Source: Fortune

Summary

At Fortune’s Modern CFO dinner, Melissa Valentine, a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, urged CFOs to take command of AI value creation, citing a recent Harvard Business Review article that showed CFOs are uniquely positioned to define, evaluate, fund, and measure AI initiatives. Valentine argued that generative AI is moving out of its experimental phase and into systematic measurement, and that CFOs have a strategic opening to lead on AI if they are willing to quantify the value and be accountable for it.

Our Reading

The announcement sounds familiar.

CFOs are being told to take charge of AI value creation, but the question remains, what does that mean in practice? Melissa Valentine’s message is clear: CFOs need to quantify the value of AI and be accountable for it. But what about the risks? Valentine points to the example of Anthropic’s source code leak, highlighting the need for “harness engineering” to make AI models usable and safe. The requirements for safe, production-grade AI are fundamentally different from those for everyday employee experimentation.

The CFOs are being asked to impose discipline on AI, but will they be able to capture its value?

Author: Evan Null