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The CFO’s New Playbook: 5 Ways AI Is Redefining Finance with Insights from Rishi Oberoi
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Global Banking and Finance Review
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Finance has never been about quick closes alone. At its core, it rests on discipline, trust, and foresight. However, time and time again, there have been decisive moments that reset entire eras, and in 2025, that moment is marked by Artificial Intelligence, aka AI.
Finance has never been about quick closes alone. At its core, it rests on discipline, trust, and foresight. However, time and time again, there have been decisive moments that reset entire eras, and in 2025, that moment is marked by Artificial Intelligence, aka AI.
AI has been on the scene for some time now, hurling the world into chaos, changing everything about it. Yet, when it comes to AI in finance, most conversations have been limited only to faster closes, prettier dashboards, and chatbots. Useful, but ordinary.
Rishi Oberoi, having spent over two decades as a finance leader navigating financial transformation, regulatory scrutiny, capital markets, banking, and the tension between growth and resilience, has seen it all, from hype cycles to holy grails. What he has learned is that AI isn’t just about efficiency; it has the potential to completely transform the role of a CFO. From being a passive reporter watching from the sidelines, AI can turn a CFO into an active guardian of controls, contracts, compliance, deals, and capital.
Here are Rishi’s suggestions for five frontier AI use cases that show what this shift looks like in practice.
Traditionally, internal controls in the financial sector have been tested quarterly or annually, leaving significant blind spots in between.
Now imagine a 24/7 AI agent embedded in your ERP, workflows, and access logs. It continuously stress-tests controls, flags weaknesses the moment they appear, and generates audit-ready evidence automatically.
Continuous Controls Sentinel AI agent changes the game for CFOs, investors, and regulators as they no longer have to place blind faith in outdated reports and can gain continuous assurance that all their financial processes are compliant.
Result: real-time trust for investors, boards, and regulators.
Contracts are where margin silently leaks away. Their lengthy and complex nature makes them particularly vulnerable to human error. Further, once they are signed, vital details are often buried in documents that rarely get revisited.
A Contract Genome and Cash-Leakage Hunter AI parses every vendor, customer, lease, and debt agreement into a living obligation map. The agent identifies unclaimed rebates, missed CPI escalators, SLA penalties, and covenant risks, and can even draft recovery invoices or disputes in seconds. With this AI, what once took weeks or months of human review can be handled proactively, and leaks can be plugged much before they start draining cash.
Result: A direct impact on margins — cash unlocked, margins protected, and covenant slippage avoided.
History has taught us that the later you respond to compliance and regulatory issues, the higher the cost goes. Yet, compliance in finance has always been exactly that: reactive, scrambling to pick up the pieces after regulators show up.
A Supervisory Digital Twin AI flips the model. Trained on regulator handbooks, SEC comment letters, enforcement actions, and accounting updates, it predicts what issues would be flagged if regulators walked in tomorrow. Then it builds remediation plans, board decks, and exam-ready evidence packs way before trouble arrives.
Result: compliance that anticipates instead of defends.
Mergers and acquisitions are high-stakes exercises in discovery and negotiation. Traditionally, teams spend weeks (or months) combing through filings, litigation, and ESG data. By the time red flags emerge, leverage is often lost.
An Autonomous Deal Diligence Agent can compress this entire timeline. It can ingest filings, litigation histories, ESG exposures, sentiment data, and financials, and create a “Deal DNA” within days. With this automation, hidden liabilities, culture risks, and integration pain points can be found much earlier, giving organizations much sharper leverage in negotiations.
Result: fewer surprises, faster clarity, stronger deals.
In banking and lending, capital allocation is oxygen. Even so, Asset-Liability Committees (ALCOs) that do this job typically meet monthly or quarterly, sometimes only after market signals or portfolio stresses have shifted. In volatile markets, waiting weeks to adjust credit boxes or funding strategies can drain out your banks.
A Real-Time Capital Optimization AI can shorten this cycle by a remarkable stretch. It ingests portfolio performance, macro conditions, funding spreads, and demand signals daily and reallocates capital instantly, within pre-defined limits. It can tighten every credit box when delinquencies flare, redirect funding toward cheaper sources, or even accelerate high-ROI products in real time. The principle remains the same: optimize return on equity while managing risk. What changes is the responsiveness.
Result: higher ROE, optimized risk-weighted assets, and resilient capital.
The next generation of CFOs will not be defined by how fast they close the books, but by how intelligently they anticipate risk, protect trust, and deploy capital in real time. Rishi predicts that despite everyone’s fear, AI won’t replace the prudence that finance was built on, but will sharpen it.
Rishi Oberoi sums it up perfectly: “Fears around AI are natural, and partly valid. But every technology, from airplanes to the internet, began just as raw and disruptive before our patience refined them. Rather than resisting AI, we should embrace it and shape its growth, while also keeping guardrails around. Soon enough, AI will not only mature, but we will also have created a new world with it.”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans, enabling them to perform tasks such as problem-solving and decision-making.
Compliance in finance refers to the adherence to laws, regulations, and guidelines that govern financial practices and operations, ensuring that organizations operate within legal frameworks.
Capital allocation is the process of distributing financial resources among various investment opportunities or projects, aimed at maximizing returns while managing risk.
Risk management involves identifying, assessing, and prioritizing risks followed by coordinated efforts to minimize, monitor, and control the probability or impact of unforeseen events.
Contract management is the process of managing contracts made with customers, vendors, partners, or employees, ensuring compliance and optimizing performance throughout the contract lifecycle.
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