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We’re in a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure moment in finance when it comes to AI usage and employee compensation.

You’ve got the JPMorgan Chases of the world, with internal dashboards tracking AI usage, and then you’ve got EY doling out $100 million in bonuses for “human” skills. And then, presumably, you’ve got your company, which may land somewhere in between: Trying to encourage innovation and efficiency, but still focused on the core nontech ingredients that can really make a company thrive.

So, what now?

Before companies can consider redesigning pay structures for an AI-enabled workforce, Tauseef Rahman, a US workforce solutions leader at Marsh, recommends CFOs work through a much more fundamental question: Do we really understand which tasks are driving value?

“You can’t just paint technology onto broken processes and unclear value creation, and then be surprised it didn’t make things better,” he warned. If companies don’t understand a given task or role’s value, they also can’t tell what AI will do that role: Will it enhance it, hurt it, or simply change how it’s completed?

Here’s what Rahman recommends.—NP

      

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Larry Swets Jr. was pleased when nearly 88% of Pelican Acquisition stockholders opted to redeem their shares in March ahead of the SPAC’s merger with Greenland Energy Co., a Denver-based oil and gas exploration company. Swets, who is Greenland’s executive chairman, thought more Pelican shareholders might’ve cashed out.

“I was happy to have not had 99% redemptions,” Swets told CFO Brew.

Roughly 10% or 12% of Pelican shareholders chose to stay with the deal, and later that month, Pelican Acquisition completed its merger with Greenland Energy, an oil and gas exploration company, and March GL Co, which had inked a deal with 80 Mile to start drilling at Jameson oil and gas basin in Greenland.

SPAC redemptions exceeded 90% in 2023 and 2024, and then dropped to just over 80% during the first half of 2026, according to investment bank Houlihan Capital.

Swets is also head of SPACs at FG Merchant Partners, an affiliate of Fundamental Global, has been involved with blank check companies—development stage companies with no business operations; he says he’s taken part in SPACs for 20 years, usually as a sponsor. He noted that he’s seen SPACs with redemptions as high as 99%, some as low as 10% and “everything in between.”

“We tell people from Day 1 [to] expect 100% redemption, unless we can drive some attention with shareholders,” Swets said.

And sometimes, you need the PIPE. Keep reading here.—LB

      

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Innovation

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At a team off-site in January, Remote’s founder Job van der Voort challenged his CPO Barbara Matthews to build an ATS tool in house with AI. It was a bit of a dare, and, she said, she was confident it would be incredibly challenging and time-consuming.

“That’s just very complex to build, and it takes a really long time, and blah blah,” Matthews recounted. So van der Voort took another shot at the challenge: CV screener.

The two competed to develop an internal résumé screener, to satisfy his curiosity and get a sense of how tall a task it might be. After the exercise, van der Voort (maybe unsurprisingly, given that he is a tech CEO) found a way to code the app.

His success evolved into a much bigger experiment to rebuild its internal tech stack, one homegrown tool at a time.

For more on this DIY success story, keep reading on IT Brew.—AD

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 702%. That’s CoreWeave’s debt-to-equity ratio, up from 291% year over year. The neocloud company is one of many wrapped up in the AI infrastructure arms race. (CNBC)

Quote: “Inflation is too high…this means that even if, as I expect, the monthly rate of inflation improves in October, I am leaning toward supporting an increase in our policy rate of 25 basis points at the FOMC’s December meeting.”—Christopher Waller, Federal Reserve board governor (Yahoo! Finance)

Read: CFOs are figuring out what responsibilities can be left up to AI and what still needs a heavy dose of human oversight. (The Daily Upside)

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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.

• Bilingual Executive Assistant to the CFO at US Tech Solutions, Inc.
• Chief of Staff to the CFO at CoreWeave
• Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Tidelands Health
• Tax Accountant — Controller and Fractional CFO Services at Lang Recruiting
• Researcher, Executive Search — CFO Practice Team at Egon Zehnder