tech

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Some AI proponents claim that soon, pretty much everyone will be able to vibe-code their own tools and agents. But many companies have run into roadblocks attempting to implement or scale AI: messy data, rising costs, and reluctant staff among them. Skeptics question whether AI has much value, or even whether its ROI can be measured at all.

But what some accountants are achieving with AI might have SaaS companies looking anxiously over their shoulders. Nathaniel Dycus, VP and global controller at Estonian CRM software company Pipedrive, built an accounting close tool in a matter of months using Gemini—without any programming experience. Dycus’s vibe-coded app has replaced the finance team’s commercial close management tool, his CFO, Regi Vengalil, told CFO Brew.

A messy manual close. Pipedrive, a 16-year-old company targeting small and medium-sized businesses, reached “unicorn” status in 2020 with a $1.5 billion valuation. It has more than 800 employees.

That global reach caused headaches for the accounting team, which had members spread across time zones in the US, Estonia, the UK, Ireland, Portugal, and other countries, Dycus said. Sometimes a team member would mark close-related tasks as completed or reviewed on different days than the rest of the team. “We had a struggle with collaboration on month-end close and how to look at it as one consolidated process,” he said.

So Dycus, who had no prior coding experience, decided to see what he could do with AI. —CV

      

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accounting

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Your team’s next hire might well be someone who’s better at system design than reviewing and reconciling transactions. Meet the finance engineer.

The role, which combines software engineering expertise and financial or accounting acumen, is popping up in job listings. According to data from Ladders, there have been 60 six-figure listings for finance engineers so far this year, including from high-profile companies such as OpenAI, Google, Netflix, and Nike.

“Finance engineer” is a role that’s about “owning the systems and the architecture and the data model that cuts across both” accounting and finance, Parker Gilbert, CEO and cofounder of AI accounting platform Numeric, told CFO Brew. In a LinkedIn post, he describes it as a person who can “orchestrat[e] the logic, flows, and pipes that get the accounting work done.”

Click here for more on the next evolution in accounting.—CV

      

talent management

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Hiring for finance roles has historically been a challenge. Now, widespread AI use is making the task even more difficult.

AI—and its younger sibling, automation—have created a standoff of sorts between employers and job-seekers. HR departments and recruiters use AI and software to sift through the “piles” of resumes they receive and filter out the unsuitable candidates. (And let’s not get started on AI interviewers.) People on the hunt for jobs have adapted: Nearly half of US job candidates said they were applying to more positions to increase their chances of getting through the filters, in a 2025 survey from hiring platform Greenhouse. Also common? Using AI to tailor their resumes to job descriptions, even if, in some cases, the jobs aren’t good fits.

CFOs are witnessing this in real time. Mindr, a company that makes blood alcohol detection and other safety-related products, recently received “several hundred” applications after it posted an opening for a manager-level FP&A position, CFO Sonya Evanosky told CFO Brew. “Some of the resumes honestly just didn’t make sense,” she said, and it was obvious that some of them were AI-generated.

So how does one weed out the replicants? Keep reading.—CV

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 450,000. That’s how many square feet Anthropic is planning to occupy with its east coast flagship office in NYC. (Barron’s)

Quote: “AI is absolutely the perfect example of a systematic risk that by itself in any one asset class may not be a big worry, but because it reaches into so many aspects of the economy, of corporate operations and activities and so on, that it’s a risk that can’t possibly be fully appreciated asset class by asset class.”—Monte Tarbox, chief investment officer for New York City Retirement Systems’ pension funds (Bloomberg)

Read: Got a multimillion-dollar nest egg saved up for retirement? Must be nice. Better make sure it doesn’t fall into one of these traps and go up in flames. (Yahoo! Finance)

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