AI DEPLOYMENTS

Francis Scialabba

It seems like a lot of people, including CFOs, are excited by AI. But what happens when this technology fails to deliver on its big promise? That’s the problem that Harri, an employee experience platform, faced last year.

Harri, founded in 2012, provides human capital management software to hospitality and service companies like McDonalds and Cava.

The privately held, 650-plus-employee company has been using AI, including machine learning and algorithmic capabilities, within its product for “quite a period of time,” CFO Jack Gordon told CFO Brew. The last two years it has “very aggressively moved” into using native AI functionality within its platform, he said. Then, last summer, Harri “made a very big push” to adopt AI, including Claude and Claude Code, across its back office.

The project. Harri planned to focus AI on the “customer cube,” a data model that multiple teams use to track revenue across different product lines. “We run all of our analytics and customer revenue reporting and data analysis off of this data set,” Gordon said.

“We wanted to automate the calculations, the aggregation of the data, and the reporting around it,” he said, aiming to “free up capacity of our team from doing these manual workflows.” However, he admitted that “there wasn’t a ton of architecting and thought process that went into” how the company would implement AI. “It was just, ‘We know these things are strong and powerful. Let’s drop them on and see if they can do what we want them to do.’”

Google helped Harri get on the right track.—LB

      

Sponsored By The Wall Street Journal

Somewhere out there, your next client is reading today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s the same story your team will get asked about in tomorrow’s meeting.

A Corporate WSJ + Barron’s + MarketWatch Digital Bundle gets everyone in the door already informed: WSJ for the story, Barron’s for the market angle, MarketWatch for the numbers. That’s the gap between “let me get back to you” and running the room.

Finance will approve, too. One corporate plan costs 50%+ less than stacking individual subscriptions, with one invoice and central admin.

3,500 companies already give their teams the edge.

You don’t have to play catch-up.

INTERNAL AUDIT

Metamorworks/Getty Images

AI has fully embedded itself in internal audit: 90% of US internal audit leaders said their teams use the technology, in a survey from top-30 CPA firm Sikich. That’s up from 77% in 2024 and 37% in 2023.

Sikich’s tenth annual US Internal Audit Priorities survey found that auditors use AI in a wide variety of ways. Though brainstorming/writing remains the most common use case (63%), more than half of respondents said their teams used AI for “core audit work” such as “analytics, planning, reporting and evidence review, or control testing,” the authors of a report on the survey noted.

The majority who use AI in internal audit—82%—said it’s brought them the ROI they sought, according to the poll of 222 US audit leaders at a broad range of organizations in July and August 2026.

Risky business. But AI has also surfaced as auditors’ second-largest emerging risk. About a third (35%) of audit leaders named it as a key risk, the same percentage as last year, but up from only 2% in 2022. Auditors still chose cybersecurity as their top risk (43%), as they have for the previous four years. Non-technological risks that internal auditors ranked the highest were economic uncertainty (26%) and regulatory compliance (25%).

Not all IA teams own the AI-related risks.—CV

      

WORKPLACE ISSUES

Morning Brew Inc.

Blink and you might miss the next workplace buzzword…

In the wake of the pandemic, the tight labor market brought about “the Great Resignation.” But the labor market cooled, and we needed new ways to describe how workers were responding, so “quiet quitting,” “the Big Stay,” and “the Great Detachment” entered the chat.

Nowadays, amid layoffs, economic uncertainty, and AI transformation, some workers are “job hugging,” or deprioritizing career advancement in favor of job stability. Employees have also started “loud working,” Business Insider reported, promoting themselves at work in an effort to ensure visibility, recognition, and ultimately their jobs.

What’s going on? Many workers are loud working out of “fear of becoming obsolete, or FOBO,” Jennifer Moss, author and workplace strategist, told HR Brew. More than one-quarter (27%) of workers are worried their jobs will become obsolete because of technology, a recent Gallup report found; that percentage rises to 34% for workers between 18 and 44 years old.

Are any of your employees loud working? HR Brew explains why you should pay attention.—MC

      

Sponsored By Rippling

Month-end close velocity. Cut your month-end close from 10 days to four. Rippling helps automate key month-end close tasks, streamlining how you collect and match receipts, categorize transactions, and sync transaction data directly into your ERP. Earn a $600 gift card when you sign up for a Corporate Card and spend $5,000 in the first three months. Terms apply. Learn more.

market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 70%. That’s the increase in Malta-based subsidiaries of US companies in the past three years. Senator Ron Wyden has asked for information on the Big Four’s potential involvement in promoting Malta as a tax haven. 🇲🇹 (New York Times)

Quote: “One of my life’s callings is to make sure that we get this message out: Business is not just about driving profitability for the shareholders, it is absolutely about taking care of people.”—Steve Gund, CEO of composite materials firm The Gund Co., which says it has never laid off an employee in 75 years 🫶 (Wall Street Journal)

Read: Bank CFOs want to control AI spending better, but are finding that for sophisticated uses like agentic AI, computing consumption is difficult to forecast. (Bloomberg)

^{*A message from our sponsor.}