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This past Thursday, Pigment’s Head of Strategy and Interim CFO, Jay Peir, was joined for a webinar by Stacie Faggioli, VP of Strategic Finance at OpenAI. She shared stories and advice from a storied career in finance - it really was an incredibly insightful session.
We’ve summarized five key takeaways from the session in this article. The full video is available to view on-demand here.
1. Maintain financial discipline
It’s critical for high-growth companies to maintain financial discipline, since there’s naturally going to be a lot of investment going on. OpenAI is a research and deployment company - there’s a commercial business, but there’s also a research arm, so this point is very important to them.
Some forms of investment - Stacie gave people as an example - are harder to assess the value of. But there are some where accurate calculations can and should be made.
Over the past year, the strategic finance team at OpenAI has been laser-focused on measuring gross margins. That means they’re able to make better decisions around where they deploy GPU resources, and the features that free vs paid subscribers get access to.
2. Help the business go fast
Another symptom of working in a high-growth company is that finance has to facilitate rapid, smart decisions. And to do that, they need to equip the business with the right systems and tools so that the data and insights required to do so are readily available.
Giving an example, in advance of their H2 reforecasting cycle this year, Stacie’s team implemented a new system for headcount planning to replace the normal process, which was to do so in spreadsheets - a slow, laborious, and error prone approach that could easily have caused costly delays.
3. Use digital transformation to build confidence in your decisions
Digital transformation is foundational - and it goes beyond the obvious benefits. As we covered earlier, real-time gross margin data allows OpenAI to monitor and optimize performance, and guide company strategy.
But it also gives leaders confidence to let the business take bigger risks and invest more. Stacie felt more comfortable incorporating compute-intensive features into their plans because they knew that if they ever needed to, adjustments could be made.
What started as a way to maintain control and financial discipline ended up enabling the finance team to feel more confident about driving growth and taking risks.
4. Look forward more than you look back
Another important point is the value of real-time forecasting and always knowing where your business is heading. In finance, especially in financial planning, we can sometimes fall into the trap of simply extending trend lines from the past - but Stacie thinks we should be focussed more on the future.
If you’re off-plan, how do you course correct? If you’re significantly ahead of plan, how do you capitalize on that position? Do you invest more, shift resources, or double down in specific areas?
The focus should be on forward-looking decisions - not just analyzing the past. But to do that effectively, you need real-time insights into where the business is trending, and those come through digital transformation.
Stacie’s team built a data science-driven forecasting pod earlier this year, with a goal of leveraging machine learning models that can predict, in real time, where the business is heading.
On the side, she’s been experimenting with Pigment AI’s forecasting capabilities and mentioned that they could save other companies the expense of hiring and maintaining a data science team.
5. Get your data infrastructure in order to make the most of AI
Stacie noted that you might assume that the assets under management per employee for quant funds would be higher, since they’re algorithm-driven. But it’s actually significantly lower, because quant funds have enormous teams of data engineers and infrastructure specialists. They gather, clean, and structure data into machine-readable formats for the algorithms to run effectively and execute trades.
The lesson here is that while AI models are incredibly powerful and valuable, the quality of the underlying data is critical. You can’t generate meaningful insights without a strong data foundation.
This means having clean, reliable data and systems that organize and interpret data in ways the finance team can use effectively. Platforms like Pigment, financial systems, and other B2B SaaS tools play a huge role in ensuring the data is accessible and actionable.
Next steps
To view the full webinar, which includes Stacie listing the ways OpenAI’s finance team uses ChatGPT themselves, click here.
