My 5 AI strategies to impress your ceo…

Let me tell you a quick story.

A few months ago, I was chatting with a CFO who felt stuck. Her team was buried in repetitive tasks, leaving no time for big-picture strategy. Every month, she’d race to finish board reports, knowing they didn’t go beyond the basics.

Her CEO wanted deeper insights—trends, opportunities, risks—but she couldn’t keep up with the workload to deliver them.

Then, she joined my AI Finance Club and discovered how to harness AI through my courses.

Within weeks, she and her team had completely transformed (and accelerated) their approach. They used AI to accelerate the tedious number crunching and commentary drafting. This freed them up to focus on exploring solutions to solve problems rather than just presenting problems.

Now, she and her team present actionable insights at every meeting—things no one else had thought to look for. Their CEO? Blown away by the finance team!

?? That’s why you don’t want to miss my next masterclass "Impress Your CEO: 5 New AI Strategies for Finance Leaders", sponsored by Ramp, on January 28, 2025, at 1:00 PM EST.

Why Attend this masterclass?

I’m sharing real, actionable AI strategies straight from my 2025 playbook:

• Automate variance analysis and commentary generation
• Master Excel Copilot to build advanced analysis faster
• See live demos of AI with Excel and Presentations and more

?? Reserve Your Spot Now

Can’t Wait? Here are the 5 practical insights I will share in this webinar

Here is a sneak peek of what I will show and how you can start today

1. Perform Financial Analysis

How to Do It: Imagine your CFO challenges you to present an analysis on improving profitability for a struggling product line. Instead of defaulting to a standard gross margin review, you turn to an LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude) and prompt it: “Analyze profitability using data provided. Propose advanced, less-common financial analyses to uncover strategic opportunities.”

Here is what we get as recommendations:

1. RFM Analysis (Recency, Frequency, Monetary): Identify High Value and Low Value Customers
2. Cohort Analysis: Assess changes in profitability by cohorts of customers acquired during different marketing campaigns.
3. Price Elasticity Analysis: Use the price elasticity to understand how to move the price to optimize your profits

You apply one of these methods and discover that a small subset of loyal customers drives 70% of product profitability. You suggest reallocating marketing resources to nurture this segment, which earns a nod from your CFO.

Why It Matters: When you introduce analyses that aren’t part of the usual toolkit, you position yourself as a strategic thinker who adds unexpected value and impresses leadership.

2. Model Financial Analysis in Excel

How to Do It: You’re tasked with building a financial model to predict the impact of pricing adjustments on gross margins. Instead of manually figuring out complex formulas, you prompt your favorite LLM: “I have a historical list of prices and volumes for each of my products. Propose the Excel formulas to calculate elasticity and predict revenue under different pricing scenarios.”

Here is what your LLM will provide you

• Calculation of the elasticity
• How to calculate your new profits
• How to use Goal Seek workflows to find pricing that maximizes profits

Why It Matters: You will probably never find all these functionalities and formulas by yourself unless you spend hours of researching and trial and error. Your LLM assistant which is available 24/7, just give them to you in a few seconds (I am using it every day for Excel formulas and while I thought I knew most of the functions, I have learned a ton since I am using ChatGPT as my go-to expert).

3. Create Data Visualizations

How to Do It: You’re preparing a report on company-wide performance and need advanced, interactive visualizations. Instead of static charts, you can use Python and libraries like Plotly or Altair to create interactive dashboards.

And yes you might be afraid of Python… but the reality is that you don’t need to code anymore, AI is doing it for you! So why not trying it? (My recommendation: use Google Colab or Pythoin in Excel to make your first tests).

Prompt an LLM: “Write Python code to create an interactive dashboard comparing revenue growth across regions with drill-down capabilities for product categories. My data looks like this [paste here a sample of data with headers]”

The AI generates a Plotly dashboard with:

• Hover-over details showing region-specific insights.
• A drop-down filter to analyze individual product categories.
• A dynamic heatmap to highlight underperforming segments.

Why It Matters: Interactive visualizations add another dimension which often answer to questions your management will have. This is not something your CEO is used to… but once you will make them taste it, they will want to have it for most of your analysis!

4. Generate Commentaries

How to Do It: Drafting commentaries that feel generic won’t cut it. Instead, train your LLM with your style and examples of what you think are sophisticated commentaries (ideally you create a GPT where you upload examples and explain your typical structure of commentaries). “Generate a CFO-level commentary, weaving in strategic insights, macroeconomic context, and actionable recommendations. Here are the main data [paste here your data]”

Example Output:

• “Revenue grew 8% this quarter, driven by double-digit growth in our SaaS segment, outperforming market expectations by 12%. However, gross margin declined by 3 points, impacted by rising material costs. To mitigate this, we propose renegotiating supplier contracts and expanding our portfolio of local vendors. With marketing ROI up by 20% YoY, we’ll reallocate resources to campaigns targeting high-margin customer segments.”

You have to admit it, even if you are experienced, the quality of the writing is impressive. Once you have found your style and know how to prompt it, you will save so much time but also leave your readers a more impactful impression than before!

Why It Matters: This level of sophistication positions you as someone who not only understands the data but also knows how to communicate its strategic implications effectively. And as one of my favorite quote says: “The world rewards the people who are best at communicating ideas, not the people with the best ideas.”

(from David Perell )

Link to the tweet

5. Build Presentations

How to Do It: Do you know that ChatGPT can create a PowerPoint presentation?

I have actually created a video that shows you how.

Watch it here (and subscribe to my YouTube channel!)

Why It Matters: With AI, you can accelerate the time you spend creating presentations, which we all know is a long task and often something you do late at night!

Why should you use these 5 strategies?

First, I don’t want to showcase to you anything that requires the implementation of new tools or is dependent on which ERP you have, which data you have, or even how much money you have to spend on tools.

Second, I want to give you strategies that are now applicable to either Microsoft Office or Google Suite.

In other newsletters, I will also present you specific AI tools, but they often require time, money, and a specific use case (for example, automation of some accounts receivable processes).

Finally: let's not wait anymore to use AI to make your work better, try one of these tips and I am sure you will see good results!

So let me know what you think about it and which technique you will use!

Want to unlock even more? Join my Masterclass with Ramp for live demos and advanced tips to make AI your competitive advantage in 2025.

If you like this email, tell me which of the 5 strategies you liked the most!

Nicolas

P.S. If you want to get the same experience as the CFO I mentioned in my introduction, you can join the AI Finance Club and get access to over 50 courses, guides, and masterclasses on how to use AI for Finance.