Ever feel like your accountants are forever tucked away in the farthest corner of the office’s cubicle farm, where all the “spreadsheet nerds” belong?

There are ways to break down those walls (we’re speaking metaphorically, now) that divide accounting and the rest of an organization. CFO Brew spoke with two finance leaders who have made it their business to remove barriers between finance and the rest of the company.

The benefits, they said, are symbiotic. The finance folks better understand where they fit into the organization as a whole, and other teams can see how they’re impacting the company’s finances.

“[Other departments] know how their decision-making is going to affect the company’s financial health, and that’s a really powerful type of partner to have when you’re a finance operator, connecting with other stakeholders,” Michael Zheng, SVP of finance and people at Spinwheel, a consumer credit data platform, told us.

Same team. With a wealth of data and tools at its disposal, the finance function can be a key contributor to other functions—especially marketing, sales, and customer success, according to Zheng.

How finance can be a key contributor to other functions.—AZ

With astronomical computing bills stacking up, a spendthrift era of “tokenmaxxing” is giving way to a more frugal mindset among companies building AI systems.

Taking a cue from this trend, workflow software platform Pegasystems will soon roll out a new pricing model that eliminates token-based rates in favor of a flat charge per resolved case. The company is one of a wave of software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers rethinking per-seat and other traditional pricing models in favor of charging for actual results.

The shift comes as businesses worry that incentivizing AI adoption at all costs hasn’t necessarily led to higher ROI. Instead, they end up using costly, sophisticated AI for tasks that could be better served by cheaper, simpler tools, one analyst noted to Morning Brew. Meanwhile, SaaS vendors are facing ongoing pressure as the rise of AI agents and coding threatens their own value propositions.

“We’ve been watching our clients struggle with and come to terms with the fact that leveraging some of this agent technology, especially in high volumes of production, can lead to pretty rapidly escalating and unpredictable costs,” Pega CTO Don Schuerman told us. “We felt we had a really strong approach in our architecture that allowed us to keep those costs much more sustainable.”

What is outcome-based pricing?—PK

What’s the one thing Sam Altman, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump can agree on?

Don’t worry, it’s not the setup for some bad joke. All three believe regular Americans deserve a slice of AI companies.

We’ve written for months about how the Trump administration has ushered in a counterintuitive wave of government stakes in companies, from rare earths to quantum to chipmakers like Intel (see our story above). The move has been controversial: Critics argue that the federal government getting into bed with corporations is playing with fire, while proponents point to the fact that it has generated billions of dollars in profits for the government.

But unlike pretty much every single issue you can think of, there’s support across the political spectrum for the government buying shares of AI titans. President Trump himself has suggested the idea, saying earlier this month to reporters, “There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public.”

One proposal creates a sovereign wealth fund financed by taxes on AI companies, Brew Markets reports.—LB

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