good morning. CFOs are moving from the sidelines of AI strategy to the center of the conversation, and Cursor’s new CFO Council aims to translate that shift into a strategy for AI ROI.
Cursor, AI coding company Acquired by SpaceX In the $60 billion all-stock deal, the company has formed a CFO council that will meet quarterly in a rotating city, starting in San Francisco on Aug. 18. The group brings together finance leaders from technology-forward and traditional companies.
New members announced Wednesday include Michael Brophy, Natera’s CFO; Bea Ordonez, CFO of Payoneer. Dinesh Jain, CFO, FirstSource. Matthew Wasiner, CFO, First American Bank. Ed Grubscheid, CFO of JFrog. And Andrew Casey, Amplitude’s CFO, said: They join members announced on July 6th. Sonalee Parekh, CFO of SentinelOne. Madhur Deora, Paytm CFO. and Aziz Meghji, CFO of Asana. New members are being accepted on a rolling basis.
I spoke with Cursor COO Jordan Topoleski, who was instrumental in the development of the council, to discuss why this initiative came together.
“Everyone is investing in AI… but it’s very difficult to really understand how you can measure tactical ROI,” he told me, describing a common concern among Fortune 500 customers who use Cursor’s agent platform at scale.
While CIOs and CTOs are still leading AI adoption, CFOs are increasingly expected to answer the tougher questions. For example, how does a dollar of AI spend reliably generate $10 of business value rather than 50 cents? Measuring that return is increasingly a priority for financial industry leaders.
Topoleski announced the initiative in a simple post on LinkedIn and was surprised by the response, which resulted in a number of requests to participate. Rather than using a formal application process, Cursor combined inbound interest and customer outreach to form the council. The goal is to create cross-functional groups that span industries, public and private companies, and sectors.
Topoleski said the council is designed as a working forum focused on practical tools. Expected outcomes include shared benchmarks for AI productivity, a framework for measuring “return on intelligence,” and guidance on model allocation and cost management that accelerates rather than stifles adoption.
The goal, Topoleski said, is to help CFOs avoid runaway AI spending while identifying areas where investments can yield meaningful returns, from coding to financial analysis.
This focus reflects what he’s hearing from finance leaders who are increasingly drawn into discussions with customers as AI spending moves from an experimental item to a critical operating expense. We also asked about the role of AI in finance.
At Cursor, he explained that the company’s agent framework routes work to the best model for a specific task. At the same time, its “canvas” functionality allows finance teams to connect directly to live data and build AI-powered dashboards without additional software layers. Internally, two of Cursor’s 10 most active users are in finance, he said, highlighting how much AI-powered analytics work is being done outside of engineering departments.
In Topoleski’s view, adoption alone is no longer enough. The next step is to prove that AI intelligence translates into durable economics that CFOs can defend in the boardroom.
Cheryl estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
leader board
wes gilbreth was appointed as CFO of daybright financialMr. Gilbreth will lead Daybright’s financial organization. Matt Riordan, who has served as Daybright’s CFO for the past 18 years, will remain with the company as Operating CFO, focusing on ensuring continuity across the finance organization and supporting Gilbreath’s transition. Gilbreath joins Daybright from Integrity Wealth and brings nearly 20 years of experience.
Andrew “Andy” Aberdale Appointed as President and CFO of AiM Medical Roboticsis a developer of advanced robotic systems for MRI-guided neurosurgery. Aberdale has over 30 years of experience. He has spent the past 20 years exclusively within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, specializing in guiding early stage startups to commercialization.
big deal
Nearly a quarter of U.S. workers are currently “job-locked,” stuck in a role they would like to leave in order to maintain employer-sponsored health insurance, a trend that has direct implications for workforce mobility, talent strategies, and long-term productivity.
A new survey from West Health Gallup Medical Center in the US found that 24% of workers (approximately 23 million adults) say they have a job they would like to leave but are staying at their job because they are afraid of losing their health insurance, an increase of 8 percentage points since 2021. Job lock is most acute among workers with chronic health conditions and those who are highly stressed by health care costs, indicating that heightened benefit-driven risk aversion can distort career decisions, slow entrepreneurship, and impede optimal workforce relocation.
For finance leaders tasked with managing labor costs and retention, the findings highlight how health benefit design and health cost inflation shape employee behavior in ways that support short-term stability but ultimately constrain organizational agility and human capital deployment.
even deeper
“Sam Altman and Jony Ive assembled a dream team to reinvent hardware, and now it’s at the center of the battle for the future of OpenAI.” luck Reporting by Emily Forlini and Sebastian Herrera.
“In May 2025, a new war was brewing as Jony Ive and Sam Altman hugged and sipped espresso at a beautiful North Beach cafe. This coffee date was featured in a viral video announcing that Altman’s OpenAI would acquire io Products, a small hardware startup founded by Ive, the legendary designer of the Apple iPhone and perhaps the world’s most famous technology product designer,” the authors write. Click here for details.
overheard
“People come to restaurants to escape from everything going on in their lives. Your job is just to put a smile on their face and engage with them.”
— Red Lobster CEO Damola Adamolekun said. luck. “It helps you manage difficult people and situations, which is an important skill,” Adamolekun says. “You learn how to get people from one way of thinking to another.”
