The North American Finance Executive Summit (NAFES) returns to Tampa this March, bringing together CFOs and senior finance leaders focused on margin performance, cash discipline, and enterprise transformation.
These are not abstract priorities. They are operating realities CFOs manage every day, often across growing transaction volumes, tighter timelines, and increasing scrutiny.
As those pressures intensify, many finance leaders are re-examining how they surface signal, control variability, and make decisions earlier in the cycle. That is where new approaches, including AI-powered financial intelligence, are increasingly entering the conversation.
Not as a headline topic. As a practical response to complexity.
Why NAFES Conversations Matter Right Now
NAFES has earned its reputation by staying grounded in real operating challenges. The agenda brings together finance leaders who are accountable for outcomes, not experimentation for its own sake.
What makes the conversations valuable is not the volume of ideas, but the quality of perspective. CFOs compare notes on what actually changed performance, where risk still hides, and what breaks down at scale.
Common themes surface quickly.
Transaction volumes continue to rise while finance teams remain flat. Processes span more systems, vendors, and jurisdictions. Expectations around speed, accuracy, and control keep tightening. Yet most finance environments still rely on periodic-review models that were designed for slower, simpler operations.
That tension is increasingly visible in how profit variability shows up.
Not through one large failure, but through thousands of small issues that compound quietly across the business.
The Reality CFOs Are Managing Every Day
Most enterprises already have reporting. Many have modern data platforms. Plenty have invested in automation.
Still, the same pattern persists.
- You see variance after it appears.
- You investigate after the close.
- You explain outcomes after questions are asked.
The issue is not effort. It is timing.
Industry estimates suggest that 3 to 8 percent of EBITDA is lost annually due to operational decisions that are not financially informed. In most cases, those decisions were reasonable based on the information available at the time.
The problem is that material signal often arrives too late.
This is where CFOs begin to reassess how financial intelligence is generated and used across the organization.
How CFOs Are Filtering New Approaches
At NAFES, finance leaders tend to apply a consistent filter when evaluating new capabilities.
Does this materially improve how we identify, prioritize, and act on the drivers of profit variability?
If a solution improves productivity or reporting speed, it can be helpful. But transformation happens when finance gains earlier visibility into what is financially material and can intervene before impact compounds.
In practice, that means uncovering issues such as:
- duplicate payments, vendor overpayments, and discrepancies within procure to pay
- pricing and invoicing variances across order-to-cash
- manual journal entry anomalies and policy deviations during record-to-report
- indirect tax inconsistencies driven by transaction context and jurisdiction
These are not rare exceptions. They are recurring patterns that traditional sampling and static thresholds were never designed to catch consistently.
Why Full Population Visibility Is Becoming Essential
Sampling has always been a tradeoff. It reduces effort, but it accepts blind spots.
As enterprises operate with higher transaction velocity and greater automation, that tradeoff becomes harder to justify. Quarterly or monthly visibility increasingly feels reactive rather than controlling.
This is why many finance leaders are moving toward continuous monitoring across the full transaction population, supported by risk ranking that directs attention to what matters most.
The goal is not more alerts. It is better prioritization.
When finance teams can see patterns and anomalies across all activity, they gain:
- earlier signal on emerging issues
- clearer focus on material risk and opportunity
- stronger confidence in close and governance
- the ability to scale insight without scaling headcount
This shift also changes how AI is evaluated. The value is not in replacing judgment, but in augmenting it by surfacing patterns that rules and predefined models will never anticipate.
What Transformational Finance Intelligence Looks Like in Practice
In large organizations, progress does not come from adding another dashboard. It comes from establishing an intelligence layer that continuously converts transaction activity into financially actionable signal.
The operating loop is straightforward:
- signal leads to insight
- insight drives prioritization
- prioritization enables action
When this loop runs continuously, finance teams can surface leakage earlier, reduce investigation noise, and act with greater confidence across close, controls, and operational decision-making.
This is the type of operating model many CFOs are actively exploring. Not technology for its own sake, but intelligence embedded into how finance manages performance.
Where MindBridge Enters the NAFES Conversation
MindBridge is the global leader in AI-powered financial decision intelligence. We help CFOs build an AI-powered Central Insights Factory that continuously scans 100 percent of transactions across order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and record-to-report.
The focus is not on automation alone. It is on enabling finance teams to surface financial leakage, process inefficiencies, and material anomalies tied directly to profit variability.
By combining unsupervised machine learning with explainable analytics and enterprise-grade governance, MindBridge helps finance leaders see what matters sooner, prioritize action, and strengthen control confidence without adding headcount.
Executive Workshop At NAFES
Many of the most productive NAFES conversations happen when CFOs move past concepts and get specific about operating model, adoption path, and measurable value. At NAFES, MindBridge will share a CFO-level perspective on how leading finance teams are turning transaction complexity into earlier signal, tighter prioritization, and tangible EBITDA impact.
From Data to Dollars: The CFO’s AI-Driven Central Insights Factory
March 10, 2026 | 2:25 PM to 3:30 PM ET
Led by Karthik Manimozhi, Chief Growth Officer at MindBridge, the workshop draws on more than two decades of experience working with enterprise finance organizations, including leadership roles at SAP, Dell EMC, and Kyriba.
The discussion focuses on how CFOs are operationalizing continuous financial intelligence across order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and record-to-report to surface profit variability earlier, strengthen control confidence, and support financially informed decisions at scale. Real-world enterprise experience, including how Chevron deployed this model, grounds the conversation in practical adoption rather than theory.
Looking Ahead to Tampa
The CFO role continues to evolve as enterprise complexity grows. Leaders are expected to move faster, govern more confidently, and deliver measurable outcomes in environments that are anything but simple.
NAFES reflects that reality. It brings together finance executives who are comparing approaches, pressure-testing ideas, and looking for strategies that translate into real performance improvement.
As the conference approaches, the most valuable conversations will center on how finance can surface signal earlier, reduce profit variability, and support better decisions across the business.
That is why NAFES continues to resonate with enterprise CFOs. It is not about chasing trends. It is about equipping finance leaders to operate with clarity and confidence in an increasingly complex world.