MindBridge CFO Matthias Steinberg has a lot of empathy for finance leaders who are under pressure to leverage generative AI to improve their finance operations and their companies.
The main tension, he sees, is the gap between the creative, language-oriented strengths of newer generative artificial intelligence technologies and the numerically-oriented talents of older machine learning technologies, which excel at processing and analyzing large amounts of data.
In an interview with CFO Dive, Steinberg said CFOs and their finance teams face high expectations driven by the market hype surrounding generative AI. But genAI, a large language model type, isn’t ideal for working with numbers “out of the box,” he said.
“We’re currently working on building tools that can actually process huge amounts of data by combining large-scale language model systems with machine learning and other technologies,” Steinberg said. “hand”
Ottawa, Canada-based MindBridge’s business model is right at the center of that pressure, but it’s not alone. Hewlett Packard Enterprise CFO Marie Meyers doubles down HPE has teamed up with Deloitte and Nvidia to ensure “definitive results” are obtained regarding the use of the agent AI tool “Alfred,” named after superhero Batman’s trusted butler. This means that you will get the same answer every time you ask the same question.
The non-deterministic element of the LLM can be very valuable in marketing, but a concern in finance. “We want our numbers to be 100% accurate, and it seems like we need them to be deterministic. And if you ask a technician the same question three times, you should get the exact same answer three times,” Steinberg told CFO Dive, noting that the solution lies in combining different technologies.
MindBridge’s SaaS platform is used by auditors and other companies to find similarities and risks in financial data and systems. Steinberg describes it as a type of monitoring tool that automates all assurance work with a company’s ledger, but it is not meant to replace an enterprise resource planning system.
“We’re not trying to replace it,” he said. “We bring in the data that’s in the ERP system, and we bring the data into other operational systems, like reservations and billing systems. We take the data, perform the analysis, and play it back to the user in its simplest form to tell the user that there may be a high-risk item that needs to be followed up.”
These users include large audit firms such as: Big Four Companies KPMG similarly companies like chevron. Analytical systems vary in price, but customers pay annual license fees starting in the low six figures, he said.
Founded in 2015, MindBridge initially evolved using unsupervised machine learning to power analytics, but is now working on a new product with agent AI, expected to launch in the coming months. Its new agent wrapper transforms and simplifies user experiences that require multiple screens and analytics into a more streamlined interface.
“Until today, auditors and financial professionals would make sure the data was loaded into our tools, the tools would run, and there would be billions of combos that needed to be done. Then it would all be replayed into a separate dashboard and the user would do all sorts of slicing and dicing,” he said. “In the future, when you open your browser or tool in the morning, you’ll have a chat box and you’ll just say, ‘What do I need to do? What happened in the last 24 hours?'”
According to his LinkedIn profile, Steinberg has led MindBridge’s finances for almost four years and holds an MBA from INSEAD and a master’s degree in engineering from RWTH Aachen University. Earlier in his career, he gained private equity experience at Boston Consulting Group and Summit Partners. As CFO, he also helped take Germany-based Ionos public before moving to Canada to join MindBridge.
As for advice for other CFOs considering leveraging AI, Steinberg believes it’s important to choose relatively low-profile projects to implement AI (such as accounts payable or investor relations), find champions for the change, often young staff, and lock it into the finance team.
“There’s no silver bullet, and it can be overwhelming at times,” he says. “But let’s just pick one project and get started.”
