1226: Anaplan's Growth Equation: AI, Profitability, and Scale | with Hemant Kapadia, CFO, Anaplan

0:00AI is changing the finance function, but how much business value is it actually delivering? According to new research from Salesforce, 90 % of finance leaders using AI report a positive return on investment. And as AI agents enter the picture, finance leaders are seeing opportunities to improve productivity, reduce costs, and strengthen forecasting. But there's another side to the story CFOs are also confronting growing revenue complexity With more subscription, consumption-based, and hybrid business models to manage And that raises an important question How can finance leaders gain the visibility they need to make better decisions while putting AI to work?

0:50Salesforce explores these challenges and the opportunities ahead in its latest CFO research Discover what finance leaders are saying about AI, revenue complexity, and the evolving CFO role. Visit salesforce.com slash CFO report. That's salesforce.com slash CFO report.

1:12Hemant Kapadia: Hello, this is Kara Childress, CFO of Venture Employer Solutions, and you are listening to the CFO Thought Leader podcast. This is episode 1226.

1:25What that basically gives me is a daily snapshot, a daily close to the business. So I know based on what I booked, I know what my bookings, my billings, my revenue, I know what my cost structure is down to a very detailed level. So I basically have a daily close, a daily even number. So what does that allow me to do? It allows me to understand where I am financially within a quarter as opposed to waiting until the end of a period, closing the books and saying, oh, we beat or we missed. And so this is very liberating because during the middle of a quarter, I can actually make a decision on should we pull forward an investment or should I push out an investment based on the financial commitments that I have.

2:20Hi, it's Jack. On today's show, we speak with Hement Kapadia, CFO of Anaplan.

2:30What if one of the biggest changes AI brings to finance isn't about reducing costs, but about changing how quickly a company can make decisions? For years, CFOs have worked to improve forecasting accuracy and financial visibility, but there's a difference between knowing where the business stands and having the ability to act on that knowledge while it still matters. And that raises an interesting question. As AI makes more information available, will companies simply make the same decisions faster or will they begin making entirely different decisions? It's a distinction worth exploring and one that comes into focus in our conversation today with Hennet Kapadia, CFO of Anaplan.

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4:53Hament Kapadia is with us. Hamant began his career as an engineer before making a pivot into finance at General Electric, where he spent 14 years navigating complex manufacturing and operational challenges. He later helped guide SunEdison Semiconductor through a public offering and eventual sale before taking on CFO roles across several industries. Today, as CFO of Anaplan, Hamant brings that broad operational and financial experience to the evolving world of enterprise planning and AI. Hamant, welcome. Thank you. It's great to be here. I have to go back to that very early chapter there. You began your career as an engineer.

5:44What prompted you to move into finance at GE? So I definitely took a non-traditional path. So as you mentioned, I started off actually in engineering and more specifically in semiconductor microelectronics. And so what was really interesting is that it was through a lot of mentorship and a lot of coaching that I was actually directed to enter the business side of the industry as opposed to staying in engineering. given my interactions with some of our customers who had our solution installed at their site. And I would ask them about their method to monetizing our solution and how they're going to make money.

6:39And when, over happy hours and such, as I thought about getting my master's in semiconductor physics, which would have been very interesting and maybe more really lucrative today in this environment, I was actually guided to go down the path on the business side, which has worked out, I guess, okay for me as well. But that was a really interesting transition point. And as you mentioned, GE gave me a great opportunity to do that because they really do value the engineering background, engineering company at its core. And I think the logic of engineering process-oriented math, being good at math, are all skills that are beneficial in finance and in business.

7:32You know, GE, maybe you'll indulge us here, is just such an interesting culture. It's one of the most widely reported on cultures, I would say, but it's a unique experience. I'm wondering, during your years managing manufacturing operations at GE, was there a decision you wish you would handle differently, perhaps? I think there's always micro decisions that you want that would have handled differently. I would say that it's really about mentoring the team. And I would have impressed upon my team to, as I did, really be comfortable with being outside of your comfort zone. So being comfortable being uncomfortable.

8:23And I think that not only creates the learning environment in and of itself, but it also creates that path of people growing their careers itself outside of their traditional roles, whether it be in cost accounting or some type of FDNA analyst type of role. So going cross-functional, going cross-discipline, I think is a great way to build your careers because ultimately you don't know what you're going to be doing 20 years from now. And I think having that breadth of experience is something that I wish I had impressed upon my team more in the past. I do that in spades today for sure. Can you tell us about when it was time to leave GE?

9:22what was your reasoning? What was happening? Yeah, so it was really a transaction. So I was at the GE security business at the time, and it was during the financial crisis. And as you may have read, GE was looking for things to sell at the time. And it just so happened they had this really nice business that was growing nicely, very profitable, a lot of core IP, and it was a fully integrated business. And ultimately, that transaction happened with United Technologies, and we went as part of that transformation.

10:09I want to jump forward. You just have such an interesting career to SunEdison, if you wouldn't mind. You helped take that business public and eventually sell it. But tell us how that experience may have changed your thinking in some way. Yeah, that was a very interesting exercise because it was a carve-out IPO from the parent company, Sunnest and Solar Company. And so with carve-outs, there's always an element of negotiation that occurs. And we're in the semiconductor business, which is absolutely booming today, but it has its cycles, a lot of foreign exchange and a lot of market dynamics that come into play.

11:01So I would say that there was a lot of learnings that I took away from what does a carve out really look like and what does it take to actually build a team, a brand new team. So, standing up all of the necessary functions in order to be a true independent public company was not a trivial exercise in and of itself. Reestablishing all of our processes, SOCs or otherwise. And then, obviously, having the relationship with the investor base was very important. and having a business cadence which actually delivered on the guidance or on the trajectory, which we had discussed with the investors during the roadshows and the like.

11:54So I think that was an interesting learning in and of itself because it was a new environment. Obviously, at GE, you're several layers away from crafting the narrative of what the street would want to hear. And now you're in the front lines and actually they're delivering. So it changes the calculus a bit about the things you worry about and when you worry about. But it was a great experience. And we did a lot with the IPO. We Singapore domiciled. We issued it. We had a joint venture with our largest customer, and we did the IPO. So apart from that, it was a simple project. When it comes to creating shareholder value, prior to that experience, I mean, as you exited, how had your thinking around creating shareholder value changed?

12:58It hasn't changed at all. I think it's ultimately creating shareholder value for the investor base is certainly an objective. But at the same time, you're rewarding the employees that have a vested stake in the company. I would just fast forward a bit to here at Anaplan. One of the things that I've been pushing for, which is a non-traditional view for private equity, is to have the entire company have some element of equity holding. So they feel they're part owners in the company and behave like owners. And I think that brings more skin in the game for the employees. And then also, you know, gets people focused on delivering on the outcomes, getting aligned on what metrics we're trying to drive and why those are important.

14:04And, you know, having that element of transparency and alignment on goals is really, really important. Along the way, you've led finance across manufacturing, technology, and software. And just from a career perspective, is there a career move here that required the biggest leap of faith as you kind of moved into different lanes? I would say the first leap into finance was the biggest leap of faith, right? because to that point, I had taken a few accounting courses and there was a lot of drinking through the fire hose and some element of on-the-job training, which is one of the things I really appreciate about GE.

14:55But I would say that there's common thread with all of my subsequent roles because irrespective of the industry I've been in, the core principles on sound financial decision-making is fairly consistent. If I'm making an investment, what's the return on that investment? How long is it going to take it? What is the probability that I'm going to achieve that outcome? So I think that in and of itself, there's a lot of consistency there. And being able to clearly connect operational metrics, KPIs to financial outcomes, I think is a skill that has to be cultivated over time. And I think that's one that I think I've done a decent job of over the years.

15:53I think it's an important one. What about how has your approach perhaps to leading finance teams changed since becoming a CFO? Yeah. I would say that my prior experiences in finance, I would be in the gory details, got to the F degree. and as I migrated into more senior roles ultimately into the CFR role I realized I could not be at that level of detail across the board because your span of influence, span of control is that much broader now and to that extent you know there's there'll be topics which will come up where you'll have to go very, very deep. In one particular example, we had a lot of intercompany leverage as part of our car valve, and that was creating some tax friction along the way.

17:06And one of the things that we had to dive into was, how do we reverse this intercompany leverage and reduce our cash taxes. And so that required getting into the gory details of what balances are sitting where and why, and how do we undo those. And so that is something that you wouldn't envision a CFO getting directly involved in, but it was something that was going to have a meaningful impact on cash flow. So it was an area that I drilled into. And then it became just a de facto process that to deep wrap with. So there's times where you just have to dive in, set the cadence, set the expectation that let the team profit.

17:56Is there anything looking back that you think you might have had wrong about leadership? Something, and again, coming out of, you know, GE is often called the leadership factory. Just any reflections on leadership you can share with us that from your earliest days, you might have changed course or begun to think differently about? Yeah, I think there's always the concept of assuming that everyone's aligned on an outcome. And I think that people will have motivations to optimize their metrics in a particular function or a particular part of the business at the expense of the whole. of the whole.

18:47I think you still see that. And it's unfortunate when you do, but the goal is to identify what those are and quickly address them and say, okay, we're not doing this. We're all shareholders of this company. We're not shareholders of this company because there are no shares of this company. And so what's good, we should always think about what's good for the aggregate company and the benefits of that will flow down. So I think that's something that I've seen consistently across all the industries I've been in. Well, Hemat, thank you for looking back for us. We might have a few more career-related questions for you, but right now we want to find out about Anaplan.

19:40Most finance execs have crossed paths with Anaplan somewhere, maybe at a conference, what have you. But we want to know what's happening with this company today. Where are the opportunities? Tell us about Anaplan. Yeah. So Anaplan at its core is an AI-driven scenario planning analysis platform. So we serve many of the Fortune 50 that's out there. We work across finance, which has been where the company started, but where we have the significant businesses in supply chain, in sales performance, and in workforce. And our most sophisticated customers and the customers that get most leveraged out of our platform from a decision-making standpoint are ones that are able to connect all of those disciplines together.

20:37So imagine connecting your sales with your supply chain, with your workforce, factories or otherwise, to your financials. And being able to make decisions that are connected across all of those domains allows you to make decisions that you just could not make before. Now, Anaplan was taken private before you joined. How has private ownership shaped the company's investment priorities? Yeah. So we were taken private in the summer of 22. And what I would say is one of the first things we did, so I joined shortly thereafter, is to address the profitability of the business because it was not profitable.

21:27It was around a$600 million ARR, that's annual recurring revenue business. Today, we'll finish the year closer to$1.4 billion. And so we're growing nicely, and we are materially more profitable, mid-30s from a free cash flow margin perspective. And so what that has done, to answer your question, that profitability profile has allowed us to invest materially into the business. We set aside$500 million for investments in our infrastructure, resiliency, in our platform, developing new applications, AI. And, you know, I actually have a meeting with the board in a couple of hours to talk about our investment profiles for next year.

22:25So and that's going to be reemphasizing doubling down on our on our AI investments. And that's that's something that we're really, really excited about. Help us understand Anaplan's subscription business. Is customer expansion, pricing, or new customer acquisition? What's the more interesting story today? Yeah, I think it's new customers, obviously, and expanding with our customers outside of the initial use case or initial line of business that they would have started. Now, in the case of, let's just take new customers, we're able to today show them a vision for creating a decision-making infrastructure layer, which does span an entire enterprise.

23:26And with our calculation engine, which can handle data, natural dimensionality, and our unified data model, it allows you to take volumes of data and really analyze it in a way and plan your business and make decisions at a level that you just could not realistically do before. whether it be in your ERP or traditional planning solutions or your attempts to do it in Excel. Excel breaks as soon as you get past the rows. So to that extent, it's a very, very different environment. On the expand side, and this is very exciting as well, where you're taking a customer on a journey of, okay, you may have started in finance.

24:21Now let's connect your finance to your supply chain, to your revenue forecasting, to your workforce. And then being able to make, again, decisions on that basis. We have customers who have done tariff sensitivities, tariffs are our topic these days, across their entire enterprise, looking at elasticity of pricing to their customers, what the impact on their supply chain is going to be, their workforce in their factories, looking at transfer price margins, et cetera, working capital, and then determining, well, do we ship cars? And so that was a snare that actually played out several months ago.

25:12And we were part of that. Our platform was part of enabling that decision to be made in near record time, basically over a weekend. When you're looking ahead at revenue, which signals tell you the most? Is it the pipeline, customer adoption, renewals? What is it that you're, what tells you the most? Yeah, that's, if I were to take it back to its very origins, obviously, you know, everything starts with pipeline of potential transactions. So, and it cascades forward from there. But obviously, pipeline of new deals or expansions are very important. And obviously renewals are a key part of the business.

26:06We want to continue to demonstrate value for our customers. We have a very, very high renewal rate, so that is fantastic, both on a gross renewal and a net renewal basis. So we're very proud of that. And we do a lot to ensure we keep that. We have programs called value assurance that make sure that our solutions are implemented correctly along the way. And then delivery insurance on the back end to make sure that our customers are actually getting the value that was anticipated as part of the project. So we try to close the loop as much as we can because happy customers are ones that are going to stay with you.

26:56I wonder, like, you were just touching on some of the signals there that, you know, how clearly can finance connect those signals to eventual revenue? Wondering how you as a finance leader has sought to help make that connection more clear, more visible for everybody. Yeah, so, right. So I'll answer that slightly differently in the sense that all of those signals are ones that we have from various support systems that we feed into Outland. So we have a way of being able to forecast our new bookings, per se, and our renewal bookings with all the telemetry we have from our customers. But what's really interesting is what happens from there.

27:53So as you can imagine, we have a large implementation of Antplan across our business. So on the front end, the sales forecasting, revenue forecasting, as I mentioned. And then that leads into our incentive compensation for our sales folks. We have all of our hosting expense, whether it be on our data centers or on the hyperscalers that we use. That comes through at a customer level. We have our services business, which we manage out of Anaplan. And we have our workforce, which is obviously down to employee level assigned to various customers or regions, et cetera. And then we have all of our financials that we run, either on our internal reporting, external reporting, we do our tax planning, manage our AR and the like.

28:52So why is that important? Well, as soon as a deal, a new deal or renewal books, I know what the impact is on my compensation for the sales team. I know everyone that's in seat on a particular day. And so that represents the majority of the cost in the business, in addition to the cloud hosting expense, which comes in on a basically real-time basis. And so you take all of that, you know what your fixed costs are. rent is rent, et cetera. And so what that basically gives me is a daily snapshot, a daily close to the business. So I know based on what I booked, I know what my bookings, my billings, my revenue, I know what my cost structure is down to a very detailed level.

29:46So I basically have a daily close, It's a daily EBITDA number. And so what does that allow me to do? It allows me to understand where I am financially within a quarter as opposed to waiting until the end of a period, closing the books and saying, oh, we beat or we missed. And so this is very liberating because during the middle of a quarter, I can actually make a decision on should we pull forward an investment or should I push out an investment based on the financial commitments that I have. And so it's very liberating from that standpoint. It's a capability that, frankly, I wish I had earlier in my career.

30:30So going back to your earlier question about what would you have done differently? Well, I wish I had Anaplan earlier in my career because it would have made forecasting and managing the business a lot easier. I thought, thank you for that. That's a nice way to reveal how decisions are able to be made earlier in the process. because Anaplan describes itself today as the decision infrastructure for the agentic enterprise. So we have to ask you this. How is AI actually changing the way decisions get made inside Anaplan? Yeah, inside Anaplan. So let me start with, look, the way I'm evaluating AI investments is the impact on the business.

31:23the cost of the solutions and the impact that it can have on the speed at which a business will operate. So the projects that are going to have the greatest impact are the ones that get prioritized. And so I actually lead the initiative for AI across, or internal use of AI across the business. We have this program called AIR, which is AI readiness. And so it's a multifaceted approach. One, we're leveraging the frontier LLMs, the employees have access to it, and we've connected a large number of our data sources, emails, SharePoint, et cetera, and some of our other support systems to the LLMs to where it becomes a great way of accessing data.

32:23Now, there's also point solutions that we're leveraging, whether it be in our sales organization, marketing, or in our legal or technology groups. Our technology group is leveraging the coding assistants that are certainly out there. And so each of them have an ROI associated with it. And then, obviously, we're leveraging the AI that we're building into our platform, which I think is part of your question. So now our vision is that we have a platform that has a lot of context as it relates to the domains that we're serving, finance, sales, supply chain, workforce, and leveraging our AI capabilities on the agents that we're building, the agentic office, or our agents on CoModeler, which is our analogy to cursor and clock code, and then some of the other AI ML forecasting solutions we have.

33:34All of those are part of Parcel, and just to make the underlying platform that much more valuable, we have an MCP, which we're rolling out here very shortly. So it is a really, really exciting time. Again, as Anaplan brings AI into more of its planning capabilities for its customers, where are customers perhaps seeing the meaningful value today? Where are they seeing it? Yeah, so I think there's definitely an efficiency play. So, for example, on our co-modeler solution, where historically you would have a COE internally, or you would use some external services to build out models or maintain models, document models.

34:32And a lot of that work can now be done with our cobalt solution. And that has driven a significant amount of productivity with not only our customers, but also our partners. And then on top of that, our AI ML solutions have allowed companies to forecast their businesses, whether it be top line consumption revenues. We've got some of the hyperscalers using our solutions to actually forecast their revenues, ironically. And then, you know, in some cases, companies are using that solution to forecast travel. You know, forecasting travel is something that travel expense is something that's very episodic.

35:26And generally, everybody gets it from all over the world. And so our solutions have been several customers that told me, you know, this works great. It's the best travel forecast that we've had. So I think all of those things are important. But I think we're a piece of the solution as it relates to, at the end of the day, I think overall processes need to get. and organization structures, DTF re-engineered in some way to really take advantage of these solutions. Because if you've got a traditional siloed, let's say finance structure, which has its 13, 14 different subfunctions and all the traditional processes, you really need to reimagine those leveraging solutions I just mentioned and think about what should those processes be going forward?

36:28And I think that's really where organizations are going to see that incremental benefit of not only doing it more efficiently at lower costs, but I think the speed at which decisions get made are going to be, et cetera. And they need to be because this market today is just moving so, so fast. Can you reflect on for us, we want to just ask about pricing here, as AI adds new capabilities to AnaPlans offerings, how are you thinking about what customers should pay for? And I got to believe that's part of the conversation taking place. Yeah, I think, look, ultimately it needs to be indexed in some way to value your driving core customer.

37:20And so there are many different models that are out in the market today. Some have used consumption as a proxy, and that could work in some cases. In other cases, customers don't want the variability that brings to their cost equation. They're looking for more of a fixed cost type of scenario, right? And there could be a hybrid where, yeah, it's a fixed cost up to a certain point, it's a fair use, and then it becomes a variable. But I think at its core, it needs to be tied back to the value that you're driving for a customer. If you're able to do the activity of five employees with three employees and two agents, then there's an economic model there that should work for both the software vendor and the customer.

38:25So I think there's a balance here. I think, as you point out, the industry is trying to find its way on that front. And I think the one thing we can be sure of is it's going to continue to evolve. And what we think is the standard today is going to be very different six months from now, even six weeks from now. The discussion, and again, you shared with us that you have a board meeting, you're going to go before the board in a few hours, can't help but just get a snapshot of what's on their minds when it comes to AI. Is it in very broad sense, what are they likely to ask you? Yeah, well, I think it's the same questions that external parties would ask.

39:14it is. What are the growth rates associated with your AI revenue? What is the roadmap for your AI product suite? Why do you have a right to win? What is your moat against the LLMs, so to speak? And then, how are customers adopting what are customers saying about your solutions and so I think those are the key questions and then that's on the external aspect of it and then internally obviously how are you leveraging AI to make your business more efficient our objective is we've been growing our business tremendously as we talked about earlier. And we have effectively the same number of employees today as what we had when the company was taken private.

40:26And so my view is, well, if we were to grow this business to double it or triple it, is there a model which says we'd have roughly the same number of employees or have the rate at which we would grow an employee base be less than what the traditional metrics would have suggested. And I think there's a world in which that could be a reality. You mentioned earlier AI Readiness Air, this program that, were you one of the founders of the team or characterize yourself for us? And how did a finance leader sort of get charged with playing a leadership role here? Yeah. So our AIR program is run out of a team that I have, which is called Financial Flexibility, which is a group that looks at processes across the business and looks for efficiencies and re-engineering, if you will.

41:34And so AI is an accelerator for that team, as you can imagine. And so it's become a great tool. And we literally just had a review a few days ago where we walked through what our legal team and HR organizations are doing as it relates to reinventing their processes. And it is profound. And so the AIR program naturally evolved out of that financial flexibility team where any of those decisions on investments ultimately needs to have some form of a payback and ensuring that it doesn't become a sandbox or a hobby for someone. And I think the program that we're running really drives more accountability and more structure across the business.

42:41So we've got this right. Sorry, go ahead. I was thinking like such a program would allow you to reach out to parts of the organization that perhaps you ordinarily hadn't connected with before or your team could connect with them. We've effectively democratized access to AI through the platforms we've made available. And we readily communicate, you know, what capabilities we're adding, what connectors are we bringing into the platform. And we've tried to energize the adoption of AI through what we had. We had these awards that we would give away to employees that came up with novel use cases that had, you know, an impact on their organizations.

43:32And so we would highlight, you know, first place winner and a runner up during our monthly town halls. And it created a lot of energy. And now we're evolving that to, okay, now we want to look at bigger projects, connect some of these smaller use cases together, say, well, how do we re-engineer a process? And so that's going to be really, really exciting because it hopefully will take away some of the administrative work that we were doing in the past and now elevates the roles within the organization to where they find their jobs more rewarding, more fulfilling. One of the things I'm finding interesting about what you're describing is that I was suspicious of AIR just being sort of a window dressing to hide the finance team bringing its ROI tools into all these different places under the guise of being AI.

44:31But in fact, it seems like it has a different tact altogether the way you're connecting with different parts of the organization. 100%. We've taken a very collaborative approach here.

44:49We've obviously communicated the charter across the business. Our approach is not to say we're going to implement AI and we're going to cut 30 % of the organization like some people have done in the industry. Our approach is we have enough to do to keep us busy until the end of time, but how do we focus our day-to -day efforts on the things that are most valuable and leverage AI to help us do things not only faster, but the interesting thing is AI, there's the efficiency aspect of it, which is great. But I think there's also the element of AI neighbors should do things at a much more granular level than you would have been able to do in the past.

45:46And so one example of that is as developers write code, the last thing they want to do is to document code in a very thorough way. or in the case of our security team leveraging AI to come up with novel ways of testing our environments. These are things that AI can do at a much more granular level than what we would have been able to do previously and we can have ultimately a higher quality outcome as a result. Well, Matt, we would love to spend more time discussing this point, but we got to move forward. We are up to our favorite question where we always prod finance leaders to supply us with a finance strategic moment from their past.

46:42Now, this might have been from 20 years ago. It might have been last week. But what would you tell us? What would you share with us as a finance strategic moment? Yeah. The one that comes to mind, and I always like to think of strategy as it's a series of choices, right? And so to a larger extent, what that means is you have to bring people along for the ride. So part of those choices, as soon as you make a choice, that person needs to still be behind you, right? Hopefully hasn't stepped out of line and gone on another journey. And so as I think about that, I go back to the semi-materials company.

47:35and so one of the things that would happen as we're setting our targets for the year, generally we would model it tops down, say, okay, we need X amount of revenue and Y amount of EBITDA, et cetera. And there would be a CapEx number in there, et cetera. And so we would model it out and great. And so there were always so many complaints about why are the targets so aggressive? And there were so many complaints. So we're in the middle of a QBR. We have all the leaders in from around the world, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Italy, et cetera. And so I got to a point after hearing all the complaints, I said, okay, stop.

48:25Time. Okay. Okay. You guys are going to pick your targets for next year. So I said, okay, let's start with how much cash do we want to generate? Oh, okay. All right, great. We want to generate a certain amount of cash. So I wrote down that one. Okay. So how much CapEx do you guys want to spend? Oh, you guys want to spend that? Okay. So I wrote down that one. I said, okay, so now we have to pay taxes. We have debt service, et cetera. We get up to operating margin. Like, okay, so we want a certain amount of OPEX. How much OPEX? We did this much last year. Oh, that's got to go up. Okay, so that's got to go up.

49:06Fine. Our gross margins. Let's say we keep gross margins flat. Okay, gross margins flat. That means our revenue number needs to be X. It was 50 % higher than what I originally gave them. And everybody in the room was like, oh, okay. So my aha moment there was do not assume, even for senior leaders in our organization, that they understand how financial is working. Financial acumen of business leaders can always get better. And so from that point, I started a series, what I call Finance 101, Finance 201, where we'll actually educate the business on what is a P &L? What is a balance sheet, cash flow state?

50:04What are the operating metrics within the business? How do you connect various parts of a business operation? What are the concepts we want to bring forward? So to that extent, I think that has been a key thread for my last few roles.

50:33AI is changing the finance function, but how much business value is it actually delivering? According to new research from Salesforce, 90 % of finance leaders using AI report a positive return on investment. And as AI agents enter the picture, finance leaders are seeing opportunities to improve productivity, reduce costs, and strengthen forecasting. But there's another side to the story. CFOs are also confronting growing revenue complexity with more subscription, consumption-based, and hybrid business models to manage. And that raises an important question. How can finance leaders gain the visibility they need to make better decisions while putting AI to work?

51:23Salesforce explores these challenges and the opportunities ahead in its latest CFO research. Discover what finance leaders are saying about AI, revenue complexity, and the evolving CFO role. Visit salesforce.com slash CFO report. That's salesforce.com slash CFO report.

51:49We're going to ask you to look back again. What we're interested in is that first 60 days you stepped into a CFO role for the first time. You had all that experience from GE behind you. You had been a leader in several capacities, but this is the first time you're a CFO. What is it that you wish someone had told you about the role? Something that might have just surprised you? Yeah. So coming into the CFR role, I think I almost have to dovetail back to the last story we talked about, which is don't assume people understand financial concepts or making financial trade-offs or what their metrics actually mean.

52:42and how it impacts the overall company. I think there's a little bit of trust in Verify, but I think if you start with really just asking the three whys or ask why three times with a particular business leader, I think it'll be important to get them to explain why a particular metric is important, how they're going to address it, and so forth. And that will give you a really good idea as to, can you have confidence in them delivering on their slated outcomes? And obviously, you've got to piece that together across all the functions within the business. So I would say that doing that proactively is something that I wish I had done, you know, for concretely coming out of the gates.

53:54Like, I think you were explaining, hey, talk to different people in the organization when you first arrived and understand if they understand the metrics. Are we all talking the same language in a way? I don't know if that's. Yeah, no, that's that's exactly that's exactly the point. I think you should verify that the business leader or the functional leader actually has a grasp on all of their metrics. You're going to be speaking the same language with them. Exactly. Exactly. So I think in the cases where you don't, you'd have to follow up and perhaps go a little deeper and really connect the dots in a more granular way.

54:38Hey, we always like to ask our guests to reflect a little on the personal side. Hamant, your colleagues, you've been there four years or they might think they know you, but something from your past, something most people might not know about you, something, a feat, an interest that you have, anything you can share with us? Yeah, I would say that one of the things that's perhaps surprising to my colleagues is that I can actually cook. And we were joking the other day with the executive team that when we're getting together in Miami next month that I'm going to cook dinner. So that was an assignment from the CEO, to which I was like, oh, okay.

55:31So I would say that that's something that people don't completely appreciate or don't connect with my role. Obviously, I love great food. I love trying new recipes and new ingredients and the like. So that's something that probably a lot of people don't appreciate. Would you have a book or a resource you can recommend to our listeners? And I was saying that maybe it's something you escape with, or maybe it's a business book that's influenced your thinking in some way. Yeah. You know, I have to go back to this one that I read a long time ago, and it's very pertinent now, which is Only the Paranoid Survived by Andy Grove.

56:22that in this environment, unless you're thinking five steps ahead, whether it be on your product roadmap or whatever contingencies you can have in your business or have multiple investments going in parallel, you're apt to be blindsided. So I would say that that's a good book for people to, And it's not that big of a book. It's kind of on the small side, but it's a good reset for people, especially in this environment. Great selection. We haven't had it in some time, but you're right about how relevant it seems to be with this environment. So thank you for that. We're up to our final question.

57:11And we'd love to know what your priorities are for this coming 12 months. What are your CFO priorities? Yeah. So I would say it's obviously leveraging, continuing our AIR program internally. I really want to see more transformational process design internally because, and that's across the business, where we'd be in the go-to-market, down to the GNA functions. And I think we've got a lot of momentum on that front, so I'd love to see more come from that, celebrating those wins.

58:00Obviously, I speak to a lot of our customers as it relates to our AI solutions, and I'd love to – obviously, I'm going to continue doing that, and I'd love to see us get more traction and accelerate on that front. And then I'm obviously one of the bigger users of Anaplan out there. And so I'm basically customer zero for a lot of the innovation that is coming out of our team, which is at a breakneck pace. And one of the things I've challenged my team to do is if they're coming out with some, I want to try it first. And so that's something that the team is definitely focused on. Hement Kapadia, thank you for joining us on CFO Fault Leader.

58:54Thank you, Jack.

59:07Hello, we're benchmarking the CFO path. Join 500 finance leaders helping define how today's CFOs rise and lead. If you're a CFO or senior finance executive, contribute your experience. It takes just a few minutes and you'll receive early access to the findings. Visit cfothoughtleader.com slash benchmarking.