On this episode of Controllers Classified, Brex’s CAO Erik Zhou is joined by Sowmya Ranganathan, OpenAI’s Controller. The conversation begins with a discussion on Sowmya’s career and her diverse experiences as an auditor and as a finance leader at both public and private tech companies, including Square and Rippling prior to OpenAI. Specifically, she highlights some of her insights for accounting during periods of business hypergrowth (i.e. when OpenAI launched ChatGPT) and the increasing need for technical savviness even as a finance professional (ex: Sowmya learned SQL as a way to manage the processing and analysis of a large data set of transactions at Square). She concludes her career overview with this advice: accounting leaders need to consider where their processes would break down if they were to grow quickly and focus their time and effort on making sure those processes are as scalable and automated as possible (hint: it requires building relationships with engineering). 

Sowmya and Erik then deep dive into the need for a tech-first approach to accounting that embraces AI to find efficiencies in the financial close process. Sowmya outlines how she thinks AI may evolve the job of accountants and the future skill sets that will be required as a result. She also spends some time considering audit implications and considerations as teams embed emerging technology into their workflows and systems. This episode is a must-listen for finance and tech enthusiasts. 

Finally, the episode closes with Sowmya’s bookkeeping fiasco at a previous company! 

Key Quotes

• On accounting during hypergrowth:  It definitely was a period of amazing hyper growth in user base, customer base, and I'd say we're really fortunate to have a revenue team with a very strong technical skill set. We were already partnering with engineering to automate a lot of the billing transactions. We use Stripe here and the piping of usage-based billing, like the internal usage tables to make its way to actually generate an invoice in Stripe, there's no way. Even at the pre-ChatGPT scale, it would have been really difficult to do this manually. Definitely post-ChatGPT, it would have been just impossible. We would have just come to a grinding halt. I think this is a good thing for accounting teams to look at: if your company were to grow like crazy, where would accounting break? And I think injecting engineering help into those parts early and frequently is the only way to go.
• On accounting automation: When you're building out an accounting function, you're building out a team, sure, and you're executing on accounting, but you're also building products that face your team or customers or someone else. You should think about it like a PM would. What is the problem we're solving? Who are the customers for this problem? If we [don't] solve this, what's going to break? And then you actually define what is your ideal dream state experience? Like if this were working perfectly, what data would flow into what, what would be the outcome here, like maybe automated notifications, automated reporting, what have you, right?
• On using ChatGPT in accounting: Even your best Excel-loving accountant eventually just throws their hand up in the air and is like, what is this nonsense? Why am I wasting my time on this? So what we ask ChatGPT to do is: “Hey, I have an input file that has these headers. This is what I want to do with it. Now write this in a Python script where I can feed it a CSV file and out comes the output you want.” And the most interesting thing is you don't need to know any programming or technical skills. You don't need to know SQL. 
• On the future of AI in accounting:
  •  I'm excited  because I hope that this will be the thing that makes all the manual and routine work of accounting go away and really free up time to engage with the rest of the business and the people that are building the products and helping deliver like better insights, maybe faster, maybe close as we know it goes away..
  • AI is going to advance really quickly, right? I often catch myself in the same thought process that we're in right now, and then I have to remind myself maybe it can't do A, B, and C today, but tomorrow, or in six months, it might be able to do this. So,I think we kind of have to keep evolving what our role looks like and what our team does, and maybe teams will look different, right? 

Time stamps

• 01:30 - Joining OpenAI at the perfect moment 
• 03:46 - Navigating different accounting worlds
• 14:40 - Navigating hypergrowth
• 22:35 - Using AI to create accounting efficiency 
• 33:20 - Incorporating AI into financial tools & systems
• 42:03 -Sowmya's bookkeeping fiasco

Links

• Connect with Sowmya
• Check out OpenAI
• Connect with Erik
• Check out Brex