Home Podcasts Excel At AI In Finance

Excel At AI In Finance

Mike Dion 3 Episodes Oct 13, 2026

Excel at AI in Finance is a weekly podcast for finance professionals seeking to leverage AI to automate repetitive tasks. Each short episode covers practical applications of tools like Excel, Power BI, Python, and AI assistants. The host, Mike Dion, shares real-world examples from his own experience to help listeners escape the grind of late-night spreadsheets. The goal is to make finance work more efficient and less time-consuming.

Episodes

Your Auditor Will Ask About AI in Finance. Here’s What CFOs Need Ready. Oct 13, 2026 767 Your AI tools got the number right. Can you show how? If your auditor asked who checked the AI's answer, who would raise their hand? Do you have a record of what you asked the AI to do? HIGHLIGHTS OF EPISODE Most finance teams now use AI tools to help produce their numbers, and most of the time the tools get it right. Then the auditor shows up. Most teams can't answer, because nobody kept a rec

AI Tools Saved Your FP&A Team Hours. So Why Is Everyone Still Here at 8pm? Oct 6, 2026 740 AI saved you two hours this week. Where did they go? If your AI tools are working, why are you still at your desk at 8pm? What would your FP&A team do with an hour nobody else gets to claim? HIGHLIGHTS OF EPISODE AI tools save finance pros real time every week, and the research backs it up. The catch comes after. About a third of those saved hours get refilled with more work, so the time neve

Are AI Tools Worth It for FP&A? Most CFOs Can't Prove It Sep 29, 2026 744 Can you prove what your AI tools paid back this year? Who asked for the last AI project your team built? Why has the same payback problem shown up in surveys since 2007? HIGHLIGHTS OF EPISODE Are AI tools worth it for FP&A? Mike asks the question most companies skip. He tells the story of a client team that built six AI projects a week, and when he checked, almost all of them paid back nothing

Are Humans Optional in AI in Finance? The 3 Gates Every Finance Team Needs Sep 22, 2026 863 Ever opened a deck your AI Tools built and found the numbers went wrong three steps back? Watching every AI pilot on your FP&A team stall out before anything ships? Tired of being the only person in the room asking who actually checked this? Mike came back from his yearly AI conference with a pattern he did not expect, because talk after talk was about AI not working, and the reason kept trac

Windows Broke Claude Overnight. The AI Tools Backup Plan Every FP&A Pro Needs Sep 15, 2026 787 What happens to your workflow when an update you never asked for installs itself overnight? Should one AI tool ever be allowed to run your entire day in finance? What's your backup plan if Claude, Microsoft Copilot, or any AI tool goes down tomorrow? A routine Windows update broke the daily workflow Mike runs his finance work through, and he spent the whole morning rebuilding what one overnight gl

AI Tools Are Automating Excel. You Have to Be Technical with AI in Finance to Survive. Sep 8, 2026 787 AI Tools Are Automating Excel. You Have to Be Technical with AI in Finance to Survive. What breaks if you took two weeks off right now? How many times has someone come to you before making a decision, instead of just running the numbers themselves? Can you explain what AI actually did for you to someone who'd push back on it? Excel was the bottleneck for twenty-five years, and standing in it wa

Claude and Microsoft Copilot Giving You Garbage? Check Your Brief! Sep 1, 2026 869 Tried AI on real finance work and got back something you would never send? Can you point at an example of good, or can you only describe one? Ever written off a tool on the strength of one bad Tuesday? HIGHLIGHTS OF EPISODE The first time I opened Microsoft Copilot for Excel I gave it three months of revenue data and one sentence, asking why a line wasn’t working, and when it handed back something

Impressive Finance Report? Be Careful! Your AI Tools Might Fail Next Month. Aug 25, 2026 1071 What if the AI win you keep bragging about isn't actually finished? Why can a 30% drop in your exception count mean nothing got fixed at all? What happens when your AI tools quietly stop working, and your CFO finds out before you do? Eighty percent took minutes. The rest took weeks. I'm sharing how I built an AI-assisted reconciliation that looked finished in eleven minutes, then broke the moment

Over Budget for AI in Finance? Here's What The CFO Needs to Know Aug 11, 2026 1209 Why did the finance teams who called themselves most mature at AI cost control do worse than everyone else? If Technology says it owns AI cost 55% of the time and Finance says 53%, who actually owns it? Why does 40 to 60% of what an AI feature actually costs never show up on the vendor invoice? Highlights of Episode AI in Finance spend stopped being an engineering experiment and became a real line

Prompts for AI Tools Don't Matter Anymore. 3 Things That Change When You Brief Claude Like an FP&A Analyst Aug 4, 2026 1102 What good are a couple hundred saved prompts if you're still losing your afternoon to month-end? What do you do when Claude hands you the end of 12 steps you never watched? What changes when you brief Claude like a new FP&A analyst instead of prompting it? Highlights of Episode Last month I watched Claude take a job I would have broken into fifteen separate prompts and just run it, start to fi

I Watched AI Burnout Finance Teams for a Year. Here’s What Finally Started Working Jul 28, 2026 1129 What is “workslop,” and are you already passing it downstream without knowing? Why did 40% of workers get handed broken AI work in a single month, and could you already be one of them? Why did 95% of enterprise AI pilots return nothing measurable? Highlights of Episode The same AI tool, in the same week, saved me a full afternoon on one job and cost me one on another, and this episode draws the li

Claude Fable 5 Vanished for 3 Weeks: 3 Moves Before You Trust AI Tools With a Deadline Jul 21, 2026 1057 What do you do when the AI tool your workflow runs on gets pulled by the government with zero notice? Why is betting on a frontier AI model actually a concentration risk, the same kind you already manage in a portfolio? What are the three moves that keep a vanished AI tool from blowing up a deadline you already promised your CFO? Highlights of Episode On June 9th, the most powerful AI model on the

Why Finance Automation Rollouts Keep Stalling: The CFO Questions to Ask First Jul 14, 2026 1047 Why “tool first, not job first” kills most AI rollouts before month 3? What’s the one question that separates pilots that ship from pilots that stall? Is the CFO mandate actually enough to get an AI rollout across the finish line? Highlights of Episode Every vendor sells AI. Most pilots stall anyway. In this episode I break down the three failure modes I keep seeing across real finance functions,

Excel at AI in Finance | CFO, FP&A, AI Tools, Claude, Microsoft Copilot Jul 10, 2026 84 The AI playbook for finance pros who want their nights back. The finance job is getting bigger every quarter. The day isn’t getting any longer. Every week there’s a new tool, a new LinkedIn post about someone who automated their entire close, a new AI conversation happening around you. If you’re the finance pro trying to keep up without giving up your evenings, your weekends, or the life you have

Excel At AI In Finance

Episodes

Recommended