Posts
If your numbers face a board, an auditor or a regulator every month, this is written for you. AI and automation for finance, in plain language: essays, walkthroughs with receipts, and notes from real Anaplan estates.
The series
AI for finance, explained
Plain-English essays for finance people: what the technology actually does, where it fails, and the controls that make it safe to rely on. No pitch. Read them in any order.
AI FOR FINANCE, EXPLAINED
Citations aren't verification
What is verifiable AI? The difference between a citation and a verification, why AI arithmetic needs a calculator, and the four controls a finance team should demand.
1 Sept 2026 · 5 min readAI FOR FINANCE, EXPLAINED
How to use AI at work without leaking data
Is it safe to put company data in ChatGPT? A working protocol for finance teams: what to paste where, how to anonymise a question properly, and how to get IT to yes.
17 Aug 2026 · 6 min readAI FOR FINANCE, EXPLAINED
"Why not just upload it to ChatGPT?" The honest answer
It's the question every finance leader asks, and it deserves a straight answer, including the cases where a chatbot genuinely is the right tool.
2 Aug 2026 · 3 min readAI FOR FINANCE, EXPLAINED
How an AI agent searches your files (and why Excel fights back)
The four ways an AI agent can search your files (keyword, vector, file system, graph), each mapped to how you already find things, and why spreadsheets break the most popular one.
2 Aug 2026 · 6 min readAI FOR FINANCE, EXPLAINED
What is an API, actually?
The word finance people hear in every vendor call, explained through their own day: how actuals move between NetSuite, Anaplan, SAP and Workday, what a key is, and why IT's questions are your own posting-access discipline.
2 Aug 2026 · 5 min readAI FOR FINANCE, EXPLAINED
Analysis is answering questions, but three-quarters of it is finding things
Variance analysis has four steps. Only one of them is analysis. A look at where an FP&A analyst's time actually goes, and which steps a machine should be doing.
27 Jul 2026 · 3 min readAI FOR FINANCE, EXPLAINED
The 4:45-on-a-Friday question
Every finance team knows the out-of-nowhere question that lands at the worst moment. It isn't an interruption. It's a tax. Here's what it actually costs, and why you'll never get headcount to fix it.
20 Jul 2026 · 2 min read
From the practice
Walkthroughs, with receipts
Real questions run against real (and openly synthetic) reporting packs. The product shows up here, because these are demos.
AI WITH RECEIPTS
The anatomy of a financial knowledge base
Engineering teams have shown how to build company knowledge bases. Finance needs a different animal. Seven organs, what each one is for, and how I built them.
26 Aug 2026 · 14 min readAI WITH RECEIPTS
The questions your finance team has stopped asking
The entire pitch for what I built, asterisk included: why the board pack questions that cost an afternoon stop getting asked, what changed this year, and how I'd test any AI that says it's fixed that, including mine.
19 Aug 2026 · 9 min readAI WITH RECEIPTS
The Board Pack Test: I gave four AIs the same board pack, then graded them with a script
I published an exam for finance AI: 34 realistic documents, 25 questions, a deterministic grader, answer key included. The frontier models got most answers right. Proving them right was a different story.
10 Aug 2026 · 8 min readAI WITH RECEIPTS
A runway question, answered with receipts
What happens to our runway if the Phase 3 runs a year long? How Grounded's advisory mode answers a board-level question in three tiers: facts, assumptions, analysis.
30 Jul 2026 · 2 min readAI WITH RECEIPTS
The $2.1 million that was only in one of your reports
Two of your own documents disagree about R&D spend by $2.1 million. Which one is right, and how long would it take your team to find out? A walkthrough on a synthetic biotech reporting pack.
28 Jul 2026 · 2 min read