“Do you work for the CEO or with the CEO?” That, says serial founder, CEO and television personality Marcus Lemonis, is the most essential question every financial professional has to be asking themselves in the age of artificial intelligence. Because if your job is just about furnishing numbers to the guy or gal in the top job, your days—your career prospects—are absolutely numbered as AI grows.
Speaking to a hall packed with financial professionals to open CFO Leadership’s 2025 Finance & Accounting Technology Expo, November 13 and 14 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in midtown Manhattan, Lemonis—CEO of Bed, Bath and Beyond and Camper World—admonished the crowd to realize the importance and power they had in their organizations, which, he said, CFOs do far too infrequently.
“Most CEOs, and they get mad at me when I say this, including myself, think we know how all the inputs and outputs work,” he said. “We don’t. And sometimes we’re a little too embarrassed to admit that we don’t know it. Your job is to be not the wingman, but to be the copilot. I don’t think we wake up every day in the jobs that we’re in, particularly in this room. And think about ourselves as the copilot.”
The reasons are simple, and, to him, self-evident. CFOs and CEOs are the only two roles in any business that work on every part of the business. But only one of those roles demands the deep attention to the actual operating details of everything that’s going on in the key areas of a company, especially cash flow and taking care of employees with essentials like a paycheck and their health benefits.
Too often, though, he said CFOs are still perceived as non-revenue generating “bean counters” because they don’t “generate revenue.” Don’t believe it, he said. There are only two ways to generate profit, and the CFO commands the most powerful levers in that equation: cost and effective capital allocation.
“CFOs for years have been relegated to the accounting department,” he said. “They’ve been relegated to tell me what the numbers are and I’ll tell you what to do with them. They’ve been relegated to putting board packages together, putting bank loan documents and applications together. And that is a terrible, terrible mistake. The CFO for me, the controller for me, is a copilot and in many cases should be making more decisions about the business than anybody.”
The AI “Authority”
To succeed in the months and years to come, he said CFOs must lean into the most frightening aspects of the AI revolution so that they can not just learn about AI, but lead it in their organizations. CFOs, in particular, he said, are correctly placed to not only see the areas where it can save money and create efficiency, but they will also be called on to vet and pay for possible solutions.
Beyond that, in their own shops, they need to get ahead of the AI wave and start deploying it to free up time for themselves and for the best members of their team to be more usefully deployed on higher-value, strategic thinking if they are to become true partners to the CEO and other leaders in the business.
“When it comes to your own job, your knowledge and your ability to be a master of [AI], to embrace it, to study it, to sit in classes, to meet different vendors will make you the authority,” he said. “There isn’t a business in this country, no matter how well it’s run, that can function without folks like you. But what you need to do in my mind is reframe what your use is in the business. If you believe that your use is exclusively closing the month and calculating things and making sure that payroll gets processed and that the loan covenants get met, I think you’re selling yourself short.”
‘Make Yourself Indispensable’
If closing the books and watching the numbers are increasingly becoming AI-powered “push a button” functions, CFOs owe it to themselves—and their organizations—to “make themselves “indispensable,” he said. That’s really going to be the best strategy for career growth and longevity. How to do it? Three essentials:
Understand the business leaders. Whether you’re running an organization built on sales or built on manufacturing or built on distribution, whatever it may be, CFOs must not only understand all parts of those businesses, all the different inputs and outputs, but most importantly the people that are responsible for them. “Your job is to build a relationship with those people to understand how they’re wired from a purpose and a motivation standpoint.
“That doesn’t mean grab all the information and keep it for yourself,” he said. “The way you make yourself indispensable is that you provide so much value to the different parts of the organization where you know those people’s lives or incomes are dependent on their work product.”
Track your stats. Lemonis asked CFOs to then “journal every single thing that you’re doing on a daily basis” to document how you can be a great partner to potential CEOs down the line. “If you liken it to sports, people get new contracts or they get traded or they get drafted based on their results on the field,” he said. “The difference is those stats are kept and those stats are calculated. And for people in this room who make a living by calculating and collecting information, you need to do that same thing with your own behavior, with your own actions, with your own suggestions, with your own work product to prove your value.”
Become a (much) better communicator. Too often he’s seen CFOs get frustrated with people who “don’t know anything,” he said. “The key to being a leader is to understand that there’s different aptitudes.”
“Finance people typically get frustrated with me when I ask questions and more questions and more questions and they start to look at me and they just say, ‘I don’t understand what you’re not understanding,’” he said. “You have to really temper it because sometimes I’m asking a lot of questions to see if you know the answer, not if I know the answer. And I want to see how patient you are with me and I want to see how detailed you get with me. And I want to see if you start making things up. So you should assume that when people are asking questions, they either don’t know—or they’re testing your knowledge.”
“I have a deep and desperate appreciation and need for a CFO that helps run the business,” he said, “not calculates everything and puts it on my desk because I believe wholeheartedly that the health of the business and the strategy of the business and the future of the business goes through her and his hands,” he said. “I am begging you and pleading with you to be the kind of leader that I need and every other CEO needs. It doesn’t exist.”
