using Excel. Yes. But what I do not longer do is a manual work. I use codex and cloud code to play around an Excel to, to modify all the stuff I want. I talked about Godres and stuff like that and edge cases. That's very important because you are the human gate in the end. But yes, the manual work, the manual building of an integrated model is no longer the case. I'm doing because also clients, they do not pay you anymore for it because they know, especially because of these strange LinkedIn posts sometimes, the models can do it. The AI can do it. And this reason why I automate as much as possible and the manual work is just. FPNA guy here. I hope you're enjoying this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it. I love speaking to Eve, Boogie and Jurgen and hearing how the AI Finance Club has accelerated their use of AI and changed the way they're working in finance and even procurement. And with that, what I want to share, if you're interested in the AI Finance Club, you can learn more about it at my website. You can also use my discount code YNV, TUWKG for $100 or 10% on. So you can go to the FPNA guy.com, click on my educational resources, go to the AI section and go to the AI Finance Club and you can learn more about it there. I encourage you to check it out. And if you're interested, consider joining the club. Like I said, I've got an exclusive discount for you. Get 100 off. That code once again is YNV TUWKG. If you have any questions about the community, don't hesitate to email me. Eve, any thoughts here? I know you're in procurement. So you probably weren't quite the same, maybe the same with Excel, but any thoughts there. So definitely spend a lot of time. I always spend a lot of time in Excel. And AI has definitely cut that in half to some of the basics for cleaning up a chart. I used to spend way too much time trying to fix charts and PowerPoint. And then AI has unlocked a lot of dashboards, analytics, dashboards, insights, and really cleaned up the quality of the appearance because for Excel, well, comfortable in Excel, I've learned. I've gotten that FPNA polished my spreadsheets. I think it's gone to the next level. And I've been able to do amazing dashboards, which I do check in Excel and I have an audit trail. And it's great to have this work product to build this work product in your wall, or if you're looking for a wall or trying to win new business, you want to have work product that you can show. So not just that you took the class or your part of AI finance, but here's what I feel. And work product is the new resume. I need to post more on LinkedIn and get a little time. But I definitely use it and I'm using it in different, particular projects for different clients and also putting a portfolio together. So I'd say it's cut my Excel in half, probably from before it could be endless number of hours of Excel. Well, let's say 20 hours of Excel down to 10 hours of Excel, because I'm still learning and testing. I want to be comfortable, want to document the processes as well. So I don't forget. And I could keep everything fresh. Appreciate that. I kind of had an idea what the answers would be, but I wanted our audience to hear that. So, so appreciate that. What's the favorite thing you've built either kind of tool that you've vicarated, workflow you've automated? Maybe your thing you're most proud of favorite saved you the most time. You can define that however you want. But kind of with AI, maybe we'll start with you, Jürgen. I'm a several tools, but I think at least the most important one from a client perspective, at least there was the tool the client paid the most of the money so far. It was a Monte Carlo simulation, a cash flow tool that I built for a SaaS company. They just shifted their revenue model from a license to a subscription model. And they wanted to see how this revenue dipped that that made my, may come from a J curve result in the cash position. And I, yes, I built that model for them, based fully based on AI. And what I like is how it changed the conversation. Instead of just saying revenue will be X and we could talk in pro week to just could talk in probabilities, which was difficult, more difficult before. For example, what are the odds that the liquidity stays above a certain line? There was one of the questions. There is something in CIO, CIO, can actually decide off because the model really gave the possibility to do that. And but the part I'm proudest of is probably invisible before the simulation. And I did some, let's say, unglamorous work, making sure the numbers tie, tie back to source systems. You see, always come back to the dead crucial point because I checked the edge cases. I made sure that the, that the output could be the challenge. And that is why a client could actually trust it and he paid for it. And it was not built to look good in a five minute demo because I hate these demos. I think you all got that now. It was built on a hold up when someone challenged the number. Yes, I was pretty proud of it because the client really saw the value added for him. And it was of course very interchangeable. It was it was HTML Java based and yes, look pretty good. But the question could that also have been done with a guy by Excel? Yes, that was possible and Excel. But I think the way I could sell it to the client was much easier with the age of, in the age of AI. And all. Yeah. And now it makes a lot of sense. I mean, the reality is you can build just about anything in Excel, even without AI, right? Before AI ever came. There's a question of should you, does it make sense? And think that's what a lot of people are trying to figure out. And it varies depending on the role, complexity, how much you can do with AI versus Excel, also your learning skills, seeing a lot of different things. But there's clearly, it can clearly help. No question. It can do things. There are certain things that are better for AI than doing in Excel for sure. So totally makes sense. I get what you're saying. Eve, how about you? So when I was in the AI accelerator, I created everyone's favorite topic for curvent policy. So a chat or. But procurement policy, mod, you know, where you have to use procurement, no one understands the policy. Everyone's in tears. So I was like, there must be a better way to do this. Now what took time creating the actual agent or the GBT, the custom GBT was pretty easy. But having to, I created basically a fictional policy, having to break that down, trying to simplify it and explain it was a great opportunity for process improvement. And what I should have done. And what I would do in the future is I ran it through AI again, whole separate chat. And here is the policy process. Map this out. It took a while. And tell me how it could be more efficient using first principles. So where are their duplicate approvals? Or where are their points of confusion? Because it's not necessarily procurement often by any else has to approve that leave all the business. And then it has to be approved again during the contract process. So I got a lot of great ideas and I would have a work session to simplify. So you always hear about before you build any AI tool, use this as an opportunity to simplify the process. Document the process. My points of confusion and then just use the app as a supporting tool. The app is not going to streamline your process for you. Unless you, if you can ask it for ideas. So that foundational work is really important. And then I submitted it and my coach said, Hey, wait a minute. How do I know this is real? Go back because I had an attached to actual policy itself. And I hadn't attached enough use cases. So I went back again and I liked that rigor. I liked that talent and I built out more detail and more explanation with table. So I tested more use cases and I resubited it. So the great learning example and one of my favorite thoughts. Cool. Thank you for sharing that. How about you, Boogie? Yeah. Sure. I would say without any shadow of doubt, my favorite works with us being building CFO for Intel from scratch. And how that started out was I was I just to be ideal. Okay. How far can I go with this? I wanted to put on a quote or to meet myself out of most of the groundwork that comes with FN. So like, okay, the deterministic part of it, the calculations, the, you know, putting stuff together. And I just started building. So I just, you know, no prior experience, but I'll go, okay, let me take a stab at this. Let me take a stab at this. So I built it to a point where I felt, hmm. Okay. In fact, at some point And a version of me was asking, how far down the rabbit hole have I gotten? What am I doing right here? Why do you think you're suffering to develop all of a sudden? So I was having that conversation. But then I, Annabel reached out and said, hey, we're collecting pieces from people. What have you been doing with AI? And I'm like, OK, well, I've been doing this. I can share this, right? And she shared it on the feed and the response kind of blew my mind, right? Because prior to that, I was just, OK, I'm just putting stuff together. But the level of response that I got on feedback kind of validated it. What I was doing that I was, I had something that was something here, right? Like, I had mentorship inquiries. I had people saying, oh, you've inspired me to go build something, right? I think I also got featured on the milestone announcement as well. So I'm like, OK, well, this is a big deal. Like, I should take this more seriously, right? So I then continued building it out up to the point where I now have gotten it to, it's fully production deployed. And now I'm at the piece where I'm not getting an engineer to look in and start to look at, OK, where are the guys from a security standpoint? Before I didn't officially bring it to market. So that has been super, super great. I would say without any doubt that I'm very part of that. And then most recently as well, another idea that I've been sitting on. A finance concept as well. I did it in AI Akaton, Johnny Foods. And it won third price for Best Builder Award, too. So I'm like, OK, you know what? I think I unlocked new skills at this point with AI. And I'm excited to see how far I can push it. So yeah, that, it's been, that's been my two favorite experiences so far. FPNA Guy here. I want to take a minute and share something I've been working on. I've spent several months adding new affiliate programs to my website. I'm wondering why affiliate programs? Well, I can't train you on everything. But I can show you and give you trusted resources with exclusive FPNA Guy discounts in many cases on my website. I have several of the top FPNA AI people in the world. I have the top certificate programs. I also have other programs like Excel, Power BI. I'm bringing you some of the top people that train in the world. There's Nicholas Boucher with exclusive discounts, David 14, Madden Carl Siedman with the exclusive discount, the top programs F-PAC, FMI, and more. So go ahead and check it out on my website. Sign up. And if you have a question on what program is right for you, go ahead and message me. I'll get back to you. LinkedIn or you can email me. So go to the FPNA Guy.com and check out my trusted list of resources for you to upskill yourself. Love it. Thanks. So is the plan to release your software and sell it commercially? Or are you, where are you thinking about it? Yeah. So I'm thinking so right now I have it in two forms. I have it like as a SaaS software and then I literally did a portable workflow for codex and cloud. So right now I think right now it's more marketable with the codex, cloud, workflow because there's already buying with that. I'm just going to write the way from that versus, you know, there's that reservation. It's an ad, do I need another SaaS platform? So I'm still kind of figuring those pieces out. Like I said, I kind of accidentally stumbled on this, but I'm trying to put on my founder and to print no hat and see, you know, how far I can take this, but I really, really believe in the product and I think that is something I can take really far. So I appreciate that. The next question I added, it's clear you're all big fans. You feel like you've got a lot of value out of the finance club. I mean, that's obvious. What are, it may be areas you'd like to see it improve or changes or could even be concerns people might have or things they should be thinking about before joining. So anything you can share around that and maybe we'll go ahead and start with you on this one, Boogie, if you could go first. Yeah, sure. What I would say, not so much concerns, but more like feedback. Is that you're trying to join or you're in the community, you're joined already is, I feel like there might be some reservation from, I don't know much. And so people might tend to be quiet or not kind of like, you know, show up and say, hey, I've done this or this is what I'm working on. And I feel like the best way to learn is to share. So if you're learning and you're, you know, is a loop, you're learning, you're sharing, you're learning, you're sharing, that's the only way you can level up for, you know, for a lot of a better word, right? So if I'm doing something and I share it and somebody says, hey, there's a better way you can do that. Now, I've learned something, you versus if I just keep it to myself because I'm like, oh, I think that probably know this more than me or have a gap. I don't want to do. So just put yourself out there. Be curious, right? Is just what I would say is at any level where you find your expertise at, you will always learn. With the community structured, there's always someone who's smarter than you. You're not the smartest person in the room. So just having that sense of, okay, I can always learn. I feel like there's no shame, there's no judgment, right? So just kind of show up as yourself, show up ready to learn, be curious, ask questions, engage. I think with that kind of little mindset shift that would help, you know, you get to whatever point you're trying to get to. And it's not a one and done. It's not you do it and it's a continuous loop. It's you're learning something fresh every day. It's fresh content. AI is changing and then you're learning it. So everyone is growing at the same pace at the same time. And you know, just, I would just say just, you know, remove those reservations and just show up as yourself to learn and appreciate that. What do we go with you next, Eve on this one? Right. And I think with the AI finance club, you do have a lot of participation in training workshops. And we have a live stream. Anyone can share a use case. So for example, when Boogie's CFO intel use case was posted earlier this year, and we were all blown away. And we wanted to learn more. We'd like to see more of that. Now in the AI accelerator, one of the beautiful things is you have to post your daily exercises. So everyone learns from each other. So like, you're in laying would always somehow be the first to post on your own and how it was magic. And the best you would always have. I figured it was your upholster earlier in the day. Yeah. Let me see what I'd be like, oh, that's too complicated. But then I would see what other people did. And sometimes it would really inspire me. And get me going on my project or I do my project and I come back. Because I love to see how other people do it. So I like, I love this idea of the courage in people or firing them to share their work in the live feed for AI finance club. Like, get outside the shinest. Maybe there's an incentive or a lottery. And then I have another idea. So I am the biggest fan of AI finance club and AI accelerator. And I want to have a procurement supply saying to subgroup, no extra cost. I've floated this idea by Annabelle, but I'm going to discuss it with Nicholas. Because there's a few people in the group who are procurement or their finance and they have operations of procurement. So even if they know I procurement in the title, they're responsible. And they're like, oh, so like I'll post something and they'll be like, oh, I'm going to bring that back to my team or I'm going to try that or I'm going to bring it back to my procurement folks. So I think it would add another dimension. And maybe one for operations, there's a lot of COOs, you know, CFO, but they really are the COO. They do everything. I also have a huge network of procurement people who are like, can you stone me? You know, can you demo what you're doing in AI? And I'm happy to do that. And I'll probably start doing that as well. But they could, I'm going to get them to join the AI finance club and accelerator because I'm like, big the investments today in your future for your current job, for your future job, create that differentiation. And AI is not a spectator sport. There's no substitute to getting in there and building right away. So like the AI accelerator, firstly, you have to build a dashboard. You may not be a very good dashboard. My name was interesting. I saw you before and after. But get in, build it. You'll see what you really know. Because I thought I knew AI. I'm like, I've been to webinars. I'm reading articles. I watch podcasts. I must know. It's very different. And you see the process and you get better and better. So the AI finance club, you keep your skills sharp because it's year round. You keep that muscle. It's just like the World Cup. World Cup. players train 25 to 40 hours a week during the regular seasons. You can only imagine what you're doing for the world cup. So you wouldn't just watch a soccer match or try a few things. You need to do it in or at least week in week out and really build whether to dash board and app and automation skills and really start to use it in your day to day and build up your portfolio. So I think I'm a big component of the marketing as well, so that's another I want to take that further as well. And because I think there's something completely unique, I mean, I've done other trainings, there's nothing like it in terms of the applicability or right mix as a strategic and hands-on that's really meaningful to your job and you'll walk away with real tools that you can use in your day to day work and in your portfolio. So I just want to keep seeing it continue to grow. Thank you for that answer. Appreciate it. Anything you'd like to add any thoughts there, Jürgen? Yeah, I'm just thinking about because a lot of things have been said, I think I can, it's very difficult to say that's something new, but I think every advantage that we've just heard about the finance club, about the community, there's one thing that has to be clear, it's not coming by itself. You have to be willing to invest sometime, you have to be interested in learning something, you have to believe, of course, in this new, in that AI is no longer hype. It used to be, it's no longer hype, it's reality and it will advance. When I look at the disruptive development from December until now, when you just project that to the future, there might also be some, I'm really looking forward to it, but there's also some risks inherent with that, I think. But okay, there's another point, but you have to be willing to invest sometime because I also had some discussions with clients, especially older CFO hosts, according to my experience, we say, why should I learn stuff from you guys? Because I know how to chat with JGPT, co-pilot and Claude. Yes, probably, you know how to use AI as a junior developer, but now AI transformed to a senior partner, discussion with the senior partners completely different because it's no longer a conversation, it's no longer like a Google question answer stuff, it's a conversation, it's a brainstorm, it's a specification-driven approach, and then implementation like the tech guys used to do over years now. And that's exactly the muscle I think you learn from, not only from the expert in the group, but from the whole group, when you listen to these things, to these webinars, stuff like that, if you are open to all this stuff, to open to these information, to these new developments, and not afraid of willing to running them, then you can really stay ahead of the market, that's a huge year's theme. Thank you for that answer, and I'm going to just share one thing here before we move on to the next question. So for anyone who is interested, I do have kind of an overview on the AI Finance Club on my website. I have several finance programs there, but also I work with Nicholas and I have a special discount code that will give people 10% off if they're interested. So I think this code was traded by AI because no person would have wrote this code. So I'm going to share it here, there also be an ad you guys listen to, but here's the code, YNVTUWKG. Who came up with that code? That's all I had to say. Almost all my other ones are something like FPNA Guy or FPNA 30 or the, and I'm like, they set me the code and I'm like, are you serious? But anyway, so there's my one complaint. No, but you can also see that in the show notes. So if anyone's interested in the club, I'll be doing several more episodes like these of different programs, but just wanted to share that for anyone that was something Nicholas gave me is a special one for some of my audience and things. All right. So I want to ask one more question. Then we're going to go a brief FPNA section, a brief get to know you section and we're going to wrap up. So the last question I want to ask before we move into these sections, what has you most excited or if you want, you can say most nervous because I think there's always a little bit of both with AI and technology. So Jürgen, we're going to let you go first on this one. Yes, I think I already mentioned it a bit. I'm in there is development groups and sometimes I'm the only finance guy and was honestly beginning tough to follow them, but I know I'm pretty quite quite able to do that. But as I said, when you see the really huge change, especially from December now until June with the Opus for six, Opus for seven, 48 and now the Fable, the Fable version also GPT 5.5. This turn around from being from singing AI as a from a junior developer, there was last last year to a really senior partner who knows things sometimes much better than I do. It's great for my daily work. As I said, the output is great to clients pay for it. You can build nice shipable versions of it, but I asked myself what happens in two years? Was that in three years? Now the human gate is the most relevant aspect here. Your domain knowledge in finance is the knowledge you get really well paid for even the age of AI. But if this is the case like this in five years, honestly, I do not know. And that's the thing that really sometimes spot us with it. Makes sense. I think we all have a little bit of nervousness of where does this end? What does it look like? Because there's moments where like, all right, this is going pretty quick and then there's kind of moments where like, oh, wow, that went really fast. I think the Opus versions there that came out in pretty quick succession was a big step forward that surprised all of us. Because I remember I was testling all the modeling tools and none of them would get the balance sheet to balance. And they were they were subpar compared to where we are. Then we tested Claude and was like, oh, wow, this is a huge difference. And so I totally know what you're talking about is like, okay, so do we have another leap like that? What does that look like? So it's good question. What are we going to you next, Boogie? I like how you first the question because I have the high points and I have the points I'm nervous about. So let me start with the, let me start with what I'm happy about. I'm happy about the fact that AI now exists. Ideas that you would have cubed because you didn't have the budget. You didn't have the the timeline of the team to put it together, right? A lot of ideas are in the graveyard right now because yeah, I can't attend people now. Just a few sleepless nights get some tokens to burn and you probably get your MVP at some point in a few weeks or a few days depending on how first you're going. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm really happy with the direction of AI where and to your games point now with domain expertise, we actually have an fair advantage too as finance professionals. If you're building like an AI app or like workflow, we have the domain expertise to kind of do more debt to it because we know what good and bad looks like and we can define it. We know what to spot check. We know what to say. We're challenging that assumption. So that part has been great, right? To kind of go out there and build those tools are now available. But the other flip side to it that I was kind of nervous about is also the effect of AI from a job security standpoint, right? So now like I know we've all heard recently, in recent times this company's lane off and is AI and this company is lane off because they just invested in AI. Right? And what does that mean from the from a future of work standpoint? What does that mean from a job security standpoint? Right? The formula we're giving was go to school, get a master's degree and put your head down and you're going to be grateful life to your retired. Well, I feel like future work now is going to look very different, especially with AI. And I think it has a lot of us are thinking like it what's next? What's next? A lot of people are pivoting out of full-time rules into more fractional rules now because they're like, okay, I want to own my own destiny going forward. I want to ride the current wave and see how I can just reframe myself, I reposition myself in the job market. So I think a lot of people I think I have a lot of things, right? The wheel is spinning I have like, what does job security look like going forward? I wouldn't say kind of realization, but it feels like that in a way where, oh, now cloud design, now cloud can do this. And you know, like SaaS companies that were built to provide a past color service, AI is doing all of that now to some degree, right? So it just makes you wonder like, okay, is there a bigger conversation to be hard? Is this more like a policy conversation even at this point? Like is there a boundary we need to put? So all of this is up in the end. These are things that I'm all on to kind of think of, okay, where are we going with AI? Yes, it's powerful, but how far the edge should we push it? Right? So, does I just kind of thought that I've been thinking about? Thank you appreciate that. Yeah, and I think everybody's wondering how far do we push it? And what's best for society? Where does it end? We're all, we're all in this journey together, whether we want to be or not. So we just we figured out Eve, your thoughts. I'm excited about, and it sounds like a cliche, but really AI is a true value multiplier for F P and A, for finance, procurement, supply chain, meaning, what does that mean? Value, what does value multiplier mean? It means 1 plus 1 equals 5. You can do so much more in your job than you could ever before. So you're going to spend a lot less time on the transactional work. The monthly close the day to day. You should have more accurate work. It's set it up correctly. And so much more time to do the fun stuff and the value add, which is finding the new insights, finding the risks. You can have all these risk indicators forecast. Like the cash flow that you're going to spend to make. Cast flow is the new. According to, you know, it's all about cash flow. We got to make sure we protect that. There's a lot of great tools for that. So I wouldn't be afraid to say that it truly is a value multiplier. You use it right. And it takes a little time to set it up correctly. I love this. The clawed approach where you set up skills. So I'm doing it. I'm building a competitive bidding tool. And it's going to be a set of skills. Because I want to teach. Quad. What are the different categories? I don't want racing. Otherwise going to race off and just say lowest price. And only have one supplier per category. But I really want to take the time to train it. You know, it. Sass AI ERP marketing, consulting, union. And then the competitive bidding really it should start with. What it what are your needs ask of. I'll build some parameters that have flawed interview of the user. And ask the right questions because a lot of times people think they need an R. But they're really not ready. And certainly we can have a conversation. But it may help as well. To have it go through questions. What are you trying to do? You know, big picture in one sentence. What would good look like. What is your solution today? Start coming up as some requirements. And then maybe it's an RFI. You just want to see what's out there. But in that case, you don't need to torture the suppliers. With this huge R. And then when you are ready to do assuming you need a formal. R. And then you have to have a level of questions as opposed to this formal RFP that goes out to all these suppliers to then have to spend time. Feeling in all these fields. And what customer what you can do also is have AI pulling some of the information that exists from internal tools or external. Save the supplier of some time. And then have all this great information come back. And then you realize it. Stay what's missing. And so that it's more of an iterative process and it can do the analysis. And presentation. And then you still need human in the loop. This things can go wrong. And you want to make sure this really every project is so different. The requirements get very customized. And specific. So the watch out. And then you say governance. I'm talking internal governance. Whether you're fractional, whether you're a big company. And that is have some structure around how you do a have some sort of a policy. An acceptable use policy. Any of the AI tools can help you create that. And then you can do a lot of what you can do. Not to do best practices. Don't go crazy with the tokens. Who's the right model. And ethics and governance as well. Like this is what we don't do. This is what we do. This is what we don't do. And then right. Right. Right. You're there on the governance just in the interest of time. So we can kind of wrap up. Because we're almost at time already and have a few more questions I'd like to get to. And then I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to ask you a question. Why don't we start with, uh, we'll go ahead and start with the Ergen on this one. For me, it's a judgment backed by real domain expertise, as I already mentioned, AI keeps producing convincingly wrong, wrong answers. Everybody knows that, especially when the spec is unclear, I always said that. And you cannot just tell, uh, the AI not to hallucinate. That's just a working because it's all solit purposes to produce an output. And so the skill is looking at the output and knowing, um, from real domain knowledge, whether it's brilliant or plausible, but wrong, I like to end like, I can draft your judgment is what sides. So you mean I can't just stick in the instructions, don't hallucinate. Who can't, yes, you can do it. But according to my experience, it's not really working. Yeah, no, I don't. I get a little fun. Uh, Eve, I'm going to say the most important skill is in thinking and being able to structure the problem, use the right tools without token, actually, uh, have the right audit trail and then use it within the appropriate governance, the regulatory framework. And there's something called harness, um, or prompting that's going to be more important. So a start with prompting, which is you tell it what to do. And then context, give AI a sense of what you're trying to do and the context behind it. Now it's about the harness, which is the constraints and the design features and you're going to hear more and more about that. So I think that's a critical step. You're definitely hearing more about the harness, the context, the instructions, the examples, right, the more and more you can give it guard rails and restructuring. the more likely the probability of what it's going to output is what you want. The less guardrails, less restrictions, the more freedom it has, the more likely it is to go in different directions. Because it's probabilistic, right? We're not dealing with it's not like math. One plus one always equals two. Just not how it works with AI. So I love that one. I was just going to add to it that you want. I think proper governance and structure will give users the confidence to use AI because you do have some AI detectors and companies or clients who are nervous about any use of AI because they don't know what they don't know. Sure. Yeah, agree. We mentioned this earlier, but I'll say critical thinking and I think it's very closely related to judgment as well. Just again knowing what good looks like what bad looks like so that you can look out for it and say, hey, even when you're putting like AI work flows together or if it's coding in say, I read my code right so some people just kind of put the prompt in and walk off like come back in 10 minutes and you know everything is all baked and you're ready to go, but I push back on my code like I read my code and I'm like sometimes like this doesn't make any sense. Why are you doing this right so knowing what good looks like knowing what bad looks like would also help you define your final output if you're working with AI. Same way we use critical thinking and Excel building in financial model and another that from an AI standpoint is still the same principle and what helps you know what good versus bad is is your domain expertise again back to that when you know what you know what the business, how the business runs when you embedded yourself in the business so that you know first time information. Okay, this is how we do business. This is what it looks like that gives you the domain expertise. Then you know how to feed that back into what you're trying to do or develop to say okay, well, this is a non negotiate. This is a no go. This is what I'm looking for you can define those requirements and that will you want you fine tune it like that. You can guarantee that you always have a better output so I will say for sure critical thinking that's a great one critical thinking so thanks for that again I like to all took a similar but a slightly different direction. And I think what it shows is you know there's a well rounded group of skills that are needed it's not necessarily one thing, but I like to see how different people think there so thank you for those answers and. I think one thing you said boogie on the code and you know the domain knowledge I've started now use it to help build my website not an area I have expertise but the more and more I do it. Now I can go back I really could clean out that code and but I go through every single line and edit it myself and not the code per say but the descriptions it uses and the wording and I'll challenge you and go back and forth it's not like I just produce a page throw it up on my website and hope it sells. Yeah, I'm some cases I'm probably spending more time around the copy than I was before but now I can write the code instead of have to go pay somebody to write it exactly you know AI yes it's a force multiplier can allow you to do things but that domain knowledge still makes a huge difference and i'm seeing it a lot and some of things i'm doing as I struggle through it to try to have an understanding. So I appreciate that alright so this is the get to know you section we have a three quick questions we're going to ask and i'm just looking for short answer so we're 15 20 seconds here we'll kind of go through this quick since we're little over an hour now and i'm sure there's a few people going why are they still talking but that's okay if they are that's their problem. So these are just fun little questions I'll ask we'll start with Eve here if you could have any superpower in the world what would it be I would love to have all the time in the world to do everything I want to do whether it's AI. So you live forever or be able to stop time. So you can do everything you want it. I like it. Boogie how about you I would love a perfect recall for the genic memory i'm not sure I'd want to remember some of the things I did well that's true but also it would make my life so much easier and better to. There would definitely be some advantages no question. Jürgen how about you easy one I think a great superpower for me would be being able to to set my token costs to zero. That's a good one. Spoken like somebody who uses a lot of tokens that's why you want to ask what your monthly bill is after that all right next one if you could recommend one book to our audience that you think they would enjoy reading or that you think they should read you can go either way. Go ahead and share that so we'll go ahead and start with you Boogie yeah I would say on the room. Actually I would hear. Okay the camera can catch it on the room it's executive presence is about executive presence so how you show up. You don't have to be the loudest in the room you don't have to be the most expert it just having identifying your signature voice so that when you kind of speak up and lead. You can influence decisions you can influence and push my generous forward even if you don't have the job title of a leader right so. It's a really great book that I recommend especially for FBNA partners because we always find ourselves kind of presenting in meetings presenting to leadership and so you want your. You've done behind the scenes on your laptop on you know the data crunching out of that you won't be able to represent it in a way that actually. Okay she's trustworthy I can take her I can take her word and I can you know run and execute on what she said so that's a great. Would that I recommend all right so on the room. Eve what's your book let's hop. A topic of governance and regulation lead the machine by arvand meta just came out March great overview quick read on the principles of governance a read of regulation is forming and things for you to think about so you can create it in your own business. Thanks you're again. You have a book to hold up yeah no I was out for you not but honestly I also read a lot of nonfiction business finance books and stuff like that but none of them comes close to read to the reading joy I had the first time I read the tokens lot of the rings nothing has smatched it seems and I state that. The Lord of the Rings love it I like reading fantasy books I don't read a lot of business books I'm like I work enough I need to turn off so everybody has their different approach all right. I need to know you question and then we're going to wrap up and let you guys go so we'll start this one we'll go ahead and start with Eve on this one if you could have dinner with any one person in the world someone who's alive who would you have dinner with Seth go then he's an expert in marketing and influence management first heard him speak an American express in 2006 and I'm going to try to clone him as a skill and AI he really brings me back. So the basics and talking in human language and what is this really mean so I find him very inspiration all righty you're going to you take in the dinner. I was just the first field where the machine decisively beat us humans and I'd love to understand how you keep playing at world level when you know AI will always out calculate you as exactly you know machine can win yes all right. Okay who you taking the dinner I was over I think this one I couldn't land on one person I'm sorry so I focused on more on the dinner give me great food and give me great company right there a lot of great people out here in the world especially people with X and S and great that's like my super mixture right just the excellent and you know have that great to back it up so give me people with that same characteristics and the same room great food I'm good to go. All right so you bring the great food all come show up as the person yeah. All right I want to thank all three of you for joining I think this has been a great conversation and before we wrap up one I'll mention you can reach out to these people on LinkedIn you'll be able to see there a link for each of them in the show notes but I'll just give them last you know couple seconds any last parting advice you want to give before we close here. And why don't we'll start with Boogie on this one let you go first thanks Paul this has been a great episode I'm gonna you guys today I was gonna say to everyone watching. Join if you've not used AI if you're not going on the AI hype is not about hype it should be the next era and so the other we get on the better and if you haven't got it on yet no worries you're not late the next best time is now hope you watch this through the end so that you can learn about all the great advantages you can get. Using AI in your everyday life so don't be scared to jump in and have fun thank you really appreciate that Boogie Eve remember that a jump in and do the AI got to do the work practice build your muscle and work product is the new resume a to build your reputation whether inside a company for your next role you want to build a business so results an actual work product need more than anything these days so if I can do it and procurement so can you perfect you're again first of all thanks for having me to what I want to tell people is when you see as a nice looking AI build finance model do not stop the demo ask where the numbers come from ask who signs off when it's wrong I can draft and speed up the work but it cannot be the one who signs. And I would summarize in one sentence probably AI should amplify your judgment but replace it given example somebody asked if AI is wrong on something are they responsible like the company. And the company was like, no, sasses it responsible. You still ultimately sign off, even though you have a subscription through us used. Right? At the end of the day, if something's wrong in a 10k or 10q, you can't blame it on AI. And so just that's one of the most important things to remember. And all of this AI is a tool. Human judgment is critical to the process. And so I just want to thank all three of you for joining me as a pleasure chatting with you. I really enjoyed it. So much for carving out some of your time and chatting with me today. So thanks. Thanks, Paul. Sure. Thank you. That's it for today's episode of F-P-N-A Unlocked. If you enjoy F-P-N-A Unlocked, please take a moment to leave a five star rating and review. It's the best way to support the F-P-N-A guy and help more F-P-N-A professionals discover the show. And remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting earmarkcpe.com, downloading the app and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the F-PAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. Thanks for listening. I'm Paul Barnhurst, the F-P-N-A guy. And I'll see you next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]