Across industries and growth stages, accounting and finance teams are under pressure to move faster and scale smarter. On every project, Siegfried professionals help eliminate the manual, time-consuming tasks that often limit strategic capacity, creating the opportunity for our clients to reflect and focus on what matters most. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool in making this possible.
When Caroline, a Senior Associate in New York, attended Siegfried’s May 2025 MY Journey® event and heard Geoff Woods speak, it flipped a switch for her. “I realized I wanted to lean into using AI strategically and responsibly on my projects, and that energized me to ask deeper questions at my Siegfried clients,” she shared.
Serving on a small but rapidly growing team reporting to her client’s Assistant Controller, Caroline leveraged Geoff Woods’ specific AI prompting method to spark automation ideas – leveraging AI as a thought partner without using any client or confidential information. Generative AI not only helped her get up to speed in a new area, but it also inspired her to leverage the client’s existing tools and technologies for process improvements and greater strategic insights. This elevated her ability to support the company as it scales.
“When clients bring on new team members, there’s an appetite for fresh ideas and a desire to do things differently,” Caroline explained. “With that in mind, I’m always asking, ‘How can we do things better, faster, and more accurately, while also scaling the business?’”
Caroline uncovered AI integrations in FloQast, Ramp, and NetSuite – the client’s month-end close and AP management systems. Notably, she deployed a native FloQast tool that automatically calculated amortization and depreciation and prepared workpapers. This turned what was historically a two-hour, Excel-based process into a 15-minute task.
“The time savings allowed us to continue making other, more complex processes better. For example, it gave us the opportunity to build out internal reporting for the CEO and CFO, which provided insights for strategic decision making.”
Caroline became an AI thought leader and advocate for AI use cases at the client. She regularly met with project development teams and the CFO to discuss the value-adding possibilities and impact of different technologies.
“AI has the power to allow accounting and finance professionals to do more interesting and challenging work by automating manual tasks and freeing up time for analytics and special projects,” Caroline reflected. “AI serves as a valuable thought partner, putting experts in all areas at your fingertips and enhancing your ability to achieve meaningful outcomes.”
In summary, Caroline elevated with AI by:
- Sparking automation ideas alongside Generative AI.
- Implementing AI integrations in FloQast, Ramp, and NetSuite to improve month-end close processes.
- Building out executive-level internal reporting to support strategic decision making.
- Researching technical accounting topics at a high level.
- Becoming an AI thought leader across client teams.
