Using AI to Help Drive the Investment Process | Ben Chrnelich, CFO, Symphony

And it’s impossible for one person to go through and read all that. But if you can take your Amenity Analytics or your something like the work of Chet GPT does and say, here’s the 10 things I’m really interested in. I want to understand sentiment. How did the CFO what were the words of CFO said last time he said these three words that she said these four words? What happened to the company, right? Are they signaling something either directly or indirectly. And the amount of information that can be synthesized through these models is really powerful. But it gives people more information on how you invest, right, it gives you better information on investments you want to make. And for me like these are used the right way. These are all tools that help drive the investment process and reduce manual work that someone had to do at a point.

Finance Strategic Moment

Chrnelich: Yeah, I think there’s the there’s a couple that I could talk about, I think the, for me, the strategic moment was at my at IPC, you were a private equity owned, very, kind of intense operating environment, you’re hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in the company. And you were in the boardroom. And I was kind of given a readout on the quarter the results and kind of your thinking. And you’re one of the partners that the private equity firm said, okay, so what do we do? And for me, it was like, okay, you know, the CFO job, you have to be able to talk about what do you do? And it’s not just, you know, understanding where the revenue came from, or what products are growing, but how do we position the company appropriately? And in this specific instance, you know, we kind of three areas that we can invest in, from a development standpoint, you know, some that have been around electronic trading work have been on the trader voice side, or there are some small acquisitions. And yet, in that moment, like you realize that an entire boardroom, right, there’s 25 people sitting around there spotlights on you. And these are MBAs from top schools and successful investors, and they’re looking for outcomes. And to me, the moment of being able to articulate, here’s what I think we should do, here’s why. Here’s the market that supports it. Here’s my view on the investments that are needed to drive it. And here are the scenario outcomes that we could have. And it was a probably a 25 or 30 minute presentation, I ended up giving you the answer. They ended up giving him when prepared for it. And they kind of looked around the room said, Yeah, that makes sense. Let’s let’s go down that path. And you’ll for me coming out of that meeting that it was one of the first times I felt like okay, like I’m really like driving a business oriented outcome that ties to investment and decisions, as opposed to you’re just you’re just the CFO that’s giving, giving numbers.