Newly appointed AlphaSense CFO Samantha Greenberg tries to dedicate at least 10 hours each week outside of her job to learning and honing artificial intelligence skills, she told CFO Dive. Greenberg took the top finance seat for the AI-powered market intelligence platform in April, according to a press release at the time.

That includes everything from doing workshops, reading research and building with the technology, and “making sure I am right on top of everything that is happening, how AI can be used for internal productivity, for business strategy, to run a truly AI-native finance organization,” she said in an interview.

A new CFO archetype

The 10-hour a week practice comes as Greenberg considers how finance leaders with decades of experience can continue to grow and hone their skills as new technologies disrupt finance and business models.

The “archetype of a CFO in the age of AI has changed so dramatically from what a [software-as-a-service] CFOs’ skills needed to be just a few years ago,” she said.  

Greenberg is joining New-York based AlphaSense with 25 years of experience in the technology business, having recently served for three years as CFO for identify verification company ID.me, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her tenure there ended last month.

She founded and served as chief investment officer for Margate Capital Management, which became the third-largest female-run hedge fund before it was sold to Citadel in 2019, with Greenberg taking a role as a portfolio manager for technology, telecom and media. In that role she honed her “abiding passion” for the intersection of data science and forecasting, she said. After leaving Citadel, she served as CFO for hospitality tech firm Mint House.

As AlphaSense CFO, Greenberg aims to channel her passion for data while leading the company’s capital markets strategy and financial operations as the company continues to rapidly expand, according to the press release.

Greenberg aims to to ensure the finance team gains new skills, she said.

Finance is “fundamentally a service organization” to teams such as product, engineering and go-to-market strategy, she said. Gaining new capabilities helps ensure “we're staying at the forefront of the skills we need to best serve those functions,” she said. 

Greenberg’s thoughts on the upskilling of her AI competencies aligns with her approach as a finance leader.

“I consider myself extremely hands on, more like a player coach, not just a coach,” she said. “I like to do the thing, not just coach the thing.”

For instance, she’s been in steady communication with the finance team at AlphaSense, making sure that anytime a report or analysis is filed, she’s sitting down with the function and “making sure I understand every line of it,” she said. Getting “deep in the numbers” is critical for mining the insights that generate revenue and profits and add value to an organization, she said.

Maintaining hypergrowth

Gaining a firm handle on AI skills is not only part of how Greenberg pursues her own professional development, but how she thinks about maintaining the pace of growth at the AI-powered market intelligence platform.

Describing herself as a seven-year “power user” of the AlphaSense platform, Greenberg has deployed the platform in her past CFO roles. At ID.Me, she used it to the point where “it had become a product that our teams couldn't do our jobs without,” she said.

The company has seen a spike in demand during the AI boom. In October it announced that it had surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue, according to a press release at the time.  

The company — valued at $4 billion after its latest funding round in June 2024 — also recently announced plans for further international expansion across the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East amid rising demand, according to an April 7 press release.

That expansion comes with its own set of hurdles, however. “The challenge for any business when you grow so rapidly is like every two years — if you're doubling every couple years, or even less than that, every 18 to 24 months, you have a brand-new company,” Greenberg said.

Overcoming that challenge requires hitting the right mix between innovation and sustainability when it comes to areas such as capital allocation. It’s important not to spend all one’s time on simply sustaining one’s offerings or on innovation which just drives incremental profits: “that's great, but you'll be leapfrogged” by competitors, Greenberg said.

“Conversely, if 90% of your R&D dollars and your effort and your time is spent on disruptive innovation, but you're not investing in the important sustaining things, to keep up with things that might be a table stake feature...you have also ceded a valuable market opportunity,” she said.

Similarly, in examining growth, it’s crucial to look at the right metrics, Greenberg said.

For a company like AlphaSense, which has low customer turnover and where users are “expanding with you,” the goal is to continue to invest in areas that will continue to generate value, “but thankfully, there are metrics that give you a lot of information as to whether that growth is efficient, and that's just as critical,” she said.

“Even though growth is more important than profitability, the efficiency of that growth is just as important a lens,” she said.