Future of Finance: Where AI is Just a Way of Life

Partway through Weel’s ANZ CFO Summit that I hosted recently, our CEO, Daniel Kniaz, shared a story that resonated with me.

He told the audience that he’d recently built a small personal app using AI. He has a young family. Choosing what to cook and writing a shopping list organised by the layout of his local grocery store – it was twenty minutes of his Sunday he wanted back.

So he built an app to do it for him. I have a young family too. And I know exactly which twenty minutes on Sunday he means.

What struck me wasn’t the app. It was what it represented. It’s also a story I hear increasingly often: people without technical backgrounds creating apps with AI to make their work and personal lives easier.

If this change is already happening at the frontiers, what does it mean for the finance function of the future?

The cost of intelligence is collapsing

Esteemed financial journalist and presenter, Alan Kohler, set the tone for the day in his session: a 25,000-word strategic analysis – the kind that takes a team three months and $50,000 in salary – now costs approximately 50 cents in AI tokens.

The price of intelligence, Alan argued, is falling toward zero.

Knowledge workers – people whose primary output is judgment, analysis, and synthesis – are the incumbent industry being disrupted. He framed it plainly: “We are the incumbent businesses. Humans Proprietary Limited.”

It can be a confronting thought for finance leaders in a function that is built on the assumption that intelligence is scarce and expensive. That shift represents either an opportunity or a threat depending on how quickly teams can adapt.

From doing to designing

Daniel’s session argued that the transformation already taking place in software engineering is now arriving in finance.

Two years ago, building a new system integration at Weel took a team of engineers the best part of a quarter.

Earlier this year, a single engineer built a comparable integration in 48 hours, with much of the work happening while he was asleep. He set the architecture, defined the guardrails, and went to bed. The AI did the work. He woke up, reviewed it, and started testing.

The engineer’s judgment became more valuable. The typing of code largely disappeared.

Our data tells us that finance teams, on average, are spending over half their time on admin: reconciling transactions, chasing approvals, and copying data between systems. Much of that work can be undertaken by AI agents. This frees up more time to focus on higher-value activities: interpretation, strategy, and governance.

The new era will see finance teams doing fundamentally different, more valuable work.

The ROI case most of us are missing

Professor Prabhu Sivabalan, in the final session of the day, presented research developed with colleagues at LSE and the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. His message was one many CFOs in the audience needed to hear: the business cases we are building for AI investment are probably incomplete.

The easiest lever to justify AI spend is headcount reduction. It’s quantifiable, easy to explain, and fits neatly into a board paper.

But organisations that rely too heavily on that argument often cut more than they should. They then find themselves without the capacity to take advantage of what comes next – augmentation, new capabilities, and strategic work that previously went undone.

“When your easiest lever to pull is employee savings,” Prabhu said, “you might over-pull that to make a case. And then suffer the consequences later.”

The ROI of AI is not only what it eliminates. It is also what it enables. That includes forecasting at a level of fidelity we’ve never had before, risk modelling at a scale that was previously too expensive, and strategic analysis that once required costly external advisors.

The question needs to be reframed. Not what does this cost save, but what capability does this unlock?

Finance’s moment

I left this year’s Summit with the conviction that there is enormous change coming and significant opportunity for those at the forefront.

Finance leaders are uniquely positioned to help lead this transition within their organisations. They have a skill set spanning storytelling, stakeholder management, governance, and data that is required to reposition organisations for the AI era.

Daniel’s closing point stayed with me. “The individuals experimenting today will be the ones leading the finance teams of the future.”

He built a shopping list app on a Sunday. It gave him back twenty minutes. But what it demonstrated is that the technology is already here. The question is how quickly we will adopt it.

The sessions are on demand

All presentations from Weel’s 2026 ANZ CFO Summit are now available to watch on demand for free by clicking here > CFO Summit –

They will be relevant across many stages of organisational readiness: Alan’s keynote provides the macro framing; Daniel’s session explores the operational implications; and Prabhu’s presentation examines how to build the investment case.

If it sparks a question you would like to see us explore in future events, I would encourage you to reach out directly. That conversation is exactly the one this Summit was designed to start.

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Damon Hauenstein is CFO & COO at Weel, Australia and New Zealand’s leading spend management platform. Damon hosts Weel’s annual ANZ CFO Summit and publishes research on AI adoption in finance.

Follow or connect with Damon on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/damonhauenstein