The Use and ROI of AI in Finance - with Sowmya Ranganathan, Former Controller OpenAI and CEO, Lumera

Think about the unparalleled growth that OpenAI has experienced since the public introduction of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022.

Now, think about being in finance, or being the controller who had to scale their financial processes, including closing the books to keep up with a company that has scaled from less than $100M in revenue to $10B+ in less than 3 years!?!?

That was the situation that Sowmya Ranganathan, Former Controller OpenAI and CEO, Lumera found herself facing in the early part of 2023.

During today's conversation with Sowmya, our host Ray Rike discusses several important lessons and use cases of AI at OpenAI in the Finance department including:

• Why there was no existing playbook for scaling Finance in a company like OpenAI
• Challenges in one of the fastest growing software companies of all time
• Understanding compute expenses is critical to understanding the financial performance today and tomorrow at an AI company
• Why excel could not work at the scale of OpenAI (1M+ rows)
• Using OpenAI to enable finance to write the python code to write the statistical model to analyze financial data
• Why historic analysis is not a good place to start for forecasting in a hypergrowth, compute intensive company
• Leveraging AI in the Financial close process - leveraging data warehouse information to build a repeatable process
• Tracking GPU costs in real-time throughout the month - not an excel scale requirement
• Hallucinations are a real concern - but once your AI is encapsulated as standard code - the concerns are minimized
• Human review on any stochastic model is a best practice - such as contract data fields from signed contracts to establish billing

A long description would not do the conversation justice - so jump in and be ready to pause the audio to capture the highlights.

Sowmya has been in financial leaderships at Square and Rippling in addition to OpenAI, so she has a very unique perspective on not scaling finance to meet the unparalleled growth at OpenAI, and two other hyper growth companies. If you are interested in learning about real-life stories of using AI in Finance at the world's largest AI software company - this episode is a must listen!!!

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