I have spent 20 years bringing technology into Finance. AI is changing the job itself.
I started as a software engineer in 2006. Since then, I have worked across more than 50 countries, led global teams, built finance platforms and helped companies through major technology shifts. Today at LinkedIn, I focus on what Finance should become when AI can do more than automate tasks.
Pankaj Prasoon · Senior Director, LinkedIn CFO Organization · Cornell MBA · 3x Author · Forbes Finance Council
I did not plan a career in Finance transformation.
I started with code. At Infosys, the work quickly took me outside India and into customer environments across Asia, Europe and the United States. I learned early that a system can be technically right and still fail if people do not understand it, trust it or want to use it.
That lesson stayed with me as my roles grew. I moved from engineering into transformation, cloud, product leadership and eventually the CFO agenda. The technology changed. The core problem did not.
Today, I spend much of my time thinking about AI in Finance. Not where we can add another tool, but where Finance is slow, fragmented or making decisions with incomplete information.
Five companies shaped how I think about transformation.
Each chapter gave me a different view of the same challenge: how to make complex technology useful to the business.
Infosys
Software engineering, enterprise systems, global delivery and transformation leadership.
SoftwareOne
Cloud transformation, customer strategy and business leadership.
Microsoft
Finance transformation, product leadership and AI in the enterprise.
CoreWeave
Working closer to the infrastructure powering the AI economy.
CFO systems, technology and AI for the Finance organization.
Experience helps. Curiosity matters more.
Cornell was an important part of my education, but some of the most useful lessons in my career came from being dropped into problems I had never seen before.
Technology changes too quickly to build a career around knowing all the answers. I have found it far more useful to keep asking better questions, stay close to the problem and be willing to change my mind when the evidence changes.
A few ideas I keep coming back to.
These are not slogans. They are lessons I have learned from building systems, leading teams and watching transformation succeed or fail.
Hours saved are not ROI.
AI can release capacity. Finance still has to turn that capacity into better decisions, lower risk or economic value.
Fix the problem before you automate it.
Putting AI on top of a broken process usually gives you a faster broken process.
Finance should improve the decision.
Faster reports are useful. Seeing risk earlier, allocating resources better and helping the business choose well matter more.
Clarity. Courage. Connection.
See the real problem. Say when the current way is not good enough. Bring people with you when you change it.
I am interested in the problems Finance leaders are trying to solve next.
If you are working on AI, Finance transformation, enterprise systems or leadership, I would be glad to connect and compare notes.