Ep. 341: John Glasgow - Why the World Needs a Modern ERP and What Makes It Different
Welcome to Count Me In. In this episode, I sit down with John Glasgow, founder, CEO, and CFO of Campfire about how modern finance teams are being transformed through innovation and AI powered ERPs. John shares his personal journey from finance executive to entrepreneur, revealing how his own frustrations with legacy systems fueled the creation of Campfire. The conversation covers the importance of prioritization, the challenges of scaling a company, and why today's finance leaders need to embrace new technology, especially Gen AI, to stay ahead. If you're interested in actual insights on automating finance tasks, leading change, and building resilient teams in a fast evolving landscape, this episode is for you.
Adam Larson:Tune in for a grounded inspiring look at the future of finance from someone who's building it every day. Let's get started. Well, John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Excited to have you here. Excited to have a conversation talking about finance teams and ERPs and stuff you're working on.
Adam Larson:But I wanted to start the conversation just, you know, maybe we can get to know you a little bit more. You know, you're running a company. You're a dad. You know, you you do a lot of different things. And what's it like kinda being a founder, you know, and and a and a family man and trying to do all juggle all those things every day?
John Glasgow:Yeah. It's a great question. And, Adam, thanks again for having me on. Really excited to be here. Yeah.
John Glasgow:Being a parent, fun fact, my oldest daughter is the same age as Campfire, so I kinda took on a lot in the '23. I would I would say the biggest thing I've learned, you know, even when I was a a finance exec or now as a founder, which is, like, being a being a parent, a lot of people say, how is it, like, physically possible? But learning ruthless prioritization, I think, has been incredibly important, and then learning how to survive on even less sleep. And so I'd say, like, even last night, one of my little ones got up at 3AM. And so there's a lot of overnight wake ups as I think all the parents out there are aware of.
John Glasgow:But it's really like, what is the best use of my time, how can I just, like, maximize value, whether it's at home or whether it's in the workplace, has been incredibly helpful for me to have that mindset? And just as a as an executive, especially as we've scaled a Campfire, that mindset has been incredibly valuable.
Adam Larson:Can we can we dig into that mindset a little bit more? Because Yeah. It's not easy to kinda build that foundation in a home or in a workplace. And how did you how did you kinda work to build that lay that foundation to kinda have that mindset because you wanna give it to your employees as well to make sure that they're using the best use of their time too.
John Glasgow:Yeah. I would say it's funny. Our head of marketing has a sticky on her desk, and it's a a quote I shared with her once, which is if it's not a hell yes, then it's a no. And so I I think just this phrase of, like, it has to be, like, a super high conviction yes to move forward on anything. And then I frequently ask the team, which I ask myself, which is if I only had one hour of time for the week, what would I do in that one hour?
John Glasgow:And then why don't I actually just go focus on that? Like, clearly, is the most important thing. I think the other one is during Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, for those that aren't familiar, they have 10 founders sit in a circle, and you have to say your commitment, like a a group of people that have to, like, keep each other honest, and you you commit to the group. And then kinda one or two weeks later, depending on the cadence, like, go back and you're like, did you hit your goal that you committed to the group? And so these accountability circles, they found to be incredibly helpful, and we still do that today.
John Glasgow:So we're Mhmm. It's larger back than back then, but literally, the whole company is here in San Francisco. So we're able to go in one massive circle at HQ, and everybody says what they're gonna do for the week. And I tell them this is really the only thing that matters for you right now. And I think, like, hitting that goal, whether it's writing it down for a week, for a day, to my family, I think just, like, incredible clarity on what's important will allow you to, like, understand what signal versus noise.
John Glasgow:That's
Adam Larson:super important because a lot of times in corporate structures, you know, you set a goal at the beginning of the year, and then at the end of the year, you look at that goal and say, yes. I did it or I didn't do it. But a lot times, goals are are are moving so much faster than that. You know, is there a certain cadence that you got? Do you just do weekly goals and say, what am I doing this week?
John Glasgow:We do weekly, and then they roll up to to monthly, and they roll up to quarterly. Gotcha. You know, I was talking to a a CFO at a public company the other day, and he's like, I met he's like, I was talking to someone at a 180 KPIs at the company. And it's like, obviously, the the letter k is not really, like nothing's really key at a one eighty. And so it then it's just like, how do we have one to three KPIs?
John Glasgow:Everything rolls up to that. And then we have micro goals that allow us to get there. At Invoice2Go, it was a series c scale up. One thing I learned reporting to our CEO, Mark, was you need to really have, like, a a rally moment that so we we were doing through this big relaunch of the product, and you need, like, a realistic but tight kinda goal that the whole company can rally around. And whether it's, like, a big milestone going into a fundraise or whether it's a big product launch or whether it's just something big, really route rallying people around it and really building a culture around it and really keep everyone focused on that kinda one launch moment or one launch KPI or whatever it may be, allows folks to essentially do things that maybe they didn't know was feasible from, like, a a pace or from a quality perspective.
Adam Larson:Yeah. Well you're setting the tone at the top, so it kinda gets everybody involved as opposed to, you know, feeling like you're alone in your goals and what you're working on.
John Glasgow:Yeah. What's funny here is, like, whatever is the most important thing, I'll go sit with that team. So we had a huge new feature go live yesterday. I just sat down with the team doing QA, testing the feature before go live, and I was just QA ing with them, you know, quality assurance for folks QA. And it's it's just like a as an executive, you know, I obviously need to push a lot down.
John Glasgow:But whatever the most important thing is, they need to make sure everybody's aware how important it is to them. Otherwise, they're not gonna always fully appreciate that.
Adam Larson:So I love asking this question, you know, to people who are who are founders, who started organizations. You know, why did you what what was what were you trying to solve when you're like, hey. I need to build this company. I need to build this this new solution for people.
John Glasgow:Yeah. I mean, it was quite simple. I was a finance executive, and our ERP, we were really, really not happy with our ERP. Once we got acquired for 625,000,000, it was like, you know, why why is there no modern ERP? Like, why is nothing else out there?
John Glasgow:I kinda went on this, like, tour trying to to find something for us, and there wasn't anything out there. So this is really you know, Campfire is just solving my own pain. I mean, it's as simple as that. And so it's been fun solving my own pain, and we're obviously on Campfire. And so I kinda continue to solve my own pain, and and a lot of the road map is just based on our internal use of Campfire.
Adam Larson:That seems so simple when you say that. And I feel like there's more to the story, but, like but it could be that simple. I just I feel like, you know, sometimes there's so many new softwares coming out there all the time. And so, you know, why does the world need a new another ERP? I guess that's that's another question to ask you.
John Glasgow:Yeah. I mean, in the in the mid market lower enterprise, there were two things that I saw. Everything in the finance stack had turned over except the general ledger. There's been incredible innovation in the finance stack on EP, payroll, HRIS in the last ten years. The general ledgers, the two market leaders are are from the nineties.
John Glasgow:And so I think just, like, very outdated software is the pain that I experienced. It was really my kinda seminal moment. The other one was the company we sold to was the large still is the largest accounts payable solution in the market, bill.com. And we were the largest partner for a lot of the general ledgers and saw firsthand, like, as a partner that the pain I felt was being felt at scale across our 500,000 businesses that were that were customers. And so did a lot of digging there and saw that, like, this was just very thematic and and widespread.
John Glasgow:And then once I said, gosh, why is there no modern GL when everything's turned over but the core? Everyone needs a modern core to build around. Then GenAI had just started to take off. And OpenAI was kinda six months in on their infamous ChatGPT three and saw the ability to the prior generation of ERPs took everybody from on prem into the cloud, but all of the workloads were still very manual. And so it's not an opportunity to take everybody from cloud to AI.
John Glasgow:And so not just a modern interface, the original thesis, but this kinda rapidly evolving second thesis was, like, how do we take the transactional accounting? How do we take and everyone's sitting in spreadsheets, editing the y and x axis on a chart. How do we take the kind of preparation of financial analysis and and reporting? And we and we unlock all of that for the end user, and they can focus on more strategic work. And this big thesis that finding corporate finance and accounting is going through a fundamental shift in terms of the activities the team is gonna be doing.
John Glasgow:So, like, at Adobe, I was on the finance team. We spent weeks preparing, like, LTV to CAC by product line. So, like, lifetime value to cost of acquisition. It was, like, a ratio we were closely measuring. And it took so long to prepare.
John Glasgow:By the time we did the analysis, we actually it was quite limited in terms of executing on the analysis. There was a lot to execute on. So it's how do we truncate the preparation of the analysis and elongate or extend the actual, like, delivery. And that's an area that AI is not gonna replace. Right, Adam?
John Glasgow:It's like going and meeting with the CMO, going and meeting with the VP of sales, like, delivering and executing on the financial output, not just the what happened, but, like, what do we do about it. And so I think for me, it was like, we can now unlock a lot of our customers are coming to us and saying, for the first time, I have the the capacity to go focus on what do we do about it. And to me, as a as a fellow finance peer, that's been incredibly, I've been incredibly honored to hear feedback like that from our customers.
Adam Larson:That's amazing because a lot those pain points when you talk to different finance teams, there's a those are a lot of pain points that you hear from a lot of different folks, especially, you know, all different you know, no matter the size of the business. Do you think that, you know, a lot of times there's in the especially in the finance team, the resources will go elsewhere first. You know, how do you how do you kind of break through that? Well, I've always been using, you know, that software since the nineties, and it's and it's worked well. It's it's not broken.
Adam Larson:Why should I fix it? You know, how do you have that conversation with somebody?
John Glasgow:I'll say, Adam, the early days were incredibly challenging. Yeah. I mean, we were just a few people, and I was convincing finance teams to move all you know, to move to a early stage start up that no one had heard of. Yeah. I think a a lot of it, candidly, they were just believing in me.
John Glasgow:They were just like, you know, you're a fellow finance person. You come from the category. You've this is your third, you know, finance software company you've been at. You know, if there's anyone that's gonna solve it, it's it's a it's a peer like me that deeply understands the pain. I think that was the real early days, call it first 50 customers.
John Glasgow:But then we started to see with, particularly with Gen AI kinda thesis too, articulated earlier that what was deemed safe was, like, a good thing three years ago that's now went from, like, feature to a bug, and that safety means it's not a Gen AI product, and there's just been this big mandate from the executive and and even board level of, like, driving AI transformation. And so then, it's like, well, the old school way of doing things is not inherently not modern or or GenAI native. So a lot of folks are coming to us and saying, you're the only GenAI ERP we've been able to find that actually, like, is showing real transformation for its customers. And that then really switched. There was a light switch of, like, we then need new.
John Glasgow:And so it was like, we've had this incredible tailwind. And over the summer, we announced, you know, a 100,000,000 in in capital that that we've raised because it's the sheer kind of market pull that that we have felt that really is only within the last year or two.
Adam Larson:And as other SaaS companies start, you know, adding the Gen AI to their softwares, you know, how do you kind of keep up with, you know, the day to day as, you know, there's so many new things being thrown at you every day, especially with, you know, the agentic AI and all those things that are coming out as well?
John Glasgow:Yeah. I mean, look. Even at the at the model level, I mean, we saw, like, Gemini three just dropped and then OpenAI just came out, the new one. I mean, for those that are popping popcorn and following the frontier model wars, it's been incredible. You know, we decided to do something a little unique and launch our own frontier model.
John Glasgow:So we actually went went multi model at Campfire. Here in San Francisco, have AI engineering. We're it's called a large accounting model instead of language model because it's purely trained on accounting data for our actual intended use case. And we're still using the frontier models. Consume a lot of content, a lot of news in the car.
John Glasgow:I listen to podcasts in bed. You know, I'll read a lot of the lot of the publications as the you know, when the when the kids wake me up and I can't fall back to sleep, I'll cruise through some Wall Street Journal articles or the information. But I I would say beyond that, customers are great at letting us know what's important to them. And so we'll we'll hear from them, like, hey. We're on this this model or we're using AI in a certain way.
John Glasgow:Like, you know, we would like you to to partner or integrate. And so that's a huge driver of our road map as well.
Adam Larson:I'm sure it keeps you on your toes because every day there's a new article, somebody's releasing some new thing, and there's some new element that's coming out. But I'm sure, you know, you have to take the time to test and make sure everything's working properly before you can integrate or do all those things. What is that like as you're trying to build a modern modern tech stack and try to keep up with everything?
John Glasgow:Yeah. I mean, look, we just launched, like, a lease accounting subledger, and that was a lot of customers were raising their hand and saying, hey. We we we really wanna get our spreadsheets. So I think Yeah. You know, anything that's still being done in Spreadsheets for transactional, like, for any sort of repetitive task, I think Spreadsheets will always be here.
John Glasgow:I've spent way too many years myself in Spreadsheets.
Adam Larson:Yeah.
John Glasgow:The ad hoc requests, the one off, the the custom, you know, the board wants to swag, you know, twenty twenty six number in a different scenario for m m and a. That'll always, you know, to me be in a spreadsheet. But if your subledgers are being maintained, if your kinda weekly, you know, reporting is constantly updated in a spreadsheet that, you know, we tell customers, tell us about that, and we wanna ship that. So for us, from a product velocity, we ship, call it, three new things a week. Some are big.
John Glasgow:Some are small.
Adam Larson:Yeah.
John Glasgow:Very, very customer driven here. And, again, we are a customer. But then we also have to come up with things that no one's asking for. So we launched our own, like, close management product. Nobody was asking that.
John Glasgow:Like, no one said, hey. I want you to build close that had never been in the ERP before. But we decided there was unique opportunity to run the entire close in the ERP. And so we we kinda brought that to market as an innovation, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. And so it's a bit about I mean, we since we whiteboard a lot here at at headquarters, customers tell us, and then just consuming a lot of lot of content.
John Glasgow:I think the last thing I'll say on the on the frontier model side, there's a lot of ways to to test the new models when they come out. I think I think the benchmarks, we don't overly follow the benchmarks too much because I think a lot of the models are now gaming the model for the benchmark because that's become such a focus. We run our own internal evaluations. And so to your question, there's just, like, a lot of internal work done to evaluate, but it it can it can be a lot sometimes because to your point, there's just so much going on.
Adam Larson:There is so much going on. How do you you you say your internal accounting team uses this software as well. What's it like having, you know, your own internal employees being the being the customer as well, and how does that build up? Are they able to test things for you? Like, do you get instant feedback?
Adam Larson:What does that look like?
John Glasgow:Yeah. We definitely get instant feedback. We're the hardest on ourselves of any of the vendors.
Adam Larson:Yeah.
John Glasgow:Yeah. I think all the feedback really goes straight into the road map. But I I would also say, I mean, what's funny is in the in the early days, the product was quite rudimentary. Now it's gotten quite mature, but, of course, it's always still still getting better. The the I would say that the product is actually gotten more it's gotten mature faster than Campfire has as a company.
Adam Larson:Mhmm.
John Glasgow:So in a way of, like, it can it can easily support companies much larger than ourselves. Mhmm. And so we still give a lot of internal feedback, but it has shifted more to be from the customer because a lot of them have like, we're we're in every continent today. Mhmm. And so, like, internally, we can't test some of the, you know, localization, for example.
John Glasgow:Some customers have inventory now. Like, we don't have inventory here. So it's it shifted a bit on where the feedback comes from, but we're always looking to that point of, like, well, no one's asking for this, but we should do it. A lot of that comes from our own internal use. Sure.
Adam Larson:Yeah. That's great. I mean, I love that you can connect with them, but you're right. You you don't always have the best use case in house, especially if you're just a software company, and each each organization is different. Do you think that certain sizes of business are better for, like, an AI driven ERP such as your own?
Adam Larson:Like, are there certain industries that work better in this type of thing, or is it kind of agnostic to whatever industry you're in?
John Glasgow:Yeah. I would say the early adopters of excuse me, primarily coming from software businesses. And so Yeah. Ironically, a lot of the fastest growing AI companies like Replit or Decagon are customers. And so they turned to us and say, we wanna be AI native as an internal tech stack.
John Glasgow:And so I think they're as in their end product being AI, they have this, like, kind of full we are AI throughout the company. And so I think they've just been early and really innovating with us on the sharp end of the spear. So I'd say midsize to lower enterprise software has been the most, but we have companies like Boom Arrow that's building airplanes, you know, Mach one airplanes on Campfire. And so we see the you know, Replit doing vibe coding to to Boom Arrow and building airplanes. Really, the full spectrum is on Campfire, and it's been fun to play a small part in their success.
Adam Larson:So being such a a a young company, where do you kinda see yourself going in the next, you know, ten five to ten years, especially, you know, with rapidly changing environments and and so many different moving parts in the industry?
John Glasgow:Yeah. I think about that one every day. I would say continuing to support larger businesses, particularly given organically our customers are growing or in, like, just net new customers are
Adam Larson:Yeah.
John Glasgow:Larger going live on the platform. Supporting more industries is certainly a focus. So there's some, you know, industry specific functionality, whether it's an integration or whether it's something natively within Campfire, and then better global support. So, like, yes, we're in every continent, but we're not in every country. And so I think more localized compliance.
John Glasgow:You think of, like, what you know, we just talked to we had a company on-site this week, and they're like, we're in a 174 we have 174 subsidiaries in 85 countries. And so I think, you know, it doesn't need to be, like, we're supporting a local company in the region. It's a, you know, similar San Francisco based company to us, but they're just so global that we really need to be global for even just a a US based company.
Adam Larson:Well, I can imagine how challenging that can be, especially laws change from country to country and having to make sure that you're in compliance. But, you know, obviously, because there's so many there's so many different things that you have to evaluate when working with a multinational organization.
John Glasgow:Yeah. We go really deep with their their auditors, their tax team, the local and region teams. For example, in India, it requires local daily cloud data backup. And so we now have have that. So there's a it's been enjoyable for me to learn, but I'm learning about all sorts of localized laws throughout the world.
Adam Larson:Yeah. It's a huge challenge. So, you know, we've been we've been talking about, you know, all some of the great things that you're doing, some of the things you're seeing. But let's say somebody's listening to this conversation. They're like a FP and A leader or CFO.
Adam Larson:They're kind of evaluating different technologies. What are some red flags they should look for as they're evaluating different different companies? And and what are some things they should be looking for? Maybe you can, like, look at both of those things.
John Glasgow:Yeah. Well, we really look for folks that there is a bit of change management. I mean, doing the old way of things and the new way, for example, bank reconciliations typically in a mid market ERP can be quite manual, reconciling cash. And we start out by having Gen AI take a pass at the full task. And then we so the human, like, here's the three areas that the it's not real based.
John Glasgow:It's true through Gen AI. So, like, human level synthesis, here's the three transactions it was not able to reconcile for you. So I think for for folks that are ready to embark on a different way of doing things is certainly part of the journey. But I think folks that are candidly looking to offload a lot of the transactional accounting. And like I mentioned earlier, like, folks that are tired of manually doing financial analysis and really wanna focus on, like, strategic work, that's where we've seen folks see the most value of moving to Campfire because we've been so helpful in automating the the transactional.
John Glasgow:From, like, things to consider, you know, I I would say that it's definitely a good one. I mean, we wanna make sure there's a fit from an integration, from an ecosystem, from a country coverage, and also from any industry specific nuances. I think we just again, like, most has been in software to date, although we're in every industry today. We just really wanna make sure there's a fit. And so talking to our team, we're just very candid about what we can and can't do to ensure there's a happy path for both sides.
Adam Larson:Yeah. But what about, like, red flags? Like, let's say they they they have four four software companies just like yours, and then they're evaluating. What are things that if they see this, like, hey. Turn and run.
Adam Larson:Don't go that way.
John Glasgow:So one thing we have seen is, like, a lot of people will demo AI. Mhmm. But the AI is not actually real. And so we do encourage people to actually get a sandbox or do a POC. ERP is, like, a mission critical decision, and it's a lot of work to go live.
John Glasgow:So we're very forthcoming with Campfire environments and sandboxes for prospective customers. And they often get in, and they they use our AI to automate a task or to even just query their data, like writing an accrual with AI in Campfire. We we put in a bunch of sample data for them. They don't need to share anything sensitive, and they can actually go through the workflows themselves and see the AIs actually transforming how work is done. I think we've gone to evaluations where competitors have shown compelling AI, but in reality, it was not actually compelling.
John Glasgow:And so I think just really do your diligence. There's a lot of demo ware, they call it, in AI right now from income from legacy incumbents and from new providers both that we just really encourage folks to, like, go use the AI yourself or just go kind of really use the product yourself before before signing. That's actually been one of the best ways we've been able to win more deals is just, like, we're super transparent. You can go use it. Everything we demoed to you actually works, is actually in production today.
John Glasgow:And then we where we're very forthcoming with customer reference calls, being a newer provider, just about everybody talks to an existing customer on Campfire before they sign, and they can just really get get comfortable with the customer experience.
Adam Larson:That's cool being able to offer that because I know sometimes, you know, the the organizations, like, say, hey. This is a good person. They'll say good things about us, but you want somebody who's gonna be honest and say the ups and downs because not every solution is perfect. Right?
John Glasgow:Yeah. Exactly.
Adam Larson:So you you know, you're you and your team, you know, talk to finance teams all the time. And if there was a message you could give the finance team to say, hey. These are some things you could be doing today to make your jobs better, to make your jobs easier, you know, what would that be to to kinda help push them in the right direction?
John Glasgow:Yeah. I mean, this one is a bit overhyped at the moment, but certainly start to think about going on your AI journey. I mean, I can't say it enough. I do think this is similar to from an on prem to a cloud transition, and it's gonna be a lot of work. It's scary.
John Glasgow:Totally understand finance aid is very sensitive. Do your diligence on security and privacy and confidence in the system. But, ultimately, I think folks that are able to we're starting to see a lot of finance and accounting teams get hired, and they're looking for what's called, like, a systems forward individual or, like, an AI forward individual because there's quite a bit of of a mandate right now on GNA, call it, you know, like, the supporting functions within a company. There's a big task of, like, not hiring a lot of headcount. And so if you can be the one that can not still deliver the quality and accuracy expected of the team, but, like, not hire a lot of headcount, that that really differentiates you in the market relative to peers.
John Glasgow:So start to just setting Gen AI aside. Just start to think about how do we automate tasks. There's, like, this saying in engineering that, like, sometimes the laziest engineer is the best engineer because they find a way to, like, automate all the tasks because it's, like, they're inherently lazy. So I think have the lazy mindset. If there's something you do every week by hand as a finance center accounting professional, the former controller at OpenAI is one of our investors.
John Glasgow:And after every close, going into the next close, she would push each member of the team and said, what is the task that took the longest in the last close? And go find a way to speed it up. And whether it's software, whether it's you know, it's find some way to speed it up. And then in the next close, you know, continually continuously iterate on your own processes and tasks. So that's really my advice is don't be don't be static.
John Glasgow:Be dynamic. And whether it's GenAI or something else, just kinda constantly be learning and innovating and pushing the boundary. Those are the folks that are that are, again, moving into more of that strategic role. And when you're the one helping the company grow faster or save money, you're gonna get hired. You're gonna get promoted.
John Glasgow:You're gonna you're gonna see the reward of that. The expectation of just closing the books and moving on to the next month, it seems to be the expectations are evolving a bit. And so that's my advice.
Adam Larson:They are evolving a bit. And maybe you could speak on this just real quick. Just how how do you help your team get to that mindset? Because, you know, you're you're speaking to, like, individuals who see that and wanna go. But what if you have a team of people and you wanna inspire them to do the same thing because you wanna upscale your team and and and have them grow as well?
John Glasgow:Yeah. Well, one that was fascinating is I see a lot of CFOs and accounting teams put publish, like, an an AI memo or AI policy for their team. And I think if you're not driving clarity, then people are gonna default on the more conservative approach. So how can you introduce AI? When is it acceptable?
John Glasgow:How do you go from, like, testing or playing around with it to into production for, like, live tasks? Like, building a framework for actually putting it in, encouraging even failure like a founder. You need to encourage failure on the team for AI because, again, not all AI is gonna end up working for every task. So I think establishing that, like, called founder mindset and also giving giving folks the the the mandate to actually go do so. So I talked to a CFO the other day that says, once a month, I have an hour for the whole finance function, and everybody or at least a few folks demo how they've used AI in their role.
John Glasgow:Or I've seen another one like an AI hackathon. There's an hour block that everybody has to try and offload one task to AI. And so I think, like, just just encouraging that, like, this is where we're going. Some folks have gone a step further, and so they've put in hiring rubrics. They've put in performance reviews.
John Glasgow:Are you leveraging AI, scoring people on their AI usage? I think these are things that I saw here and on the engineering team is critical, on sales is critical here, and it's really starting to work its way through finance and accounting at this point.
Adam Larson:I think it's awesome, you know, kind of putting it in the the the framework of the organization and allowing people that space to do things, but not being afraid to, like, hey. It might not work the first time, and that's okay. But you learn from it, you grow, and you keep going. And I I I think that's counterculture, what your typical corporate culture is like. And so I love this push to to do that, and I think all organizations should be thinking that way.
John Glasgow:Yeah. I mean, my the constant thing I hear from finance and accounting teams is the AI makes errors, and so I can't trust it. Humans make errors. Right? And so it's like, as a former finance leader, I would never send a slide to the board without asking for the financial model and and actually going through the model myself.
John Glasgow:Go you know, when you use AI, treat it like any other human on your team. You're responsible for its work. You need to check its work. You need to take ownership of its work. Maybe just like any other individual, like, you you hire them on week one.
John Glasgow:If they get something wrong, you wouldn't fire them. You would give them feedback. You would learn how to work with them. And by month six, maybe you're spending less time on their financial models. Similarly with AI, we we give it feedback.
John Glasgow:We we we work with it. We review its work. We take ownership. But, ultimately, if you're using it right, everyone on the team gets a bit of a promotion. Right?
John Glasgow:There's, like, another layer under you. Instead of data entry, you're reviewing the work, even the most junior people at your team that were previously doing the data entry themselves. So it's like AI is not perfect. Humans are not perfect. We need to learn how to treat it like anyone else on the team.
John Glasgow:Well,
Adam Larson:John, thank you so much for coming to the podcast. I it's been really great chatting with you, getting to know you, and hearing your story and what things are going on at Camp Fire. Thanks so much for sharing your story with our audience today.
John Glasgow:Thanks so much for having me, Adam. Really excited to be here today.
Announcer:This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast, providing you with the latest perspectives of thought leaders from the accounting and finance profession. If you like what you heard and you'd like to be counted in for more relevant accounting and finance education, visit IMA's website at www.imanet.org.
