CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Ashley Still, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intuit’s mid-market business, discusses how the expectations of finance leaders are shifting as AI reshapes the finance function. She explains how Intuit is expanding beyond its small-business roots with Intuit Enterprise Suite, designed to serve growing mid-market organizations seeking faster implementation and lower total cost than traditional ERP systems. Still highlights how AI-powered agents are helping finance teams reduce manual work, accelerate month-end insights, and focus more on strategic decision-making. As the CFO role evolves from scorekeeper to growth driver, she believes technology will increasingly enable finance leaders to connect data, manage risk, and guide business growth.

Early in his career, Intekhab Nazeer found himself sitting in go-to-market meetings rather than finance reviews. A CFO mentor had pushed him beyond traditional accounting responsibilities, exposing him to pipeline discussions and sales forecasting. That experience changed how he viewed finance leadership. Instead of simply reporting financial results, he began understanding “how pipeline is generated, how deal flow is measured, how the forecasting really works,” Nazeer tells us. The exposure reshaped his perspective, shifting his mindset from reporting outcomes to influencing them.
The shift became even more real when he stepped into an interim CFO role after his mentor moved on. Responsibility changed overnight. “I was no longer supporting decisions. I was making decisions,” Nazeer tells us, describing board meetings, capital allocation choices, and the balancing act between growth and risk.
Throughout his career, he continued to place finance alongside operations rather than apart from them. At one venture-backed company, that mindset proved critical. Revenue targets were being met, yet something felt wrong. When Nazeer overlaid unit economics—customer acquisition cost, payback period, and expansion revenue—he discovered the company was optimizing growth while quietly locking in unprofitable customer behavior, he tells us.
The response required collaboration rather than spreadsheets alone. He worked with sales and product leaders to redefine the ideal customer profile, adjust pricing discipline, and elevate metrics like payback period and the “magic number” into core operating indicators, he tells us.
The experience reinforced a lesson he carries today: the CFO role is “far less about spreadsheets and more about psychology,” Nazeer tells us. Precision creates accuracy, but influence creates outcomes.

Fiber is “a lot of investment up front for that stream of cash flow in the future,” Derek Doyle tells us. At C Spire, that reality defines nearly every strategic decision.
The advanced technology and communications company has been reinventing itself for more than 70 years, Doyle tells us. Today, it is the largest privately held wireless carrier in the U.S. and operates 22,000 miles of fiber, placing it among the top 20 fiber internet providers in the country by premise passings, he tells us. The company has invested hundreds of millions of dollars expanding beyond Mississippi into Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida, Doyle tells us—moves that require disciplined capital judgment.
For Doyle, capital allocation is not just about near-term profit. It is about equity value. Public companies may emphasize shareholder return metrics, but as a private company, C Spire centers on equity value growth, he tells us. “I’m a big intrinsic value person,” Doyle explains, grounding decisions in discounted cash flow and intrinsic value models, he tells us.
That approach requires looking beyond projected profit to the full funding equation—how much must be borrowed, how much capital deployed up front, and what long-term cash flows justify the investment, Doyle tells us.
Ultimately, the objective is clear: invest resources in what “drives that needle the most,” he tells us—ensuring that growth in connectivity translates into sustainable enterprise value.

In this episode of Planning Aces, hosts Jack Sweeney and Glenn Hopper lead a focused discussion spotlighting the thinking of CFO Kevin Rubin of Zscaler, CFO Bruce Schuman of Universal Technical Institute, and CFO Razzak Jallow of FloQast on how disciplined FP&A leadership is shaping AI adoption. Rubin frames AI as a capital allocation decision, supported by centralized governance to prevent tool sprawl. Schuman underscores foundational readiness—data governance, ERP consolidation, and process redesign—before deploying AI-driven forecasting. Jallow cautions against fragmented “spaghetti AI,” advocating for platform coherence and skill development.
As resident thought leader, Glenn Hopper reinforces a unifying insight: AI should function as an “exoskeleton” for finance—amplifying sound processes, not replacing them. Together, Jack and Glenn connect the perspectives, highlighting a shared conclusion: AI success in FP&A depends less on speed and more on governance, architecture, and trust embedded in the planning process.

Nearly 90% of Americans suffer from metabolic disease, Manu Diwakar tells us, citing a recent McKinsey & Company study. For Diwakar, CFO of Virta Health, that statistic defines both the scale of the challenge and the clarity of the mission.
Metabolic disease, he explains, includes type 2 diabetes, obesity, liver disease, kidney disease, heart disease, and high blood pressure—“branches of a tree,” he tells us, all sharing the same root cause: poor nutrition. Virta’s model blends medical professionals and technology to reverse those conditions, partnering with insurers, employers, and government entities in a B2B2C framework.
From a finance perspective, the impact is measurable. Diwakar tells us Virta uses pharmacy and medical claims data to compare enrolled members with non-enrolled employees who share the same conditions—creating what he describes as a “really clean A/B test.” For type 2 diabetes, the company delivers a “two-to-one ROI,” he tells us, making the value proposition tangible.
In a market captivated by GLP-1 drugs, the numbers sharpen further. Virta charges about $150 per month, Diwakar tells us, compared with roughly $1,000 per month list price for GLP-1s—about $500 after rebates. More important, he notes that when patients stop GLP-1s, weight often returns. By targeting the root cause—nutrition habits—Virta aims to make results sustainable and long-lasting, he tells us.
For Diwakar, disciplined measurement and root-cause thinking align strategy with impact—improving health while lowering cost.