Welcome to Dear CFO, where finance leaders seek practical advice from experienced CFOs who've successfully navigated the same challenges they're facing today. If you have a question you'd like answered in a future edition, we want to hear from you — email us here, and it could be featured in an upcoming column.
Today, Gary Vecchiarelli, CFO of AI data center infrastructure firm CleanSpark, answers the question:
With all of the hype around AI and the prolific use of robotic process automation, how are you planning to address the skills gap between recent college grads and those who have been in finance for several years?
The skills gap between recent graduates and experienced finance professionals is real, but I don’t think artificial intelligence makes that problem worse. In many ways, I think it gives us a better opportunity to close it.
I view AI first and foremost as a tool to help professionals become more efficient. In finance, there is never a shortage of work. There is always another analysis to run, another process to improve, another question from the business, or another deadline approaching. If AI can eliminate some of the lower-value and tedious work, accelerate research, help someone organize their thinking, or get them to a first draft faster, it effectively creates more hours in the day. This matters for everyone, but especially for people early in their careers.
When I started my career, if I didn’t understand something, the learning process was typically slow. I asked a colleague, searched through prior work, found a book or simply spent enough time doing the work until I figured it out. There was a lot of value in that process, but it also had limitations. Today, a recent graduate can use AI as a 24/7 available learning tool. They can ask it to explain an accounting concept, walk through a financial model, critique their analysis, help them understand why a process works the way it does or suggest questions they should be asking. Used correctly that can compress the learning curve in a way that simply wasn’t available to earlier generations of finance professionals. The key phrase here is when "used correctly."
Right now, AI cannot replace judgment, context or experience. A young professional still needs to understand the underlying work. They need to know when an answer doesn’t make sense, when an assumption is wrong, and when something that looks technically correct is inappropriate for the situation. Those skills are developed through experience, feedback, repetition and accountability. That is why I still believe on-the-job training is the best training.
I believe that in a scalable finance organization, there should be room for both recent graduates and experienced professionals. Junior employees need opportunities to do real work, make decisions at the appropriate level, receive feedback and learn from people who have been through similar situations. Experienced professionals bring judgment, pattern recognition and an understanding of the business that cannot be replicated simply by having access to better technology. AI can make that combination much more powerful.
My advice is not to focus too heavily on whether AI is creating a gap between generations. Instead, focus on whether your team is learning how to use it to improve themselves. For recent graduates, encourage them to use AI to accelerate learning but require them to understand and defend their work. Ask them why they reached a conclusion, not simply how quickly they produced the analysis.
For experienced professionals, the challenge is different. Do not allow experience to become an excuse for avoiding new tools. The same technology that helps a junior employee learn faster can help a seasoned finance leader analyze information faster, communicate more clearly, challenge assumptions and spend more time on judgment-heavy work.
And for the organization, keep investing in real-world experience. Give people exposure to the business. Let them work with operators. Put them in situations where the answer is not obvious. Technology can accelerate development, but it cannot replace the lessons that come from actually doing the job.
If I had access to these tools early in my career, I would have used them aggressively. The opportunity today is to combine something my generation relied heavily on, experience gained through doing the work, with technology that can make that learning process dramatically faster.
That is less of a skills-gap problem to me and more of an opportunity.
