1125: Finance Lessons in the AI Era | Jay Peir, CFO, Pigment

At 30, Jay Peir stepped into the CFO role at SunPower, a high-efficiency solar cell manufacturer. The appointment came after leading M&A and venture investments at Cypress Semiconductor, where SunPower was the largest portfolio company. “I had my first CFO experience at the age of 30,” Peir tells us, recalling how corporate development responsibilities opened the door to finance leadership.

That early leap reflected a broader pattern in his career: moving fluidly between finance and strategy. With dual engineering degrees from Stanford, Peir began in economic consulting before earning his MBA amid the rise and fall of the dot-com era. His background in technology and data analysis, he tells us, formed “my first chapter” and prepared him for navigating growth in fast-moving sectors.

A decade at Tableau deepened those lessons. When revenue slowed and the company’s stock “dropped about 50% in one day,” Peir was tasked with helping lead a shift to subscription. He emphasizes that success required aligning stakeholders across sales, marketing, and finance, ensuring teams could both understand and articulate changes to customers. “There’s both internal and external change management,” he tells us, noting the importance of investor communication as well.

Today, as Head of Strategy at Pigment, CFO Peir applies these experiences to scaling an AI-native planning platform. Pigment’s tools unify financial and operational planning, enabling companies to act on data with speed and flexibility. The company’s AI roadmap includes predictive analytics and autonomous agents, helping finance teams drive variance analysis, expense tracking, and forecasting more efficiently, Peir tells us.