OpenAI has become one of the most closely watched companies in business, but far less is known about the soon-to-be-public company’s finance organization and how it operates behind the scenes.
During a recent webcast hosted by the company, CFO Sarah Friar offered a candid look at how OpenAI’s finance team is organized, sharing details about everything from investor relations and tax compliance to auditing, pricing and economic research. The discussion, which took place with Jagdeep Singh Bachher, chief investment officer at the University of California, provided a glimpse into how the finance team at OpenAI developed.
Friar said OpenAI has spent the past two years integrating artificial intelligence into finance workflows, first through experimentation with ChatGPT and custom GPTs and later by examining how the technology can be applied across core finance processes throughout the 200-person team. The goal, she said, is to ensure finance is continually looking for opportunities to become more productive and generate deeper insights.
The discussion comes several weeks after OpenAI expanded its finance leadership team with the appointments of chief accounting officer Ajmere Dale, who held the same role while working with Friar at Block, and Cynthia Gaylor, the former CFO of DocuSign, as OpenAI’s business finance officer.
“We are really going AI native in the finance world,” Friar said. “We’re constantly looking for ways where we can embrace our own technology to make us more productive, more insightful, do things faster.”
Creating time to experiment
Like many organizations, OpenAI initially encountered resistance from employees who felt they were too busy to spend time learning new tools. To address that challenge, Friar introduced quarterly hackathons that give finance employees dedicated time to experiment with AI applications and identify potential use cases.
Sarah Friar (left) with former Twitter (now X) CFO Ned Segal in 2018.
Drew Angerer via Getty Images
“One of the things I did for my team was to create hackathons,” Friar said. “Every quarter, we would create some space for the team to slow down to go fast because when I would pull people [to ask], ‘Why aren’t you using this new tool?’ they were like, ‘I don’t have any time to learn it, I’m too busy getting my work done.’”
One result was the creation of a custom investor relations GPT trained on company presentations, fundraising materials and diligence documents. The finance team initially built the tool during a fundraising process and gradually expanded its use. “What we did is effectively fed ChatGPT all of our materials. So our company presentation, all of the diligence materials we’d created,” Friar said. “Very quickly, we have at our fingertips a custom GPT that helps us answer any investor questions.”
She then detailed how the tool has since become part of her day-to-day workflow. Friar recalled arriving at an investor meeting in South Korea and being handed two pages of questions written in Korean. Rather than waiting for translations or manually searching through materials, she turned to the GPT on her phone.
“I pulled my phone out, which had my custom GPT on it. I snapped a photograph, and I asked it to just give me the answers,” she said. “We’re inches away from being able to just communicate in a bidirectional way, English to Korean and back, so you can have a very fruitful conversation with an investor.”
Tax and controls
Friar pointed to tax as one of the areas where OpenAI has seen some of the clearest benefits from AI adoption. While tax departments are often viewed as conservative, rear-looking functions, she described OpenAI’s tax team as among the most enthusiastic users of the company’s tools.
“Our tax team is probably our most AI-pilled team, which is funny because tax people are often your most conservative,” she said.
As OpenAI’s global footprint expands, the team is responsible for filing and complying with requirements across numerous jurisdictions. Friar said finance employees once had to locate forms from tax authorities, verify that they were using the most current version and manually populate information. The process there is now largely automated, she explained.
“You would have people whose job would be to go to the IRS website or the equivalent … to go scour through to find the tax form,” she said. “Today, we have now totally automated that. So every tax form in the world is automatically prefilled, which means that my tax team moves into checking mode.”
According to Friar, the shift allows tax professionals to spend more time reviewing calculations and advising the business. As confidence in the process grows, she said, OpenAI hopes to further automate filing activities while keeping finance professionals focused on judgment and oversight.
The same thinking is influencing how Friar views controls and auditing. She noted that auditors have traditionally relied on sampling because reviewing every invoice or transaction would require too much time and labor. AI agents, however, could eventually make it practical to review entire populations rather than subsets.
“You do sampling because there’s not enough people and time to actually go read every single invoice,” Friar said. “In a world of abundance, which is what AI brings us, the agent can actually check all 1,000 invoices.” Rather than weakening controls, she argued, the approach could strengthen them. “I actually think it will make controls and precision and so on much stronger.”
Expanding finance’s reach
Friar said OpenAI’s finance team remains relatively small given the scale of the business, though she noted some functions inside the department may look different from those found at more traditional companies.
“Today our finance team is probably about 200 people-ish,” she said. “We are quite lean.”
At the same time, the company has expanded finance into areas focused on research and insight generation. Friar said her organization includes both an economic research team and a pricing team, groups that often sit elsewhere within large enterprises.
“Today I have an economic research team. I have a pricing team,” she said. “These often will not sit in the CFO’s world because the CFO is overloaded with all the other things.”
The economic research team studies the broader impact of AI and helps inform conversations with investors, customers and policymakers. Friar said the function reflects a broader effort to use finance not only as a reporting and compliance organization but also as a source of analysis and business intelligence.
“It helps us with investors. They help us with customers. They help us with just the curious,” she said.