Memoirs of an AI-Savvy CEO
"I replaced a $400K salary with a $20/month subscription."
Here is what I found, what I changed, and what it means for any company still running finance the old way.
All characters and events are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
"The board deck was late. Again. I opened an AI tool and typed the question my CFO's team had been working on for six weeks."
Eleven minutes later I had a better answer — more detailed, more honest, and more useful than the one I had been waiting for. That moment cost me eight months of uncomfortable thinking, one difficult conversation I kept postponing, and eventually one of the most clarifying decisions I had made as a CEO. I wrote all of it down.
You have done the math privately and it is uncomfortable. You have not said it out loud.
This book gives you the language, the data, and the path forward — including a step-by-step guide to the conversation most CEOs have been postponing for months.
You see the change coming. Raising it feels like arguing against your own value.
This book makes the case you have been afraid to make on your own behalf — and shows four finance leaders who made the transition and what their careers look like now.
You spend most of your time on assembly and reporting. You suspect you are capable of more.
Chapter 16 describes exactly what the new finance leader looks like. Chapter 12 shows four real people who got there. The path is specific and documented.
Some portfolio companies are running finance functions at half the cost of comparable companies and getting better outputs.
Chapter 10 maps the diligence questions that are already changing — the metrics sophisticated investors are beginning to track and what they mean for your portfolio companies.
25 questions. 5 sections. 100 points. Four score bands with specific recommended actions. Run it on your own finance function today. Takes 20 to 30 minutes. Makes avoidance harder to sustain than action.
Fully written, immediately usable prompts for cash flow forecasting, variance narrative, scenario planning, board presentation architecture, M&A analysis, and more. Copy, customize, run.
Step-by-step guidance for the conversation most CEOs have been putting off. Three annotated scripts. Four scenario responses with what to do in each. A 30-day follow-up protocol. And an honest answer to the legal question the title implies.
Eight-layer AI finance stack with tool categories, what each replaces, and real monthly costs. Total software cost of the restructured function: approximately $300 per month. Nothing is estimated. These are the actual numbers.
Elena, promoted to CFO with a 38% pay increase within 11 months. Daniel, who ran his own counter-experiment. Priya, who was 31 and being recruited for CFO roles. Richard, who recognized the new role was not the one he wanted and left — for something better. Honest accounts of what this actually looks like.
The payoff promised from page one. 14 months of resistance. An 18-week pivot. The conversation that finally happened and the two years that followed it. The CFO who said: "I was afraid there would be nothing left of the job I knew how to do. What I found was the best part."
The 22-day process did not just fail to add value. It added negative value. The extra human iteration made the forecast worse.
The deck that took eleven days was worse. Not slightly worse. Meaningfully, measurably worse, as rated by the people it was produced for.
The auditors did not change. The standards did not change. What changed: we stopped arriving unprepared.
Most finance functions are paying premium human prices for work that a subscription can now do — and getting the strategic work as whatever is left over.
"I'm a much better CFO at this table than I am at my desk."
Chapter 13 — the line that changes everything
Instant delivery to any Kindle device or app. The most accessible format. Includes all 21 chapters, 3 appendices, and full table of contents.
Buy on Amazon~300 pages. Ships in 2–5 days. The format most executives prefer for a book they will annotate and return to. Eligible for Prime.
Buy on AmazonPDF ebook + fillable Appendix B audit worksheet + 20-prompt cheat sheet as a formatted one-page PDF. Instant download. No Amazon account required.
Buy direct View full seriesBook 1 is the interrogation. Book 3 is the build manual. You need to read Book 1 first.
