Finance’s chemistry lesson: The guardian-to-catalyst transformation

Sponsored by Blackbaud

Artificial intelligence is accelerating the transformation of the finance function in ways that go beyond automation of existing processes.

Gartner senior director Mallory Bulman explains how finance teams can help organizations move faster, make better decisions, and prepare for 2030 and beyond.

The conversation explores digital talent, enterprise simulations, product management techniques, and what Bulman heard from attendees at the Future of Finance Summit about contending with volatility and deciding whether to be “AI-forward” or “AI-cautious.”

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The number of CFOs that Bulman speaks with each week, and the universal truths she hears in those calls.
• What an OODA loop is and why, in Bulman’s words, the “observe” part of that acronym will be getting shorter.
• A key theme of a Gartner finance presentation and its tie-in with one of Bulman’s sons’ science classes.

• How a product management mindset and self-service tools can help finance teams effectively deliver decision-ready information.
• Bulman’s takeaways from the Future of Finance Summit earlier in August.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome back to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. Recording at the Future of Finance Summit in National Harbor, Md., some late summer 2026 episodes. Coming up is a conversation about finance and AI’s role in the transformation of finance with a leader in that space. You’ll hear the conversation after this brief sponsor message.

[Sponsor message]

Amato: Welcome back. Mallory Bulman is our guest on the JofA podcast. She is a senior director/analyst in Gartner’s finance practice. And she’s joining me, as I said, at the Future of Finance Summit, National Harbor, Md. Mallory, welcome to the JofA podcast.

Mallory Bulman: Thanks, Neil. It’s great to be here.

Amato: I mentioned your role at Gartner. How long have you been in that role and what are your primary focus areas?

Bulman: Sure. So I’ve been at Gartner about seven years now. And my role at Gartner is an exciting one.

I have an opportunity to speak with about 20 CFOs every week. So we started doing a series of calls that we call Top Insight Calls where we really share with our CFO clients what their peers are focused on, what are emerging issues, what are critical insights they need to be paying attention to, what are some of the known unknowns that are emerging in the environment.

So that’s my role at Gartner. I also do a lot of our writing about the future of finance with AI around trends we’re seeing as well as with a lot of case studies and examples of really promising practices within finance.

Amato: Let’s talk some about what an AI-enabled finance function will look like, say, in three or four years, which as of this recording is also known as 2030.

Bulman: We have been looking at Finance 2030 for quite a while now. We undertook the project in a really strategic manner. We talked with companies that are at the frontier of finance. We’ve looked at our research. We’ve looked at the trends. We’ve done a lot of surveying. And we’ve really emerged focusing on a vision for finance that is truly transformative. Among the different roles that finance will play in the organization, one of the most important pieces is that we’ve found that finance will really be leading simulations of the enterprise for the organization.

Here at the National Harbor, we’re just a couple miles from the Pentagon, and the Air Force has something they call the OODA loop, which is a process from observing to acting. And the notion is that we really need to take that process. All of us are leading organizations right now that are complex, that are dealing with volatile environments. And finance, we believe in the next several years, will really help their organization shorten that OODA loop. They will really help make sure that organizations are able to anticipate changes better and really help the organization take the right risks.

Amato: I’ve heard OODA loop on the podcast and I’m pretty sure I had it in my head before, but it’s O-O-D-A.

Bulman: It’s O-O-D-A and it’s just an acronym. We’re good at that here in the DC area. It’s observe, orient, decide, and act. And the notion is that In finance 2030, we will have to shorten the time from when we observe something, we orient, we figure out what it means, we decide what we’re going to do, and we act. That loop is going to have to get almost to zero to enable organizations to move at the speed that they need to be able to move.

Amato: You mentioned some of these concepts at the Future Finance Summit. also back in December. The previous one was in December 2025. And there was a LinkedIn post about your talk at that December 2025 event that, I don’t know, it just was really interesting to me. One of the responses to me was really interesting. It said, “Incredible framing. The finance function isn’t just evolving, it’s being rewired from the ground up.” What do you think about that?

Bulman: I think that’s a really important observation and it’s a really important reframing that we’re not just using AI to do the same exact things we’ve always done, just faster. We’re really using it to be able to do different in-kind things.

And we have to be really careful. There’s a risk here, right, that we can get in our own way. One thing I shared here at the conference is we have a body of research we call our Efficient Growth Research. And that research focuses on what do organizations do differently if they manage to increase revenue and become operationally efficient simultaneously. And one of the most important steps that they take is they are really careful to remove growth anchors. We’re really good at adding extra steps of bureaucracy or extra controls, but sometimes they’re no longer necessary. The world’s changed.

And so we really have to fundamentally look at what work it is that we need to do. It’s really fundamentally looking at governance in a different way. In the past, governance was something that slowed us down. And now it’s really about enabling organizations to move faster and safely towards an exciting new future. And we’re seeing shifts from really having very stringent rules to identifying instances where you need rules and other instances where you need principles that can serve as a North Star so that individuals are making the right decisions in a changing environment.

Amato: Somewhat related, but a different sort of shift is the shift of how specific roles in the finance function are being performed, especially around junior roles. So what’s the new focus of kind of those junior roles that maybe wasn’t there five or 10 years ago?

Bulman: I’d say there’s really two things. One, we know increasingly that finance is going to need digital talent. These are going to be individuals who are not just able to use low- and no-code technology to do their work more efficiently and effectively, but build some of those tools for the enterprise. We talked about finance leading simulations of the enterprise. Finance will need people who are capable of building those tools, really creating environments that allow the rest of the organization to make more decisions themselves. We’re going to need to be doing a little more teaching them how to fish for the rest of the organization.

Amato: Tell me more about what you mean by this aspect of the transformation. It’s paraphrased a bit. “Finance teams will adopt product management techniques.” What does that mean?

Bulman: It’s a great question. We know that organizations aren’t great at asking finance questions, right? They tend to ask them too late or they ask the wrong questions. In fact, FP&A teams have spent a lot of time over the years — accounting, too — answering questions from the organization.

Increasingly, as finance is building more self-service tools, we’re going to have to function almost more like a product manager in that we need to study what is the financial information the business or the organization should have, when should they have it, so that we can better proactively give people the information they need to have at the moment they need to have it so that they’re making better decisions.

Amato: So let’s go back to these [calls]: You talk to 20 CFOs a week?

Bulman: I do.

Amato: That’s a lot of knowledge you get. You have to be a good listener, I guess.

Bulman: I maintain it’s the best part about my job. It also gives me an opportunity to really see in real time how the field is changing. And you can see some things, regardless of the sector, regardless of the location, some things are universally true.

And I think our experiences are more similar than they are different. And I think it’s part of the reason activities like being here at the summit, some of the research I was sharing, are really important because I do believe that the answers to most of the problems we all have exist somewhere. It’s just a matter of making sure we’re sharing them and connecting the dots.

Amato: Yeah, that is one of the themes of this event. It’s why it’s continued to be successful. It’s just the knowledge sharing of problems that maybe you thought were just your own, and a lot of different CFOs have them. So how can finance overall shift from a guardian mindset to a catalyst mindset?

Bulman: The guardian-to-catalyst shift was the topic of our keynote at our Gartner conference a couple years ago. And when we were writing it, I was actually helping one of my sons, who at the time was a high school student, study for a chemistry exam. And I was reminded that a catalyst in chemistry holds onto some of its critical properties while bringing about change in others.

And what struck me at the time was how similar that is to what the change we’re seeing in finance is. Historically, we’ve been the guardians. We’ve really had to protect the status quo. But the truth is, increasingly, the status quo is just changing. It doesn’t exist anymore. But we as finance leaders need to really figure out what is it that we need to hold on to, what truly differentiates our organization versus what do we really need to let go of and change. And that’s how we’re going to help our organizations move forward.

Amato: We’ve hit on a bunch of topics at a really high level. Anything specific you’d like to touch on as a closing thought?

Bulman: So, when I’ve been here at the summit, one thing that has struck me is all of the finance leaders who are here are trying to contend with the volatility they see around them. They’re trying to contend with the changing abilities and capabilities of artificial intelligence, and they’re trying to steer their organizations in the right direction.

And what I hear again and again is that when we can be really clear about what differentiates our organizations and what is just noise and be really deliberate about making the decisions that matter for our organization, we’ve seen really important changes.

The other piece is, AI is certainly the topic of the moment. And none of the finance leaders that I have talked with, regardless of the position they plan to take, whether they want to be AI-forward or more AI-cautious, which again, both are deliberate decisions. I think as a community, we really need to understand the potential here and make sure that each person is experimenting with AI and really learning how it can transform their industry and their organization.

Amato: That’s Mallory Bulman on the Journal of Accountancy podcast. Mallory, thanks for being on.

Bulman: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.