--- url: 'https://chatfin.ai/blog/document-processing-ai-saves-60-80-time-real-finance-wins-from-jason-yocum-cfo-podcast/' title: 'Document Processing AI Saves 60-80% Time: Real Finance Wins from Jason Yocum CFO Podcast' author: name: Tara Parker url: 'https://chatfin.ai/author/chatfin_admin/' date: '2026-01-26T11:03:50+00:00' modified: '2026-09-28T16:17:04+00:00' type: page summary: 'Jason Yocum on Rolling Forecasts, Cross-Functional Finance & Why Modern CFOs Focus on Cash Over Budgets' published: true --- # Document Processing AI Saves 60-80% Time: Real Finance Wins from Jason Yocum CFO Podcast ![Agent CFO Podcast - Ashok & Jason](/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Jason-Yacum-CFO-Podcast-thumbnail-yt.png) # Document Processing AI Saves 60-80% Time Real Finance Wins from JasonYocum By [Ashok Manthena](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashokman/) Jason Yocum on Rolling Forecasts, Cross-Functional Finance & Why Modern CFOs Focus on Cash Over Budgets January 26, 2026[Watch on YouTube](https://youtu.be/ri6DG6zu5AQ)[Listen on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3QwTvUrZjiCNH79fbuFmJr?si=9wP96g-wRZmz46tbRQtwlA) ## Episode Summary In this episode of the Agent CFO podcast, host Ashok Manthena sits down withJason Yocum, a seasoned finance executive with 20 years of experience spanningBig Four auditing, retail finance at Gap Inc., wine industry operations, andnow fractional CFO work at SaaS companies like Foxit Software. The conversation dives deep into what it really means to be a VP of Finance today—beyondjust accounting and FP&A. Jason shares candid insights on retail finance operations,the controversial death of budgeting, why AI hasn't transformed finance yet (but will),and perhaps most importantly, why understanding people matters more than perfectingspreadsheets. This is a masterclass in finance leadership from someone who's lived itacross multiple industries. Incremental TransformationAI adoption in finance will happen step by step, quietly changing how workgets done rather than through a sudden overhaul.Beyond the Back OfficeThe CFO role is deeply cross-functional, focused on strategy, alignment, andbusiness impact — not just reporting numbers.Budgeting Red FlagsWhen budgeting is treated as a finance-only exercise, it signals deeperalignment issues across leadership and teams.Data as a Leadership SkillFuture CFOs must understand how data flows across the organization and how itis used to inform real decisions, not just reports.Reimagining Finance WorkAI’s real value lies in freeing finance teams from reconciliations andpoint-in-time processes so they can focus on insight and collaboration. ## Follow on Linkedin [Ashok's LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashokman/)[Jason's LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jyocum/)[ChatFin LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/94238033/) ## Full Conversation Ashok Manthena: By the way, this podcast is called Agent CFO. And I think the idea is I want people to getconfused whetherit's Agent 007 or the AI agent. So we're going to talk about all the things under finance,accounting, andeverything falls under a CFO, right? These days even operations, some of the operations arenow under CFOincluding AP, tax, treasury, accounting, FP&A. Welcome Jason, welcome to Agent CFO podcast. It's great to be here. We had a lot of chatswith coffee today.We don't have coffee, but we can still chat about finance. Jason has 20 years of experience in finance. He worked in retail. He worked in wine industry.Now he'sworking at various other companies. And I'm very glad to have him here today. Welcome Jason. Jason Yocum: Great, happy to be here, thank you so much. Ashok Manthena: So what are you doing these days? Jason Yocum: Yeah, so I'm doing a lot of fractional CFO work. My primary is working for a company calledFoxit Software.They're a SaaS company, kind of competing with Adobe. But yeah, my previous company was withVovino, whichis the largest wine app in the world, connecting buyers and sellers. And before that, I waswith Gap Inc.for about 10 years. And really coming out of the public accounting space, right? Deloitteand Touche, GrandThornton, when I started my career. Ashok Manthena: I mean, I know you from GAP. We both worked at GAP for a really long time. Jason, how doesretail financediffers from other industries? Is it totally different or are there similarities? Jason Yocum: I mean, there's similarities across all industries when it comes to finance. When you'relooking at your P&L,your balance sheet, and your cash flow statement. But I would say that when you're talkingabout retail,you're talking about physical inventory and movement of that physical inventory andcapitalizing certaincosts and so on and so forth. At the end of the day, you're creating a financial statementthat is accurateand under US general accepted accounting principles. So they're both similar, but eachindustry has itsspecific accounting guidance that goes with it. Ashok Manthena: That's right. I think that the understanding of industry is very important. If you're talkingabout aclothing company, it's not about design or the brand or the manufacturing part of it. It isabout supplychain. How do you manufacture, and you're not even doing it, you're outsourcing it to a differentcompany, how doyou design somewhere, send it to this outsourced firm, they actually make it, then how doyou ship them veryefficiently to the country where you're going to sell and then distribute to each store? Andyou have thesedifferent stores, different brands, how do you distribute all this stuff based on designcosts, where theyare located. And I think that's where the competitive advantage is for a retail company,even though fromoutside we only see a brand, right? Did you get that understanding very easily while youwere at Gap? Jason Yocum: Yeah, no, it's really fascinating when you're talking about finance too. It's kind ofmin-maxing every littlepart of the supply chain in order to minimize costs but increase efficiency, right? So youhave to do a lotof thought process with the business to understand where can we create efficiencies, notonly in cost, butsometimes it's actually more important to increase the cost in order to speed up some partof the supplychain because later on that creates more revenue in for the company at Gap. Ashok Manthena: Right. You worked as a VP of Finance. What do they usually get wrong when people hear aboutthis job? Jason Yocum: Yeah, so I think there's a lot of different types of VPs of finance. Are you focused on justthe accountingside or are you focused more on the FP&A side? Sometimes VPs of finance can be acting CFOs.They'rereporting right into the CEO and doing presentations to the board of directors. Sometimesthey're not. And I think you said it best earlier when you were talking about how finance has really kindof taken on moreand more these days, not just accounting, FP&A, treasury, right? But it's also businessintelligence, humanresources, right? And what I'd like to think is that we've kind of taken over the backoffice, so to speak,right? And I think that's where when someone says they're a VP of Finance, you really wantto dig in, maybescratch the surface a little bit more to find out. Ashok Manthena: Yeah, you can, I mean, it's so general that you can be a controller, you can be an FP&A, oryou're eventaking care of tax or treasury part of it, right? But it became a very general leadershiprole as a VP ofFinance. And, or even you could be taking care of all the financial systems as well. Jason Yocum: Yeah, that's a huge part of it, right? Making sure your ERP system is in place, but alsoimplementingtechnology, you know, speeding up these days with AI that is allowing us to be moreefficient, but you dokind of need to keep your ear to the ground to see what new tools are out there and applythose new tools. There is, that's the other thing too, right? You talk about VP of Finance, you're also doingsystem work.Like operational flows and backend office and you get involved with the order managementteam and the cashapplications team and like all these in the sales team. It's like we're connected throughoutthe entireorganization and you're just trying to make that as efficient as possible, right? Ashok Manthena: And in terms of influence, how influential is your VP of Finance role? Jason Yocum: I think they need to be hyper influential, right? They need to be able to communicate witheverybody in theorganization, right? From top to bottom. They need to be able to present to the all handsand get people whomaybe are not financially savvy to understand the importance of their role and how they playinto the PNL,right? How they play into the financial performance of the company. So I actually think a VPof finance isthe glue that kind of holds the company together in a lot of ways. We should know every kind of challenge that the business has happened, that's happening tothe business andbe able to connect those dots. So a good VP of Finance is communicating with all thosedepartmental leaders,but also bringing that up to the board and even other senior leadership like the CEO or theC-level. And I think a good VP of Finance has that empathy towards the business to help them succeedand not to justfocus on compliance rules or not just to focus on the nitpicky details about finance. Youknow people, theysay no to everything, right? They're always trying to cut costs, they're always trying tocontrol stuff,right? And it's like, no, we need to be supportive of our business partners so that they cangenerate moremoney and focus on the business. And if you can flip that narrative, you're gonna find thatyou're gonna bea much more effective VP. Ashok Manthena: That's right. I think this is a role where, correct me if I'm wrong, you're influential. It'salso aleadership role, but at the same time, it has to be hands on. You can't be far away from theprocess beingat that leadership level, because now, since as you said, you're a glue. That means you areexpected toperform a few things by yourself. You have to back up your numbers. You have to have your own reasoning. But at the same time,also be able tobe strategic and analytical about the data that you see. Jason Yocum: You're absolutely right. Ashok Manthena: But if you weren't in finance, what do you think you would be doing? Jason Yocum: I have a psychology or something. I find people absolutely fascinating, right? And I thinkthat that's thefunnest part of the finance for me is getting away from the numbers and getting closer tothe people thatoperate the business, right? Ashok Manthena: Right. And now with AI, and we all thought 2025 would be a transformational year for finance.It didn't turnout to be. I mean, to be honest, right, we have seen tools, we have seen functionalities, wehave seenagents doing operations. But I think in 2024, we expected a big bang, even though even Iwalk in AI day inand day out. I expected a big bang kind of impact on our processes. And particularly in finance, I don'tthink thathappened. I think we are just naive to think everything will change in a day or two. But nowcoming into2026, I think we'll see this incremental change happening. The pace might pick up, but Ithink it will stillbe a slow, more cautious and careful approach that we'll all take an approach towards AI.What do you think? Jason Yocum: I think you're right. I think you're right. I think there's a lot of exciting things that AIcan do for usand we're excited to see it do for us. I don't know if we've really seen it in a package yetthat has been,I mean, for lack of a better word, sexy for the finance folks, right? It's like we know whatit can do, butwe just haven't seen anybody implement it in the right way. And what's funny is that whenyou look atindustry leaders like Oracle who owns NetSuite, You look at their NetSuite tool and it's rather lacking in a lot of these areas that youwould expect wouldalmost be implemented by now, right? When it comes to AI and supporting, you know, automaticreconciliations, P2P processes, I think it's ironic that these big ERPs, there's a lot oftools that we buyexternally from Oracle to kind of sit on top of NetSuite to do the things that NetSuitecan't do. And maybeAI will just be one more layer that sits on top of our ERP system. I'm really excited for the day where we can, I can almost chat with my ERP system. I can chatwith my PNL. Ican chat with my balance sheet and understand what is causing this flux? What is causingthis change yearover year or month over month? Where are my problems at, right? Understanding my cashflow,understanding myrevenue and my customers, right? To be able to communicate with it and communicate with thedata using, youknow, language, you know, English language and like an LLM. I think that that's going to bea game changer. Ashok Manthena: Have you seen Chatfin yet? I'm just kidding. Right. You know, we have been building Chatfinfor a while.There is always this AGI goal of having this 100% automated systems that talks to you, butalso that canmanage everything internally without our human intervention. As we work on this, actually realized it's pretty difficult to build it, not because of themodels. Modelsare already really smart, but because of the context it needs to make that decision. Whenyou are a VP offinance, you have 20 years of experience that you brought in. Worked in a lot of companies,you work hard,you failed, all that expertise that you bring it in, giving that expertise to AI almostfeels impossible atthis point of time. And I'm talking about in December, 2025, right? Things could, canchange. So managing that context in a way that can be easily changed. For example, we're talkingabout a retailindustry, totally different context to a manufacturing different context. And then alsotaking layers thatare similar and managing that. That has been a very difficult task and that's probably theanswer why if youexpect a large companies already in the market to have solved it because still no one knowshow to managethis context at that big scale. When we build Chatfin, this is what we realized, you can't really approach this problem asone big bangrather than you can actually take up multiple pain points and take each pain point and solvethem and thenyou can unify them as you move forward. That seems to be a much more manageable approach,taking AI andfinance. And have you seen any other tools in the market right now that you think are veryinteresting? Jason Yocum: Yeah, there's so many tools right now that it's almost overwhelming. So for instance, you'relooking at likea procure to pay process, right? And you're trying to streamline that. There's tools likechatfin that areusing AI to automate end-to-end procurement, right? So new vendor approval process, purchaseorders,approvals, invoices coming in, AI scanning the invoice, booking it into your ERP system,then ultimatelyeven helping you pay that vendor all with a very streamlined processes with the AI kind ofin the backgroundand they say that the AI is learning, right? So every new invoice it gets in and how youcode it, itcontinues to learn so that you can touch it less and less as time goes on, right? So that'sjust one exampleof one tool, but even drafting accounting memos, Utilizing the internet, what's already out there, I mean, I was playing around with Geminieven and you know,ChatGPT and others where they can look at the codification, the US GAAP codification to helpyou draft anaccounting memo. Say like, hey, I got this issue, how do I account for it? What guidance isgonna help meget there, right? And you you still have to, it helps you, you still have to read theguidance and make sureit's right, but it guides you there much faster than a simple Google search ever would,right? Ashok Manthena: That's right. And you remember, you and me, we had this conversation probably a year agothinking about whereAI can be applied and FP&A process. If you take budgeting, long-term planning, how do we doit? For today,let's take an example of budgeting, Such a manual process. You take small company tomid-size company tolarge company, still very manual process. I think the only automation probably we have done is having a planning tool and thensubmitting all the dataat a line item level to that and then consolidating it. That's the only automation I thinkwe have done inbudgeting. What do you think? I mean, even if we leave AI, can you envision how an automatedbudgetingprocess should look like? Jason Yocum: The tricky thing is that people are involved. People are involved. Why are people involved?Because they haveideas of what the future is going to be. They have to create the initiatives. So you've gotan R&D teamwho's maybe developing a new product, they got a new initiative. They're gonna roll that outin a certainperiod of time. And then you've got the sales team that have to go out and sell it. And soyou've got kindof this roadmap roughly and you've got all these people involved. You can collect data from them. You can say, fill out this, you know, Excel file, right? Fillout thesenumbers. When do you think this is gonna go live? How much revenue do you think that's gonnabring in? Thechallenge is that they're not finance people. So there needs to be some kind of financelens, right? Thatgoes through. It's like, well, what's amortized revenue? It's capturing that human element and capturing that human data, running it through kind of afinancial lensand then putting that into a budget and a monthly budget that other people will believe. Theboard ofdirectors looks at it and goes like, okay, that seems achievable. The CEO says that'sachievable, right?Based on what we want to accomplish. And AI I think can get there. But it's taking, it'sthose meetings,it's those budget meetings. The reason it takes so long is you're having these budgetmeetings and planningmeetings and the finance people are trying to take what everything is said and again, put itinto financialterms. So that's gonna be very tricky. Now where budgeting and AI can meet, I think is baseline run rates, right? Show me thehistorical data. Whatdo you think is gonna project out the future based on 10 years of data or five years of dataand give mesome kind of baseline, right, that I can work off of. And I think that can speed up theprocess quite a bitbecause finance doesn't have to do as much work to kind of build those out. But that layer,that human layeron top is really tricky to kind of support with AI. Ashok Manthena: That's right. I think it's the modeling part as well. If we take a line item level, the kindof model or thekind of equation you use to generate numbers for that line item. I'm talking about budgetingor forecasting.That's going to vary from line item to line item. That's going to vary from industry toindustry. That'sgoing to vary from department to department. Because at a company whole, we don't think about how many Excel files we have, right? At somepoint, we don'teven care how people come up with modeling. We just say, what is your output? Just upload itinto thisconsolidated system. But if the system can understand all the modeling, right? All the Excelsheets you havein the company, I think that would become very valuable because now it can generalize and itcan alsoremember all the modeling that needs to be done that goes into a line item. And it can alsobring in datafrom various other industries, how that is done for the specific line item. And again, now this goes back to the question of how do you manage all this context to getthere. If AI cando modeling really well, modeling is not just as come up with an equation with. Itremembers, it cangeneralize it. You actually don't need a planning tool. You can just manage everything inExcel because nowyou are not doing it. You are not checking every formula. You're just talking about highlevel assumptions,but the rest of the modeling can be done in Excel by AI. Jason Yocum: Yeah, that would be, I think that would be very helpful. Ashok Manthena: So tell me in terms of your career, you came from big four audits and then you came intothese big companiesand you worked there, you went into leadership position. What do you think what's one habityou had early inyour career that you wish you unlearned very early? Jason Yocum: Yeah, you know, if I had to pick one, I think it would be over indexing on perfection overspeed. Right? So,you know, in accounting, and that's kind of where I'm bread and butter auditing andaccounting, the detail,you need to be exact, right? Like the number of units come in, number of dollars, all exact,right? But theproblem is as you get into finance and leadership and FP&A and stuff, the focus on exactmodels andhistorical trends and inputs is you gotta be careful. You can go way too deep, way tooquickly and createthis massive model that is so complex that is based on definitely some good inputs and somerealities andget that in the hands of leaders and business partners faster to review that so that you canthen tweak it,right? So you get a lot of junior people, and even myself included, who are kind of like, okay,well, this is gonnabe the thing. We're gonna hit this by the end of December, right? And the probability ofthat occurring, thefurther out you go, the worse chance you are to hit that thing. So spending too much timetrying toperfectionalize your model is not a really good use of your time, necessarily, right? Ashok Manthena: But isn't accuracy expected from you? It's like a, it's an expected quality. Jason Yocum: Right, so we need to know that that stigma exists and tell people that we're not oracles,right? We're onlyas good as the inputs we're given and that's why ranges come into play a lot. And actuallythe best thingthat I've ever learned in my career is not only to build the model, and instead of telling,asking forleadership's input on that model, so you build the model so that you can tweak it, right? Asyou'representing it to leadership and say, well, what do you think? If we change this number, thispercentagepoint by like 10 basis points, it does this. And they go, okay, well, yeah, we'll crank thatup to 20 basispoints. What happens then? And you get them involved in that forecasting, right? And nowwhatever does occuris not just on the FP&A team, now it's on the leadership team and the FP&A team. So you makeit a usforecast and not just a FP&A forecast. Ashok Manthena: Yeah, that's also spreading out our risk to more people. Jason Yocum: Yeah, right. But also getting more input. You know, again, we are seen as somehow magicaloracles, right? Andlike, I have seen and worked at companies where it's, FP&A is, you know, performance isdependent upon thevariance from which actuals occur. Now, FPNA, it's very important to help plan, predict,strategize, but Ican guarantee you in 12 months, something in that model that you didn't predict is gonnahappen, right?Something is gonna happen—a merger, new competitive person, a contract falls through, a newsurprise goodcontract comes in. Life happens, right? And that's why I actually prefer monthly forecastingcycles thanbig, expansive budget models and things like that. I just don't think that those are asuseful. Ashok Manthena: Just correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like as the company grows big and the corp FP&A,particularly corpFP&As, they are far from operational finance. Because if you think about it really big,let's say we'retalking about manufacturing company, right? If you're in a corp FP&A, how much do you thinka corp FP&Aperson is aware of what happens in a factory and what is really impacting the operationalpart of it. Jason Yocum: So the way GAP actually did this was we had FP&A people down throughout the chain. So you hadlike littleregional FP&A people who would be closer to the business who would then feed that up to thenext level ofFP&A people who would then feed that up to the next level. And what's interesting is that asyou move up,the materiality of your forecast changes quite a bit, right? So, you know, if you're down atthe regionallevel, you're like, man, $1,000 is kind of a big deal to us. But you go to the corporatelevel and it'slike, maybe it's 5 million is the threshold before they even start to care, right? And so Ithink they did areally good job. And I think Gap Inc is probably one of the best when it comes toforecasting and planningand budgeting at that corporate level. They really, really had a good system. And thatfeeding ofinformation upwards, I think, allowed leadership to trust those numbers with more certaintythan I thinkother companies who are just like, we've got one FP&A team, and that's it. Ashok Manthena: That makes sense. When we're talking about the processes, you have seen it in really largecompanies to midcompanies, right? What do you think that we are doing right now, which is an outdatedprocess, which will goaway in, let's say, next two, three years? What is one finance process? Jason Yocum: Wow, there's probably a lot. There's one I hope goes away, which is just the whole procure topay cycle, man.It is, you know, I'm surprised by the amount of companies that I talk to or work with orother CFOs wherethey still have like an AP team. They still have a team where they're literally gettinginvoices emailed tothem. And then they're going to the internal business partner, hey, is this the rightamount? Can you stampthis PDF with your approval? Right? And then they manually put it into the ERP system, andthen there'sanother approval, and then there's a payment later on, and it's just like this wildly clunkyprocess, and inthis day and age, it just shouldn't exist. You should have an accounting team that maybe spends a couple of hours a week on pushing outpayments versustwo or three AP, dedicated accounts payable accountants, which is wild. We don't need thatanymore. That'santiquated, that's gone. But I'm surprised by how it still exists. And maybe that's for yourpoint, when youtalk about AI in the future, it's like, wow, if we're not even adopting enhanced procure topay tools, as ina finance kind of group, it's like, man, AI, adopting AI feels far away for some. The firstprocess that Ithink will disappear is just the whole accounts payable process. There is such a better wayto run all ofthis. Ashok Manthena: That's right. One of the interesting things is you know ChatFin can query, can reconcile, canprocessdocuments and it can forecast. But one of the very surprising feature that our users reallylove is documentprocessing. I never imagined it. I always worked in large companies so I was never veryclose to thatdocument processing part of it. But what users really love is, I have these contracts thatare all indifferent structures. I've seen contracts where there is an Excel table that is copy pastedin there withmerge cells. So it's just a nightmare to even standardize contracts. How do you even getextract things fromthere, right? We said, yeah, Chatfin can do it. Chatfin has much better way rather than justwe'll see howit'll do multiple things and we'll do it. And people love it. They're like, it can read thecontract? Yeah,we say yes. Can it read a remittance advice? Yes. Invoice, yes. So that's once, which usedto be a verymanual process to actually not just reading a contract or reading an invoice, but what doyou do after that?Right? If you can combine all this, that becomes very powerful. So hopefully in the nexttwo, three years,no one has to read documents manually. There will be systems that can do it pretty good,unless it's kind oflike a doctor's handwriting. Jason Yocum: Yeah, I know. I love that. Take the small problems that we have and fix it with AI. And thenyou're fixingthose small problems and that'll layer up finally to get to the bigger kind of problems. Butif AI can justsolve those small things that just take so much time and just speed that up, theneverybody's gonna see thevalue of AI and start adopting it more and more rather than expecting it's going to doeverything that theERP system can do. It's going to do everything that the budget can do. Ashok Manthena: And coming back to the outdated finance process, what is that outdated finance process youthink needs to betaken away? Jason Yocum: Okay, controversial maybe a little bit. I'm gonna go out here. I'm gonna say budgeting.Budgeting should goaway. Just look setting targets is great, right? We all need targets. But the truth withbudgets is that itbecomes outdated come February, right? You spend all this time in December setting up thesebudgets andeverybody and their mother is inputting into this thing and you build it out by month andblah, blah, andthen come February, it's already messed up. So instead of hyper focusing on these budgets, I would rather the business focus onforecasting, like kind ofkeeping that forecast alive, but also spending more time on the unit economics, the margins,the ROI fromyour marketing expense, your R&D investment and what you're getting out of that, right? Andreally focus theenergy towards even cashflow, it depends on the level of the company or where it's at andwhat the size is,but understanding your cashflow and your runway and trying to forecast and manage thatbetter. There's gotto be a better way, right? I think there is. I think there is. Ashok Manthena: I'm going to make you very popular. I'm going to make the world like Jason thinks budgetingshould die.People will love you or people will hate you. Jason Yocum: That's it, yeah. Ashok Manthena: And now, just talking about your career, right? If you're starting your finance career today,what do youthink you would do differently? A little differently. Jason Yocum: You know, I think I wished that I understood the importance of people earlier on, right? AndI know that'skind of been a theme throughout everything we've talked about here today, but you know, likeearly in mycareer as an auditor, I actually found some rather large errors in a financial statement ofa company,right? And boy was I excited, right? I found problems, right? And I went straight away tothe controller ofthis company and I was like, look, I found this problem, like it's $10 million and blah,blah. And Iexpected, you know, an applause. I expected just, oh, a big thank you, you found this thing,let's fix it,right? But the exact opposite happened, he got angry, right? He was not happy with thisfinding, because,you know, I think because of, you know, from an ego standpoint, it was kind of on him. Itwas kind of hisfault and I didn't stop to think about how he would receive this information. Nor did I take the time to think about how to present that information in a way that maybe hecould eithersave face or you know come along with that journey with me. Right? And so I actually tend tobe very luckythat I learned this very early on. Right? That people may not always want to hear what youhave to say froma finance perspective. And a lot of the times they don't. A lot of the times you actuallybring bad news,right, as a finance individual. And shooting the messenger is a very common problem. So howdo you flipthat? How do you make sure that you approach this individual that you're talking toappropriately based onwhat you know about that person based on where they're at what their goals are all of thatand having thatempathy towards them has really shaped my career, my leadership style. Because you can deliver those tough messages in a way that they do receive it well and thenmaybe you knowapplaud or even you give away the reward of it or the feeling of gratification of you foundsomethinginstead I would have been like, hey, controller, you found this, right? And switch thenarrative, right? Andmake sure that he felt like he was the one finding the error and telling his leadership teamand not theauditors, right? And that would have built much better client satisfaction, right? So Ithink overall that'sthe one career kind of mistake I made, but learned early on. And that's changed everythingsince. Ashok Manthena: It's in the ideal world, it shouldn't even matter, right? The good news or the bad news,that's the onlything that matters. It's not about how it is delivered. But we don't live in ideal world.And there are alot of people might think, right? I can be straightforward and I will get things done. Andthat's it. Idon't want to participate in it. But since we live in this maze of humans and emotions andthis works atvarious levels, it works at a boardroom level, it works at a C-suite level and it works atan analyst leveland someone who knows how to manage this and again you can just keep it aside, think aspolitics, right? Butthat's a very over simplistic way of looking at the human dynamics. Thank you, Jason. Thank you so much for spending time with us. Thank you for sharing all yourinsights onretail finance, AI, budgeting, and leadership. It's been a very enlightening conversationand I really hopepeople will find it useful. Thank you for spending time with us. Jason Yocum: Thank you so much, Ashok. I really appreciate it. ## More Episodes ![Agent CFO Podcast - Caitlin Haberberger](https://chatfin.ai/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/cfo-podcast-caitlin-ashok.png) ### The Modern CFO: Navigating AI, Data, and the Future ofFinance Join Ashok Manthena and Caitlin Haberberger as they explore the evolving CFO role, AIadoption in finance, and strategic leadership in the modern enterprise. CFO LeadershipAvailable on all platforms[Watch on YouTube](https://youtu.be/a-zG2mrIk3s)[Listen on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1Susa4QPvPudnZWhAuXZ8i) ## Stay Updated Subscribe to our channels for the latest episodes and insights on AI in finance. 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