Revenue growth is a key priority for Adriana Carpenter as she steps into the top financial seat for AI-enabled sales performance platform Xactly — but in order to achieve that goal, “we want to make sure that we’re optimizing and able to scale efficiently,” she told CFO Dive.

It remains early days for Carpenter in the seat: Xactly announced her appointment to the CFO role at the company, which offers AI-enabled sales performance orchestration products, on July 14. In her first few days in the role, her focus is on “really being a strategic partner to the business as we think about improving and increasing our revenue performance,” Carpenter said.

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Before joining the Los Gatos, California-based company,  Carpenter served as CFO for spend management platform Emburse for four years, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her past experience also includes an eight-year tenure at Ping Identity, including serving as its SVP and chief accounting officer.

Carpenter has “always been really driven by the intersection of financial strategy and operational scale,” she said of what drew her to the top financial role at Xactly. The business also stood out to the finance chief as being an “AI innovator” in its industry, she said, with the company working to integrate the technology into its products and transform how its own customers manage their revenue cycles, she said.

The CFO appointment comes after Xactly announced several new products and partnerships this year as part of its push to remain an AI innovator. In May, the business launched a fleet of AI agents attached to its existing revenue intelligence platform, which aim to help clients with manual revenue work and to help bridge the gap between disconnected systems, according to a press release at the time.

In April, as part of its collaboration with ServiceNow, Xactly launched an AI agent focused on dispute management. Customers can use the agent for such tasks as automating compensation inquiries and better managing dispute submissions, investigations and resolutions, according to the release.

While it’s early days still for Carpenter in Xactly’s CFO chair, “as I think about where I want to focus first, my priority is going to really be to align where we're allocating our financial capital and resources towards that mission,” she said, in order to ensure the comapny is investing in areas that can drive those tangible outcomes. 

Carpenter will also be bringing some of the lessons learned during her first stint in the CFO seat at Emburse to bear in the role at Xactly: For example, “I think probably one of the biggest lessons learned is people tend to learn better with visual cues,” she said.

Whether it’s communicating with board members, investors or lenders, it’s important to be able to show the story you’re telling, she said.

“If you compare whatever the the point is with a visual, maybe it's operational data tied to the financial metric, and you're showing the story, the trend, or the outlier, it is retained so much more, and your points are made,” she said.

A career growth opportunity

As she settles in at Xactly, another area Carpenter is keeping an eye on is how AI can be implemented not just externally for the company’s products, but inside its internal processes and across its own workforce. At Xactly, Carpenter is looking to do so in “a very disciplined way, also a very exploratory way,” she said.

“How do we think about adopting and investing in AI to really drive our operational excellence internally?” she said.

One of the challenges Carpenter is keeping an eye on is ensuring the company can continue to develop the data architecture necessary to support AI, as the technology is “foundationally reliant on data,” she said. Xactly is also being “very intentional” regarding the privacy and security challenges that come alongside implementing AI, she said.

Carpenter also spends a lot time thinking about how the company’s staff can work with the technology.

“Some individuals are very excited and ready to jump in with both feet, and they're out there trying things out,” she said. “But then [for] others, it can be an intimidating thing to start to use it, and it's daunting.”

Experimenting with and engaging with AI tools and solutions as they develop is “a great career growth opportunity,” and so “we need to make sure that we are able to upskill our teams effectively,” she said.  

Ensuring team members can tap AI effectively is crucial as the technology becomes more entrenched in every day tasks and processes — Carpenter, for instance, uses AI to help summarize inbound information.

“Also, I hate making presentations, so I use it a lot to help me build all kinds of decks and things like that, and it's amazing,” she said.

In her own day-to-day as a CFO, Carpenter has also seen AI’s use change the expectations for communication between the finance team and other members of leadership. For example, one changing perspective is that “delivery of financial views…shouldn't take you days and days and days,” but should instead be moving closer to real-time, she said.

AI can help enable that quicker, more timely delivery because it means financial professionals are no longer mired in detail — instead, they can automate the gathering of key information and spend more critical time looking at the business holistically.

“It is bringing that finance function along to be more embedded in the business, be better business partners, and truly be driving those business outcomes, not just reporting financial metrics,” she said. “That is not enough. You've got to be able to really help understand the connection between the metric and the operations, and how to drive the operational outcome.”