Today I started Huxley Research with a simple premise: if I can see the patterns in fractional CFO work, so can an AI. GPT-4 just dropped, and it's clear we're at an inflection point. The question isn't if AI will transform executive advisory - it's who will build it first.
Here's what most people miss about the CFO role: it's fundamentally about pattern recognition and decision trees. You identify the right KPIs, set appropriate targets, and create action plans for hitting or missing those targets. That's not magic - it's methodology. And methodologies can be codified.
The timing couldn't be better. GPT-4 shows reasoning capabilities that would have been science fiction two years ago. It can analyze financial statements, understand business context, and provide strategic recommendations. No, it's not replacing CFOs tomorrow. But tomorrow is coming faster than most executives realize.
Huxley Research isn't about building a chatbot that spits out generic financial advice. It's about creating an AI system that truly understands business dynamics, can spot trends humans might miss, and provides actionable insights at a fraction of the cost of human advisors.
The research phase is fascinating. I'm documenting every decision framework I use, every pattern I recognize, every heuristic that guides my recommendations. It's like performing surgery on my own expertise - dissecting what makes fractional CFO work effective and figuring out how to encode it.
Will this technology eventually replace my own role? Possibly. But I'd rather be the one building the future than the one surprised by it. There's something liberating about actively working to automate yourself out of a job - it forces you to think bigger about what uniquely human value really means.
The next few years will separate the executives who embrace AI from those who resist it. I'm betting everything on being in the first group. Welcome to Huxley Research - where we're building the AI-powered future of financial leadership.