If women are looking for role models to follow as CFOs, there are many who have reached the very highest levels. Indeed, the Finance heads of the world’s most valuable tech business and arguably the biggest tech disruptor both happen to be women.

Speaking during a panel at the OneStream Splash event in London, Susannah Streeter, Global Financial Commentator and former BBC business anchor, cited Nvidia CFO Colette Kress as a female CFO who currently stands out. Kress joined the business back in 2013, when it was a company providing GPUs for video games:

Under her leadership as CFO, NVIDIA’s become a $4 trillion company. And it’s been her leadership, but also the transformation that she’s brought. Having that long-term vision, understanding the wheels turning as far as artificial intelligence and the advance of the Blackwell chip and really creating that opportunity and scaling the business, providing the financial backbone to scale the business to where it’s come today [has been] absolutely key to Jensen Huang’s vision.

Recently, Kress has teamed up with another powerhouse CFO – OpenAI’s Sarah Friar – to spearhead a mammoth partnership deal. Streeter notes:

Those two groundbreaking female leaders, they put together this $100 billion deal cementing Nvidia and OpenAI together. So there’s certainly a lot of incredible strategic financial leadership from a female perspective.

Smashing the glass ceiling

But while these women have smashed the glass ceiling, it isn’t leading to a rush of others following in their wake. According to the recent ‘The Glass Chair’ report from OneStream, only around 23% of Global 500 and FTSE 100 CFOs are women, a figure that hasn’t shifted since 2011. Those women that do reach the top role in finance take an average of three years longer to make CFO compared to their male counterparts. 

Part of this could be down to women wanting to feel fully prepared to take on that job, which Streeter views as a positive. She explains:

Being prepared is a great thing to do because then when you arrive in your position, you really are ready. When you start off in your career, you’re quite desperate to get on and get to the next position, and then you get to this plateau. But the plateaus are very useful because that’s when you can be a sponge and suck up all this knowledge to be ready for that next job.

Technology expertise is now vital to getting ahead in the world of finance, as evidenced by the CFOs at Nvidia and OpenAI. This is something that women are aware of, but not necessarily embracing. OneStream’s report found that while 75% of women in senior finance positions identify leveraging AI, machine learning and automation as key for the future CFO, only 24% expect to rely significantly on AI tools themselves.

Women’s predilection for feeling fully prepared before they embark on a new role could be a factor in the gap between awareness of the importance of AI, and actually using it. According to that recent MIT report, 95% of generative AI pilot programs deliver little to no measurable impact on the bottom line. Streeter says:

Businesses feel as though they haven’t got the return on investment that they expected when they deployed those AI tools [so] there’s not a surprise that female leaders – given that they do like to prepare and do like to be doing the right thing and make sure what they are doing leads to success – are a bit more hesitant, because they want to ensure that the use case really is there before they jump in. In a way, I’m quite encouraged by that because it means that we are thinking before we leap.

Time pressures

It’s not always easy to get started using new technology, Sarita Sewnarain, Head of Finance Technology at VodafoneZiggo, acknowledged. This is something she experiences in her own role, as she explains:

We have different business priorities, we also are on a cost-cutting program, everybody’s shouting AI to us. It’s a lot to digest. And people are like, I don’t have time because I have deadlines, I need to manage the actuals, I need to do variance analysis. Time is an essential thing, an essential topic.

This can lead to a feeling of missing out, but it’s still early days for AI. Sewnarain – who’s a heavy and advanced user of ChatGPT, but admits she’s also a bit worried about it – adds:

We are evolving what can we do with it, how can we create return and take it into our advantage. I feel we are still in time to embrace AI. The only thing is that you need to be curious and not like – I need to use AI; then you will never use it. I need to really know what I need to use it at, and then just make a plan and schedule time for it. I motivate myself, my team, even my husband – just start to experiment with it.

By taking this experimental approach, Sewnarain thinks the percentage of women relying on AI will increase. She adds:

But it’s early days, so we’re still in time.

Streeter is a keen tester of AI, spending an afternoon filming in an AI studio to create her own avatar. ‘Agent Susa’ can talk and respond like Streeter, although she’s a bit more serious in tone, and she’s now ready to be deployed. She adds:
 

But I’ve not used her yet because I don’t want to just deploy her out to the world for no reason. I’ve got to find a specific use case and then it might work, but I’ve got to find that use case before she’s deployed. Otherwise, it could actually be more dangerous than it’s worth. It’s just holding back until you can really see the opportunities out there.

While Streeter is taking Agent Susa along to conferences, where the avatar can answer questions at the end of a panel, for example, she’s only allowed to interact in the presence of her creator. Streeter notes:

I don’t want to unleash her out in the world on her own. You’ve got to experiment, but within a contained way.

Simple habits

Starting small by applying AI to your daily tasks is the approach Viktoria Fridrif, Head of Finance Transformation at Sky Deutschland, has taken to improve her own digital skills. Sky Deutschland has the enterprise version of ChatGPT, and the IT department encourages the finance team to input as much information as possible.

This could be recording meetings and then turning it into practical notes with the help of gen AI; or they might upload a 500-page contract and request a one-pager deal memo for the CFO; or compare contract version one with version two. Fridrif says:

Simple habits, step by step, trying to go out of the comfort zone and just exercise it. It’s also important to be open and share this knowledge with your colleagues. Building smaller groups where you can exchange this knowledge wider and then you can grow all together and it makes it also fun.

Many people approach Fridrif concerned over whether AI might replace their job. She responds:

I don’t think that AI will replace your job, but your job could be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI. Digital literacy is no longer nice to have, it’s the foundation. It’s important that we get out of our comfort zone and start small.

My take

The proportion of female CFOs is similar to that of women in the tech industry – both less than a quarter, and both industries achieving no real progress in redressing the gender imbalance for over a decade. But the fact that two of the hottest properties in the tech sector are happy for their finances to be led by women is something to celebrate. For more women to reach that highest level, familiarity with gen AI is becoming vital, and the three panellists shared some useful tips on how not to get left behind.

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