On her first day at Greenphire, Sue Vestri sat in a conference room “learning all of the acronyms” of the clinical trial industry, she tells us. There were “many, many, many,” she recalls, and she listened to the sales team outside her door to understand how the product was positioned and why it mattered.
That willingness to learn from the ground up defines her career. Earlier, a mentor warned her she would stagnate if she stayed in the safety of a large company. “You’ve got to go to grow,” he told her. She left for a 100-employee cloud software firm, a decision that launched a string of growth-company chapters, transactions, and ultimately multiple CFO seats.
At Greenphire, she joined when the company had roughly 72 employees and “very low double digit revenue,” she tells us. Under private equity ownership, it expanded globally, shifted from clinical sites to big pharma customers, and supported the Pfizer clinical trial during COVID. Sue and her CEO conducted “20 or 30 presentations” during a remote exit process, she tells us.
Today, as CFO of CRIO, she describes finance as embedded in the business—not “sitting behind a desk… producing financial statements.” Her filter for AI is deliberate: avoid the “shiny object” and invest in what is “truly transformational,” she explains. Whether evaluating predictive revenue indicators or AI tools, Sue’s throughline remains the same—grow, but with discipline.
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CFOTL: Tell us about CRIO and what makes the opportunity compelling to you.
Vestri: Clearly, a company providing solutions in the clinical research space was interesting to me. One of the things I learned about clinical research is that there are so many manual processes, and they’re slow—slow to move. The pharma industry, in general, can be a bit monolithic when it comes to bringing in new systems or thinking about new ideas.
Historically, clinical research sites have done everything manually. They’re writing in journals, using spreadsheets, and capturing patient information and trial data in very traditional ways. CRIO was founded by someone who actually owned a clinical research site, so he saw firsthand what people were going through in their day-to-day lives and thought, “there has to be a better way.”
Read MoreWe’re a leading clinical trial platform for eSource data. Think about anything you need to absorb about a patient in a clinical trial—medical records, visit information—those details are heavily scrutinized by the people running the trial to ensure accuracy and compliance. We provide an automated way to capture and manage that information.
We take a lot of the administrative burden off clinical trial employees, who are trying to run the trial and aren’t huge fans of the paperwork that comes with it. At the same time, we deliver a high degree of data quality, which is critical for compliance and regulatory purposes. It’s honestly hard for me to imagine what it’s like in an office without that automation—journals, binders, papers everywhere. We’re really transforming the way a clinical research site works.
CFOTL: We usually will ask you some AI-related questions a little later, but I think I want to jump ahead here. Clinical trial data, as you just described, is massive and complex. Where is AI likely to reshape how companies like CRIO capture, validate, and extract insight?
Vestri: As a framing, our company has really gone all in on AI and thinking about being an AI-centric company. We’ve empowered our entire team with licenses to an AI tool—everyone from our developers, who use it to improve code quality and speed, to other functional teams.
When it comes to data, we’re often intaking paper documents, forms, and protocols that are pages and pages long. We’ve developed a tool that uses AI to identify what we need and get it into the system more quickly. That improves accuracy and eliminates hours—and sometimes days—of manual work.
We’re also using AI to surface answers through chat mechanisms and to provide translations for users in different languages. Before, that required major projects and platform updates. Now, AI helps us increase productivity, improve data integrity—even within accounting—and surface insights downstream through reporting.
CFOTL: As CFO, you arrived in May 2024 with a strong AI mindset already in place. Did you have to change your approach to resource allocation and investment discipline?
Vestri: It’s definitely different. Early on, AI was new—people were experimenting. Now, with AI agents and all that’s possible, I have to stop and think about direction. Listening to the NetSuite presentations, for example, you realize there isn’t one path.
My role is to filter for what’s truly meaningful. Will it increase sales? Drive revenue faster? Improve product quality? We also have to lead adoption from the top and help people embrace change.
Even in finance, simple things—like drafting an accounting policy—can be accelerated with AI prompts. The key is deciding where we’ll get the most bang for our buck.
CRIO | www.clinicalresearch.io | Boston