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The moment AI stopped being an abstraction for Kevina Purmanund arrived at a conference, where a conversation with an investor about the future of AI changed her outlook overnight.
What Sparked This CFO's AI Wake-Up Call?
Purmanund, CFO of the 1826 Group, a global agency that works with some of the biggest brands and artists in the world, traces her AI journey to a single conversation with an investor whose vision for how AI would reshape business gave her, in her words, an epiphany that she was not going to have a job much longer. That moment pushed her to start testing every AI tool she could find, beginning with ChatGPT and expanding to Claude and Copilot. Rather than relying on one platform, she now runs the same prompt across multiple tools and compares the results before trusting an answer.
How Is She Actually Using AI Day to Day?
Purmanund's AI use spans the full range of her CFO responsibilities. She relies on ChatGPT as a personal assistant, uses Claude for building dashboards because of the visual quality of its output, and uses Copilot for Excel work since it is already built into the tools her team uses daily. She has also uploaded her own spreadsheets into AI tools to auto-generate presentation decks, cutting work that used to take days down to minutes.
What Has Been the Biggest AI Win?
The clearest return on investment has come from a revenue-per-head analysis that required reconciling cross-billing across the 1826 Group's multiple entities. Producing that report manually used to take more than a week. After several rounds of refining the underlying workflow, the same analysis now takes about 30 minutes. Purmanund put the tool to the test by having a member of her accounting team replicate the analysis by hand, then comparing results. The AI was right, and the manual version contained an error.
What Role Does Human Review Still Play?
Purmanund is candid that AI has also produced mistakes of her own making. While building a financial dashboard, she became so focused on formatting that she missed an income error in the underlying data. The experience reinforced her review process: her controller checks every AI-assisted deliverable, and Purmanund does a final review herself before anything goes out the door.
How Did She Get Her Team on Board?
Fear of job loss is a real barrier to AI adoption, and Purmanund addressed it directly with her team by sharing the same vision that had shaped her own thinking. She added a weekly hour to her team's regular accounting meeting dedicated to AI demos, gradually building comfort before asking anyone to change how they worked. The approach surfaced unexpected champions: one accounting associate with strong technical instincts is now leading development of an internal expense management app, while another, who had never worked with a large language model before, is handling day-to-day AI-assisted work with support from the team.
What About Governance and Security?
Purmanund is equally direct about the risks of adopting AI without safeguards. She described a conversation with an outside auditor who had uploaded unredacted bank statements to a free AI tool to speed up review work, without confirming whether the platform met compliance standards. For Purmanund, business and enterprise-tier tools that are SOC compliant remove one layer of risk, but she remains cautious about putting sensitive information such as bank statements or Social Security numbers into any AI system. She also sees a gap many organizations have yet to address: smaller and mid-sized companies often lack anyone responsible for AI implementation or the risk assessment that should come with it.
Where Should CFOs Start with AI Training?
Asked what she would tell a CFO who feels behind, Purmanund's advice was to start narrow rather than broad. After testing a range of AI courses and executive education options, she found the most value in a finance-specific AI accelerator program that covers multiple tools rather than a generic AI curriculum. Her recommendation: commit one or two hours a week, start with a report or process you already dislike, and build from there.
Why Invest in Coaching?
Purmanund credits an executive coach, along with a peer network for women executives, with giving her the confidence to grow beyond a traditional CFO's finance-only mandate. That investment in herself, she said, is what allowed her to see AI leadership as part of her role rather than a distraction from it.
Key Takeaways for Financial Leaders
- Start small. Pick one spreadsheet, report, or process that is already painful and use it as your first AI test case.
- Keep a human in the loop. Every AI-assisted deliverable should go through a review process before it goes out the door.
- Build trust gradually. Regular demos and dedicated time can turn skeptics into champions.
- Ask compliance questions before uploading sensitive data. Confirm SOC compliance and think carefully about what belongs in an AI tool.
- Invest in yourself. Coaching, peer networks, and continuous learning build the confidence to lead through change.
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