A financial modeler spent years building spreadsheets without understanding how businesses actually work. Only after running his own company for over twenty years did he realize the gap: real business sense comes from narrative and judgment, not perfect models or AI. Even professional analysts disagree on the same stock.
I didn't understand how a business ran until I had to start a business. And so I was modeling for 4 years or whatever it was and didn't really understand how businesses function, right? Didn't really understand how to take a step back and understand the story around it. Today, part of the occupational hazard here is I've been modeling less and running a business more for the last 23 years. But like the challenge to me about how does the business run and how do we think about how the business runs and using judgment around what is the story being told, I think that's not something that's going to be relegated to AI. AI will certainly take a stab at telling you that story. But in the same way that every investor— that you have investment analysts, you could take 10 analysts and they're all going to come to different conclusions about whether Google is a buy or a sell, whether that's a good stock or not.
Trust and Leadership Lessons for FP&A From 100+ Top Leaders with CFO Jon Laudie
