Startups are streamlining their teams and scaling at unprecedented speeds. It’s time for CFOs to Prepare for the Next Wave of Automation and Ideation.
Many of us have had a ‘moment’ with AI. It’s usually either a eureka feeling where you start to see what’s possible, or an anxious sensation where you fear for your own career and the future of employment. Your response to this moment is going to matter.
For the final article in this series of blogs for Talent4, I want to give you a reason to respond positively, and rather than interview a fully-fledged AI expert I’ve spoken with Thomas Platford, who intends to become one by the end of 2026. Hopefully his efforts inspire others to follow suit.
Platford’s AI moment was hearing that accounting automation solution Rillet scaled to $100m in revenue with only two people on the finance team, a controller and CFO. “That blew my mind,” he says. This was a challenge he was more than familiar with, having grown the revenue of ads marketplace SuperAwesome to the same size between 2017 – 2024.
“I had a team of 11 at SuperAwesome,” Platford recalls. “And sure, it’s a different business, but that blew my mind. It wasn’t that I’d seen the tech, it was the story that supported the tech. I thought we were efficient at SuperAwesome but to scale with just two senior people… That’s what you can do now.”
Platford is now looking to master AI and apply it to the five startups that he works with, Levellr, 10x Humans, Mindstone, Botivo and Novel. He tells me that demand for fractional CFO roles is currently high, and that businesses are maintaining fractional roles for longer, even as they scale. “I think in 2022, when the tech tides went out, a lot of businesses were caught with their pants down with expensive exec teams.”
Using AI to Inspire Growth as a CFO
It makes sense that startups are taking a leaner approach, and Platford explains that the ability to facilitate this is a key value-add that he provides as a CFO.
“As a CFO you’ve got to help build value. You can do that by identifying profitable revenue growth, you can do it through M&A, you can do it through making sure that you streamline a business and scale it efficiently. I’m very tech-led, so one of my strengths is understanding the tech infrastructure, and helping businesses realise that they don’t always need to make new hires as they get bigger.”
Whilst most finance systems haven’t yet unlocked the full power of AI, Platford insists that finance professionals can still get productivity gains from personally experimenting with AI, and suggests that if everyone within a business takes the time to upskill, they’ll become five-to-ten times more efficient. In terms of his own work, he feels that he’s achieved this in three ways.
- Training digital advisors within Gemini with the help of reverse prompting
- Note taking and creating walled gardens around projects
- Using NotebookLM to unlock and summarise insights
On the first point, Platford has trained customised AI experts in Gemini, which help with tech automation, compliance control, and market knowledge. By consulting the trained models when he needs to, he can automate tasks and ideate more effectively.
As for reverse prompting, this involves describing your desired output to an AI tool and asking it for guidance on which prompt you should provide to reach that outcome. “It supercharges the information that you get,” says Platford.
On note-taking, Platford is using Granola AI and is integrating it with AI workspace tool Notion, which helps to organise notes and manage workflows and information between projects. This tool can also be used to create concise overviews of key details, or to generate relevant information in various formats ahead of a meeting.
With NotebookLM, Platford mentions that he’ll use it to summarise and unlock insights from his customer documents, sometimes generating a podcast of key information, which he can listen to while travelling to meet a client.
Applying it to Startups
Speaking specifically to small business finance, Platford says the most powerful automation he sees right now is in high-volume businesses, where AI is allowing people to auto-post and reconcile bank transactions. He again mentions Rillet, which was able to auto-reconcile more than 95% of bank transactions while scaling. “When you think about that, it’s so powerful,” he says, noting the time usually spent on this work by finance teams.
Platford anticipates that these time and cost savings will be front of mind while he scales his own consultancy business too. As you’d expect, he urges caution when using AI for sensitive or particularly significant work, and makes it clear that there are many situations where a sense check or professional opinion is still required. Efficiency and scale still requires quality controls.
To Conclude
Platford considers himself to be at the start of his path to AI expertise, yet he’s already able to offer several valuable pieces of advice. His experience of scaling a business, and seeing others do the same at greater velocity a few years later with AI-assistance, is also something to take heed of.
With this being the final piece of this series, I’ll finish with this. If you’re leading a finance team and trying to build a business, you should be exploring AI. Yes, you might be able to scale without it, but I suspect you’ll be sacrificing a significant chunk of time and money.
