Finance has become a real‑time function. The opportunity is far larger than simply closing books faster or refreshing a forecast more often—it’s about seeing the business change, helping leaders act sooner, and giving finance teams more time to shape what happens next.

When I joined OpenAI two years ago, a tiny finance team supported a company growing at extraordinary speed. We needed to build the function from scratch and make AI central to every decision and support. We set two bold ambitions: a zero‑day close and automated, continuously updated forecasting.

The work already changed how we operate, moving beyond static spreadsheets, manual searches, and slide decks toward live tools that use the full context of the business. Finance professionals now build the tools they need—custom GPTs like IR‑GPT for investor relations, dashboards, and code‑based solutions—so they can keep analysis moving as data changes.

Key lessons are to give everyone access and then create a reason to use it, redesign the full workflow around consequential decisions, and let finance professionals become builders. This transforms the team into a partner that sees what’s happening as it happens and helps leaders anticipate the next move.