As they begin to integrate AI further into their systems and teams, the perspective around the technology among CFOs is also beginning to shift. Gone are the early days of experimentation and testing: today, the “smart, strategic CFO” is thinking about how they can tap AI to solve key challenges, Tabs CEO and co-founder Ali Hussain said.
For instance, one of the priorities often cited by potential clients of Tabs — an AI-powered platform for billing, collections and other parts of the invoice-to-cash process — is “we are scaling, and the systems we have cannot support that scale,” Hussain told CFO Dive in an interview. The business has hit a certain revenue threshold, and its current systems cannot catch up to handle simple processes such as the order to-cash process. Such CFOs are seeking areas where technologies like AI could best alleviate key pressure points.
“If something around spend management or reconciliations is working fine, I think they’re just fine with it,” Hussain said of CFOs’ thought processes. “They don’t need an AI strategy there. What they’re looking for is, where is most of my pain?”
Stewards of technology
Today’s CFOs are looking for AI-driven solutions which can open up crucial bottlenecks in areas like the order-to-cash process. The greater attention to where AI can best be applied is due to a number of factors, Hussain said: first, CFOs are still navigating a shortage of qualified accounting talent — and the talent they do have is “just not interested” in chasing down payments, he said. Secondly, there’s “a lot of board pressure right now to keep these [finance] teams leaner than ever,” Hussain said.
Hussain co-founded the New York-based platform, which provides AI-powered revenue and reporting tools to finance teams, in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to Tabs, he served seven years as chief operating officer for IT services and consulting firm DOOR — formerly Latch — and held previous roles at Boston Consulting Group and Google.
Yet another factor influencing the strategic application of AI among finance leaders is the fact that many CFOs today “have to demonstrate that they are being good stewards of the new technologies in this world,” Hussain said.
Bringing in AI to make revenue reconciliation or accounting easier and more efficient can be a “big win,” therefore, as finance leaders are both looking to understand how to use such tools and under more pressure from their CEOs or boards to demonstrate to leaders in other areas of the business that they are “walking the walk” when it comes to AI’s use, he said.
In Hussain’s view, it’s also important to note that much of agentic AI’s current usage today comes down to user comfort, and not necessarily its technical capabilities. For instance, Tabs itself sees AI agent usage areas surrounding billing or collections “are more viable for our customers, and they’re more trustworthy using that end to end, than necessarily starting with something more intimate and high risk like audit,” compliance or revenue reconciliation, he said.
The turning point
Hussain does see 2026 as being a crucial year for AI within finance, he said. For companies such as Tabs, last year was a “massive capitalization moment” where businesses were able to raise large “war chests” of capital to build. In September, Tabs closed a $55 million Series B round led by Lightspeed, aimed at building out AI agents for billing and collections, according to a blog post at the time.
As such, “what I think is really exciting this year is, it’s really going to be the year where the technology and also just the infrastructure we’ve all built is at a turning point,” he said.
That inflection point doesn’t mean the end of the finance team or of certain finance roles, Hussain said, but what it does change is the way CFOs “think about how they spend their time and where they need to try to attract labor on the functional level,” he said.
“I do think there are open questions around, at what point is there a turning point with these technologies where you no longer need a lot of those jobs to be done in the more tactical [finance] roles,” Hussain said, and the focus shifts to enabling those roles to add “value and impact on other parts of their team.”