Noam Mills: Hi everyone and welcome to our webinar “The CFO mindmap, unlock clarity drive strategic decisions”. Thanks for joining us today. Maybe before we start we'll do a quick round of intros. I'm Noam, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Panax. We're an AI native cash flow management platform leveraging AI agents to build a bridge between banks and ERP and give finance teams the ability to be in full control and manage risks and find opportunities. We built Panax based on our own experience. I was myself a VP of Finance trying to find ways to gain more control over cash and different workflows. When we couldn't find anything, we decided to build one on our own. I'm joined here today by Vince and Joel. Guys, do you want to introduce yourself?
Vince DiDomizio: Yes, thank you. I appreciate your time today. My name is Vince DiDomizio, I'm the CFO at Netstock. We're an AI supply and demand planning platform that services the SMB and mid-market space. I've been in the SaaS industry a little over eight years now. Thank you for your time and looking forward to a good discussion.
Joel Jeselsohn: Thank you for inviting me for this webinar. Until recently I was the CFO of Tangoe, a leader in the technology expense management space, and I'm currently in between jobs and advising companies in the meantime.
Noam: Great. Thank you both for joining and for sharing your insights. Before we jump in, what's on the agenda for today? We'll start by talking a bit about the expanding role of the CFO and the challenges that come with this expansion in today's shifting landscape. We'll then quickly introduce the tool that we're presenting today, the CFO mind map, explain it a bit, and spend most of the time deep diving into some of the domains and areas and learning from Joel and Vince's experience. We'll wrap up by talking about what's on the radar for 2025 and beyond over the next 12 to 24 months. Let's jump in. We all know that the role of the CFO is not just shifting, it's evolving, right from being more of a finance gatekeeper, a controlling function, or a support function, into a much more strategic, data-driven, and data-leading function. Vince, you were recently promoted to CFO, and Joel, you've been a CFO for over a decade now. How do you see this role shifting and evolving?
Joel: I think the CFO in the past has been more of an operating person. You always hear about the operational CFO and the strategic CFO. Today, it's basically those two areas blended together. It's an operational-strategic CFO, with strategy taking a bigger role than even the operations. The operations everybody can do. A CFO really needs to be involved in what matters most and what brings the most value for the organization. That's why you see a trend more towards data analytics, and today also AI-driven activities.
Vince: It's an interesting climate. We're faced with new technology every single year, and especially now with the AI craze, it's shifting from an operational to a strategist or commercial level role. I look at it as a modern CFO. In order to adapt to the climate and headwinds we're experiencing, you have to shift. In the past, it was focused on controls, cost tracking, and month-end close. Now, it's trying to invest in real-time analytics, self-serve dashboards, and scenario modeling, which allows cross-functional leaders to make decisions earlier in the planning cycle. As we're seeing the rise of subscription economics and product-led growth initiatives in SaaS, it has changed how we forecast. We're no longer linear. You have to be able to adapt and shift toward cohort-based forecasting and break it down by region or segment because each region has different headwinds. It's definitely shifted into a more strategy-focused role for sure.
Noam: It's interesting the shift from more of an operating role to a more strategic role, and Vince you touched on AI and other technological developments that change the requirements. It's also not in a silo. The world is rapidly changing, starting with COVID and then everything happening with governments, interest rates, and tariffs. How do you see the external challenges impacting the role of the CFO and their priorities?
Vince: For me, it's our announcements of who we are; it's always AI and then your company name and what you do. We're battling the commercial market and what they're looking for. It's not just AI, it's generative AI versus agentic AI. We are PE-backed, so we have investors requiring certain things from the leadership team. They ask how we are enhancing our product with AI and how we are going from generative to agentic, which ultimately is the path forward. You're getting pressures not only from customers requiring fast ROI, but also from investors and shareholders to drive value. It is shifting very fast, and knowledge and transparency are key here.
Noam: Vince, do you see the pressures from the investors also on efficiency, on how you operate as a company and as a finance team?
Vince: Absolutely. Everything is KPI and metric based. You want to have "big hairy audacious goals" or north stars. It could be wanting to be the best agentic AI platform in the mid-market space. They want you to do that with the current budget you have, or prove that if it requires an investment, what the scalability and efficiency metrics are. Things like sales and marketing magic number, rule of 40, payback period, and CAC on a vertical are metrics I am responsible for tracking. We track retention metrics to ensure we do not cannibalize our current base. Ensuring customers get full value efficiently without hiring a thousand people is key. The biggest takeaway is, instead of cutting your workforce by 100, can you invest in AI technology where your headcount of 100 is working like a headcount of a 1,000, but you're only paying for the headcount of 100? Balancing that is quite the challenge currently for many CFOs.
Joel: I'd address the challenges from COVID and beyond. I think it presents us with an area of much higher risk, like tariffs and an uncertain environment that we need to address. The tools we have today are much better because we can see scenarios and prepare for them. Interestingly, Vince is right that agentic AI is probably more important than generative AI. According to Gartner, 40% of agentic AI projects will fail by 2027. This makes the mistakes we do in selecting the right engine sky-high, adding another layer of risk. We really need to make sure we pick the right tools and invest in the right things.
Noam: Vince touched on needing to do the work of a thousand with a hundred. In today's high-interest environment, there are a lot of pressures to cost-cut and be efficient. Finance teams haven't traditionally been the most tech-forward, but what's happening now with AI is almost the perfect storm. Without those pressures, CFOs wouldn't have adapted new technologies as fast, but without AI, the need to do more with less would have been very difficult to operate in such an environment.
Joel: I heard a comment last week asking if AI will replace people. The trend is more that the people who will lose their jobs are actually people who are not adopting AI, not those who are going to be replaced by AI. AI will allow us to be more efficient and upskill our capabilities. People who don't embrace AI absolutely will fail and will lose their jobs.
Noam: I think you both touched on the switch from an operational role to a strategic role going hand-in-hand with what AI can automate on the manual processes side, giving the team more time for strategic decisions.
Vince: It'll be table stakes within a year that you have to embrace AI to further enhance your processes and be efficient. It goes both ways; you should embrace the shift in this powerful technology.
Noam: That leads us to the CFO Mindmap. It's a visual framework of the modern CFO's responsibilities in 2025. We discussed with dozens of CFOs to wrap our minds around what is now part of this evolving role. We have 14 different domains that are part of today's CFO mindmap. We will share the mindmap with all of you after this webinar. The goal is to be a tool for strategic planning, to understand your responsibilities, and align the team around who owns what within the finance team. It's a way for org-wide communications, specifically around data responsibility, and a resource to benchmark your teams against others. We have 14 domains and 75 subdomains. I noticed that in all of these domains, there is at least one subdomain that speaks specifically about AI as a vertical way to look at risk, cash flow management, or identifying optimization opportunities. Data is what AI eats, and what it uses to provide recommendations and automation. Any comments before we dive in?
Joel: Those domains almost blend into each other. You have cross-functionality, and you need to be present in all of those domains. The work of the CFO is really in all of them, and you can leverage work from one for another, with AI across all of them.
Vince: 14 domains becomes 75 subdomains, so you quickly realize how much is on your plate. It goes back to people, process, technology right, the golden triangle. How can you have generative AI helping you with these things? It's important to invest in the people and process, as well as the technology, to combat these 75 to 100 subdomains, especially as we're shifting to a more sophisticated technology landscape.
Noam: It's a really good point that while they appear siloed, they're all interwoven. It's hard to leave some outside, so it's important to look at the big picture. Let's deep dive into a couple of these domains. Let's start with financial strategy and planning. Joel, how do you align your long-term financial strategy with evolving business models and market shifts?
Joel: There's a famous quote attributed to Eisenhower: "Plans are worthless but planning is everything". I think that captures the essence of the reality we face as CFOs. The moment the budget is approved, it's outdated. The rolling forecast that we do month-to-month, sometimes week-to-week or quarter-to-quarter, is what matters and what we should track. Long-term financial goals, whether we focus on growth, margins, or savings, should serve as our North Star. The scenarios we create should all be in the direction of the North Star. The narrower the cone, the better the forecast and the more targeted we are in executing our strategy.
Noam: How do you make sure that these scenarios are realistic, that you're not over-analyzing while not missing a significant scenario?
Joel: I view the long-term as the North Star. As long as I'm in the direction of that, I know I am in the right space. If I veer off course, I know that scenario is probably not something I would like to pick. If the company is heading that way, it's a wake-up call to fix things. We either change our long-term strategy, or if we truly believe in it, we better fix the underlying scenario.
Noam: You said the budget becomes immediately obsolete and you need to roll the forecast. One of the keys is access to real-time data. How do you think about the cadence of planning and getting access to fresh data?
Joel: In the companies I was with, we do a rolling 12 months, and month-to-month we roll it forward 12 months. We look at sales forecasts on a weekly basis because sales will impact our top line in the most significant way. That gives us an indication if our 12-month rolling forecast is at risk. Expenses are more on a cycle like payroll, so they can be forecasted better. If you do hire or fire people, you have to model that in the scenarios. The variances there are much less than in sales performance. A quarterly basis is too far away to react; you need to do it on a monthly basis, sometimes even sooner if the data is changing rapidly.
Vince: I agree with what Joel is saying. The genesis of this question is the cadence and transparency. I'll give a real-life example: I have an IT team that wants to buy tools and hire to the budget, but maybe our revenue for that segment isn't growing at the plan we thought. They only see one side of the story, thinking they are under budget, while revenue is trailing 5%. In order to hit the rule of 40, we need to cut back on expenses. Being able to do that on a quick cadence through a self-service dashboard or integration is critical. It's important to do your budget versus actuals monthly and get a sales forecast at least 3 months in advance. You check if tariffs have an impact, if a cohort of customers is at risk, or if there is unusual churn. You can do that efficiently if you get hands on keys within a few weeks to check momentum mid-month. You have to make sure discretionary spend units like marketing are generating ROI, and if not, move that money elsewhere to generate top-line pipeline. It is ever-evolving, and you can't just let it sit there for 90 or 120 days or you'll be hit by a tidal wave.
Noam: We see with our customers that access to daily data on what sales invoices are out and what is actually collecting is a game changer for understanding and course-correcting. Let's shift gears to cost optimizations and efficiency. Vince, you mentioned being PE-backed and having pressures to grow faster but in a more efficient way. How do you ensure that cost-cutting efforts don't compromise growth or employee morale?
Vince: It's a tough one. "Do more with less" is the quick punchline from investors, but cost optimization isn't just about cutting. It's about reallocating toward higher ROI. Transparency and communication are absolutely critical. In the seat of the CFO, you can't be siloed; you have to have your hands in the business at all times. We are fully remote, so it's imperative to have bi-weekly check-ins with your COO and ops leaders to share the "why" behind decisions. We reinvest savings into areas that produce top-line growth like go-to-market, product innovation, and retention initiatives. You have to differentiate between good costs which drive growth, and bad costs that don't add value. For employee morale, it can get confusing when you tell them to do more with less. Being transparent and involving those teams upfront to help identify inefficiencies empowers thought leadership and makes mid-level managers better leaders. You start to see a culture shift where they come to you with an ROI cost-benefit analysis. They become under budget and get more out of it, turning an hour meeting into a five-minute meeting.
Noam: I liked your distinction between good cost and bad cost, and helping the team distinguish between the two boosts morale when they realize you're not cutting the good cost.
Vince: Another real-life example: somebody told me they were going to be $100,000 behind budget, but they were going to lose 300,000 in pipeline. $100,000 of cost is one-to-one on the bottom line, but losing 300,000 in pipeline that generates 90,000 of bookings at an enterprise value of 8x is a no-brainer. We need to make sure we're shifting our cost to appropriate vectors because it has a longer enterprise value tail. You have to step aside from being just a finance/accounting person and consider the commercial strategy.
Joel: Using the word "cost cutting" gets into morale issues. I agree 100% with Vince; rebranding is the first step. I call it "cost containment". When I was involved in cost optimization exercises, sometimes cutting a third of the employees actually made morale grow. It all depends on how you do it. Transparency is key. If people understand that the implementation of AI tools will upskill what they do and make their work more interesting, they actually embrace it. They want to be part of a more productive team. Yes, some people will be let go, but those who remain have something to look forward to. It's a cutthroat environment, especially being backed by PE that drives the bottom line, but we need to face those challenges.
Noam: What parts or functions within the finance team will be transformed first by AI in the next couple of years?
Joel: The easy areas to transform are the back-office functions. If you think about financial close, tools today can learn what the accountants do and take over those activities. It doesn't mean we let the bookkeepers go; it means we use people for value-added work in analysis. In procure-to-pay, the systems can do a lot of the work. The challenge with forecasting is that the most important question is the "why". AI tools today can only handle the data they have, but a lot of the data that explains the "why" exists in people's heads. If we can create an AI engine that gives preemptive alerts, we avoid the "why" because we fix the problem before it arises. The back-office functions already have good tools. FP&A is the most challenged area from an AI perspective, but it's the golden cow we need to get to.
Noam: You touched on data quality and making sure you have the infrastructure to deploy AI to help make decisions. Vince, what's your point of view?
Vince: I absolutely agree with Joel that FP&A is phase two of this AI craze. From an FP&A perspective, they're trying to build the accounting foundation to report variance analysis, but the back end seems to be the easier way to start. I decided to do this webinar because I love Panax and their ability to provide quick insights. I have 12 bank accounts across the globe, some I don't even have access to. Panax uses AI to model sales commissions and forecast on a cash basis internally to show efficiency. We recently bought an FP&A software and are in the beginning stages of implementation. You have tons of vendors fighting for your inbox. It's a matter of ensuring planning and knowledge. Before accepting a business case, ask if one tool can replace two or three current vendors across departments like customer success or marketing ops. Be careful with everyone getting excited; do the planning because right now a lot of generative AI is just taking the next best token instead of doing deep research.
Noam: Introducing new technologies introduces risks. Do you have any notable things to take into account when evaluating solutions?
Vince: It's all about data and privacy. We're ensuring that we know what we are giving these LLMs because they learn everything very fast. You have to ensure you have internal processes because employees might give customer names to the AI just to get a quick answer, disregarding legal risk. We're seeing customers opt out of data clauses because they don't want their data out there. You must have this pre-built within your CRM or ERP to ensure you're not crossing legal bridges.
Joel: I 100% agree with what Vince said.
Noam: Looking into the next 12 to 24 months, what should be top of mind for CFOs?
Joel: How to best manage the risks around us and finding the most efficient tools. There are so many tools out there, but a CFO must understand what matters most and focus on that area. Always improving the forecast in accounting, P&L, and cash is crucial. FP&A solutions today haven't fully solved how to address different revenue models for different products.
Vince: My quick punch list would be: don't build reports, build narratives. Invest early in scalable systems because the pain of retrofitting is real. Surround yourself with strong operators who can drive strategy and go deep on process. Choose clarity over perfection and deliver insights fast to refine over time. I talk about the 80/20 rule, but perhaps AI can make that 100/0. To Joel's point, legal and risk is still a big part of the mindmap, so you must scale compliantly.
Noam: Great wrap-up. We will share the mindmap with all participants afterwards. The role of the CFO is ever-evolving, so we'd love your feedback on the domains. Thank you Vince and Joel for giving your insights. Have a good rest of your day.
.webp)
.png)
