AI is reshaping Mina Samaan’s budget season in a number of ways this year, including one that runs counter to the technology’s time-saving promises.
The CFO of the California-based lendtech startup BeSmartee, Samaan said he opted to kick off budget planning in May rather than in September or October because he wanted the extra time to gauge the impact of the AI tools everyone is using and get an understanding of their costs.
“AI made us start earlier, the reason being over the last six to nine months everybody has been on an AI frenzy so there’s a lot of tools that are being used,” Samaan said during a recent interview in Oak Brook, Illinois, after a meeting of The CFO Alliance, a networking group for financial executives. “This has caused us to take a step back and look at the tools we’re spending on.”
The technology is also changing the calculations that are part of the company’s budget projections, because AI enables BeSmartee to develop new functions faster and so it changes previously held assumptions, he said. “Historically maybe you could come out with a feature or two, but now with AI you can come out with four or five,” he said.
While Samaan acknowledges AI is bringing exciting changes to finance teams, he views himself as conservative in terms of his approach to adoption and to tapping AI to help with developing the year’s budget.
“Our finance organization is using AI and it has been tremendous, but it’s not something I can put my name on blindly,” Samaan said. “I’m helping my team adapt to it but I always tell my team you have to use it as a junior accountant or a junior finance analyst. You have to triple check it and modify it. It can speed up certain areas, however I can’t say I can trust it 100%.”
Samaan, who has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and accounting from the University of Illinois Chicago, has been CFO of BeSmartee for about five years. Previously, he served as head of accounting and FP&A at LawnStarter and his experience also includes three years as an accounting manager at Groupon, according to his LinkedIn profile.
For the first time this year, his finance team is using Anthropic’s Claude AI plugin to help develop the budget in Excel. Ultimately in coming years, he expects to explore using a full AI budgeting system as long as it offers SOC 2 data privacy safeguards, but he’s moving slowly toward full adoption in the budget process.
With what he terms a “cautious eye,” Samaan currently uses AI for a number of elements of the budget, including the data capturing, validation and trend analysis aspects of the process. One of AI’s strengths is its ability to quickly understand the data you’re feeding it, so a trend analysis of top 10 customers or a margin analysis that would take a human analyst a day or two can now be done with the help of AI in hours, Samaan said.
“Analysts are prompting what they need to see done versus actually doing the formulas and going in there so they become more validators,” Samaan said.
So far the cost of the AI budget assistance has been manageable. Samaan sets up Claude so that he will get an alert once the bill for its use hits $500. Normally, that would pay for a month or two of use, but he anticipates the company might hit its limits sooner during budgeting season.
While he takes a frugal approach to AI that aligns with being a startup, he said the AI cost is currently “not a crazy number.”
