Prophix CEO Alok Ajmera says he sees “a real sophistication grow with people asking smarter questions, not getting sucked into hype” over artificial intelligence.
“I think we've gone from hype and excitement to actually, proof matters, and I think for a CFO who has either seen a lot of hype or has been personally burned by spending money and then not seeing a benefit, they're now being way more discerning,” Ajmera told CFO Dive in an interview.
AI confidence to AI detractors
Prophix, which offers financial planning, budget and forecasting software solutions, has seen CFOs become more AI-thrifty since the start of the year, Ajmera said. At the beginning of 2026, the company could say, “’Hey, we’ve got this great AI tool,’” and CFOs would say, “’wonderful, let’s buy,’” he said.
“Now we're getting a lot of, ‘Well, no, I want to talk to someone who's using it. I want to demonstrate actual value,’” he said of how finance chiefs are thinking about the technology. The CEO has logged over two decades with the Toronto, Canada-based software firm, serving 12 years as its president and chief operating officer before assuming the CEO seat in November 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Ajmera previously touted the importance of demonstrating value in a May interview with CFO Dive, where he cautioned against building an AI “faster horse”— a technology that simply does the same things, faster, without providing true innovation or new benefits to users.
To provide real value, technology and software businesses need to ensure they are bringing their customers with them on their AI journeys, which involves creating trust — a task that can be trickier for some finance chiefs as opposed to others. CFOs today run the full spectrum between those which are “AI confident” and those that are “AI detractors,” Ajmera said.
“On one end of the spectrum, we have kind of AI-native CFOs — really confident with their usage of AI, and they're leaning into tools like Prophix or Claude directly, things like that,” he said. On the other end, for every AI-native or AI-confident user, “you still have an AI detractor,” Ajmera said. “And what I'm realizing, the more time I spend with AI detractors, is there's a bunch of different reasons why people are AI detractors.”
Security and data privacy concerns loom large in the minds of finance officers on this end of the scale: If “you don't understand this world, if you haven't put the right guardrails in place, you can definitely cause problems with data,” he said. Those in regulated industries where data breaches can expose protected information — such as banking or healthcare — are also expressing concerns over AI’s ability to keep such data secure.
The AI-curious tipping point
The vast majority of finance officers, however, fall somewhere in the middle of that scale, as what Ajmera terms as “AI-curious,” he said. They’re interested in the technology and are still feeling pressure from their boards to adopt it, but they want to be sure it will provide value, he said.
That can be difficult to navigate for CFOs who have seen the number of failed AI projects or initiatives rise, with all of the costs that entails. For instance, when saying to a CFO that AI could potentially save a team 10 hours of work a week, “they can't fire their team for 10 hours a week, so there's no actual, immediate financial return,” Ajmera said.
From the perspective of a company like Prophix, therefore, the biggest “opportunity or challenge” is getting the CFO to “think about the scale that you could get,” he said, rather than immediate cost reductions. “So, what could you do with those incremental hours? And that's been the tipping point.”
Prophix, for example, has seen a 5X productivity boost in its own engineering team with the technology, which means, potentially, it can either write five times more code, or reduce the size of that team by 20%. In actuality, however, what the company is doing is hiring more engineers.
“We're actually doing both,” Ajmera said. “We want to get the 5X lift, and we want more engineers.”
