M&A

Richard Drury/Getty Images

After the closing, the work on an acquisition is far from over; integration is where organizations prove the validity of the deal thesis.

Yet, just one in three acquirers “fully achieved” their deal objectives following an acquisition, according to a recent PwC survey of 530 C-suite executives and dealmakers.

Successful organizations do their integration homework early to establish a strategic “North Star,” according to experts who spoke with CFO Brew. They also bring in the CFO to track whether deal objectives are being met.

“The strongest acquirers, the most purposeful acquirers, don’t simply integrate the company they bought. They take the moment to architect the company that they intended to create,” Kevin Desai, PwC’s US and Mexico deals leader, told us.

Involving the CFO “brings rigor” to the operation, Desai added. “That rigor, it takes away the second-guessing, like who’s responsible for driving what, where is the value in the deal coming from?”

After the deal close, “there’s a great risk that all the other things surrounding the heart of the transaction take over,” Martti Nurminen of Basware said.—AZ

      

Sponsored By PwC

It’s no secret that AI can’t be a bolt-on. It should be part of the stack.

But a big misconception floating around nowadays is that AI could make enterprise resource planning (ERP) obsolete. Quite the contrary, notes PwC.

PwC explains that ERP like Oracle’s model can guide organizations through complex processes while AI introduces dynamic, intuitive orchestration. In short? They can make quite the team.

And as AI’s role advances, ERP’s role as an enterprise engine—and an active one at that—can become even more valuable.

Read on to learn more.

TRANSFORMATION

Fauzi Muda/Getty Images

When Troy Anderson assumed the CFO chair at $4.3 billion global staffing company Kelly Services in fall 2024, he was given a hefty mandate: Transform a 400-person finance operation with teams in multiple countries from a highly fragmented function to one with integrated technology and processes.

And as if that weren’t a heavy enough lift, Anderson had to do so against the backdrop of changes to the CEO and board, while preparing for a new ERP system launch.

Leading through change is a thread that’s run throughout much of Anderson’s career. At $4.5 billion business process services company Conduent, a Xerox spinoff, for instance, he implemented a major finance transformation project. As SVP and CFO for the public sector industry at Xerox, he had to make the difficult choice to cut an unprofitable segment.

Anderson spoke with CFO Brew at the National Association of Corporate Directors’ annual summit to talk about what it takes to successfully transform.

A fragmented function. Anderson inherited a finance function with many overlapping pieces and unclear reporting lines. Redundant work was a problem. “We had common work distributed across many different teams,” he recalled. “We had finance people doing accounting work, and we had accounting people doing finance work.” The international team, he said, reported into finance, accounting, and operations. Plus, teams from previous acquisitions “had not been integrated,” so the company had “multiple accounting teams, multiple back office teams.”

“If we led with AI, I felt we were going to lose,” the CFO of Kelly Services said.—CV

      

AI GOVERNANCE

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Adobe Stock, Unsplash

As AI agents get smarter, they’re also getting wilier.

A series of recent security incidents involving “rogue” AI agents have shown how they can cheat, hack, or otherwise misbehave in pursuit of their evaluation objectives. With these types of breaches in mind, the nonprofit Center for AI Safety (CAIS) developed a new benchmark, CheatBench, that aims to quantify the ways and frequency with which each of the major AI models tends to “cheat.”

Mantas Mazeika, a research scientist at CAIS and author on CheatBench, told us these incidents and mainstream discussion of catastrophic fears around the rise of AI have changed how he thinks about his work.

“It’s certainly made things feel more urgent,” Mazeika said. “It helps to focus—or it helps to narrow one’s focus—on what’s important, and maybe defer longer-term scientific understanding of the issues, and really try to get practical measurements and ways to address these problems in a shorter time frame.”

The “cheating tendencies” of AI models can sometimes be managed effectively with guardrails, IT Brew reports.—PK

      

Sponsored By Quadient

How long until your revenue becomes cash? For many finance teams, delays don’t come from one broken system. They come from the system’s gaps: disputes stuck in email, payments that can't be matched, collectors working without the full picture. Quadient’s Working Capital Series breaks down where AR friction starts and how much change your environment actually needs. Explore the series.

market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads

Stat: 60,000. That’s how many Microsoft employees qualify for voluntary buyouts the company is offering as it juggles AI investments with capital efficiency. (CNBC)

Quote: “Could data used by that model be channeled out to end up in places where it shouldn’t end up?”—SAP CFO Dominik Asam, revealing a common question clients ask about the AI inside business software (Reuters)

Read: The shoppers who cried AI. (The Wall Street Journal)

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Jobs

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.