As AI becomes a force multiplier within organizations, who should “own” it?
Russell Lester, president and CFO of Tropic, a New York City-based company that provides procurement and spend management software, has thoughts—including why finance leaders should be more focused on outcomes, changing skill sets and how to best communicate with boards and investors.
In a world where IT and finance infrastructure are becoming indistinguishable, should digital infrastructure investment live with the CIO or in finance?
I think it matters less where it lives and more what outcomes you’re trying to drive. The reporting structure is not the main question. IT can report into finance, the COO, the CTO or somewhere else entirely. In a world where data is fragmented, tools are proliferating and AI is accelerating everything, you simply cannot operate in silos.
What I focus on is shared accountability around a few core outcomes: Are we deploying capital efficiently, are we avoiding redundancy, is our data secure and are the tools we’ve purchased actually delivering value? The mechanism to make that real is a strong procurement process. That’s the stage gate.
Most things aren’t free, and eventually everything requires a buy decision. Every meaningful technology decision eventually becomes a capital allocation decision, and you need a system to evaluate it properly: benchmarking price, assessing alternatives, running structured negotiations and measuring post-purchase performance.
The mistake I see is companies trying to solve this with ad hoc processes or individual teams running their own AI-assisted analyses in isolation. That doesn’t scale and it doesn’t create alignment. The real opportunity is to build a culture where spend is intentional, visible and owned across the business. That’s much more strategic than just “who owns IT.”
Now that AI is becoming a necessary part of the modern workforce, how should companies consider it in organizational structure?
I bristle a little at treating AI as a singular, monolithic thing, as if it arrived from another planet. Accountants have been around for a long time. They kept the general ledger on green bar sheets. Then Lotus 1-2-3 came along, then Excel, then ERPs, and through all of it, the accounting profession didn’t disappear. It flourished. It became more technical, more in demand, better compensated.
AI’s curve of adoption and impact is steeper than those prior waves, no question. But the pattern is the same. The question for org design isn’t “do I hire a human or use AI?” If AI can fully consume the work of a human, that role was probably insufficiently scoped in the first place, there was never enough judgment, creativity or contextual reasoning required. That’s a different conversation.
What AI actually does for most companies is serve as a force multiplier, it makes people faster, surfaces insights they wouldn’t have caught otherwise and enables a smaller team to carry more capacity as you scale.
Where I do think things are changing is around skill sets and ownership. We’re already seeing the emergence of “AI orchestrators,” people who know how to pull together data, tools and workflows across the business. So, the bigger org design challenge is actually the tech stack question: In an increasingly agentic world, who owns the architecture of how your AI tools talk to each other?
Right now, at most mid-market companies, nobody clearly does, and it’s only proliferating through diffusion, each team leader spinning up their own stack from their own Slack channels and trade pubs. That’s a real governance and procurement challenge, and I believe it’s a meaningful opportunity for the office of the CFO to step in and bring order.
Is the CFO role becoming too broad to be effective, and should companies stop asking CFOs to also carry COO-level responsibilities?
Certainly, the skill set required to be a successful CFO is expanding, and it’s expanding quickly. That naturally means fewer people can do the full job at a high level. But I don’t think the right conclusion is to draw a hard line and say, “CFOs shouldn’t carry COO-level responsibilities.”
In my experience, it depends heavily on the company’s stage, the complexity of the business and the individual. I came up through the ranks with a lot of operational exposure, and that has been one of the most valuable parts of my toolkit. A CFO who is deeply connected to how the business actually runs—sales, marketing, customer success—can unlock a lot of value.
Where this breaks down is at scale. As companies grow, regulatory complexity increases, audit requirements increase, investor expectations increase. It becomes very difficult to do both jobs well. I feel that tension personally. The practical answer isn’t to just “do less,” because most CFOs don’t have that luxury. It’s to build leverage.
For me, that starts with a very strong controller so I’m not spending calories worrying about whether the books are clean. From there, it’s about developing real analytical muscle and increasingly leaning into AI as a force multiplier. If you’re being asked to carry more, you have to redesign how you spend your time, otherwise the role does become too broad to be effective.
How do CFOs and procurement leaders communicate increasingly complex realities to boards and investors who expect simpler, cleaner narratives?
There’s a growing trend to dumb everything down for boards and investors, as if the people in that room aren’t among the highest-IQ individuals you’ll ever brief. I want to push back on that instinct, because I think the demand for radical simplification often says more about the person preparing the material than it does about the audience.
When someone internally insists the slide deck needs to be a blank white page with three words on it, I’d ask: Are they actually worried the board can’t handle complexity, or are they worried they themselves can’t explain it under pressure? Those are very different problems, and conflating them leads to board presentations that strip out exactly the nuance that matters.
That said, knowing your audience is a real skill. There absolutely are moments where a story and an analogy will land harder than a 12-slide technical breakdown. You have to know when to wield the sword of complexity and when to set it down.
But here’s what I believe deeply: In the mess, in the complexity, lies the next iteration. That’s where the insight is. Oversimplify everything and you gloss over the very details that lead to better decisions. Boards and investors can handle it. Give them the credit. The CFO’s job is to be the person in the room who can synthesize the complex into the coherent, not the person who sands off all the edges so nobody has to think too hard.
