Jack O’Hara is the founder and CEO of Translucent.
After weeks of building a business forecast with every row balanced and assumption documented, you walk into the board meeting, deck in hand, ready to present the financial road map. That’s when someone asks: “What if we shift strategy?” And suddenly, all those pages of analysis feel a lot like a MapQuest printout when the road is unexpectedly closed.
I use this example because it’s exactly how CFOs at health systems and large organizations describe their reality to me. They’re working off directions printed in advance, handed to departments at month-end, while the business is moving in real time. What they actually need is a strategic navigator in the car with them.
CFOs who are actively reshaping their organizations aren’t waiting for the monthly close to understand the business. They’re guiding it in real time and asking a harder question: How do I build a team that thinks like a strategist, not just an accountant?
The Unicorn Problem And Where AI Comes In
Here’s something I’ve heard from CFO after CFO: “I have a few unicorn analysts on my team—people who know the business better than anyone. Better than the people running the P&L in cardiology. Better than the CRO. They just know how everything fits together.”
These people are the river guides. They read the map and spend time understanding the current, the terrain and the history of the waterway. They can tell you that Tuesday’s numbers look like an opportunity, but in practice they aren’t, because one physician doesn’t take appointments on Tuesdays. And that context lives in someone’s head, not in any dataset.
There are usually two or three of these river guides in a large finance function, and everyone else is downstream doing data assembly work. What AI changes is the potential to encode that tacit knowledge, like the business rules, the contextual understanding and the institutional intelligence, so that it becomes part of the overall financial strategy and planning. The river guides become the architects of a system that replicates their judgment at scale.
What Future Finance Teams Will Actually Look Like
The shift I’m describing is much less about reducing headcount than it is about what finance talent actually gets to do.
When I talk to CFOs who are building or rebuilding their teams right now, there’s a real reckoning happening around hiring. The technical, data-heavy profile that defined the high-performing finance professional for the past two decades isn’t going away, but it’s no longer sufficient on its own.
A CFO at a large Texas health system put it clearly to me recently: She wanted people who could walk into a clinical department and immediately understand how the business worked from the inside out, then translate that understanding into financial strategy. Mission-driven. Deeply curious. Able to hold a conversation with a cardiologist and a board member in the same afternoon.
The finance function of the future will still need people who are strong with data and operational detail. But the highest-value layer will be people who combine financial fluency with the kind of strategic, communicative intelligence that helps the whole organization make better decisions. The CFOs who build that kind of team, and give them the tools to operate at that level, will have a fundamentally different relationship with how the business gets run.
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