Gustavo’s Corner: AI News for CFOs - #2
Gustav’s Corner: AI News for CFOs, a twice monthly column by Gustavo Porporato Daher, scans of the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that matter most to finance leaders. Each edition distills big developments from the tech world into practical insights you can use to anticipate change, guide strategy, and keep your organization future-ready.
LinkedIn is about to make a big change: starting November 3, 2025, it will share user data with Microsoft and affiliates to help train AI models. The shift comes with an automatic opt-in, meaning users must dig into privacy settings to optout. Profiles, resumes, posts, and even interactions are all part of the data pool.
Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, is positioning this as a way to strengthen its AI offerings and deliver more personalized ads. LinkedIn, meanwhile, calls it “legitimate interest,” sidestepping the need for explicit user consent — a framing that has raised eyebrows among privacy advocates. Privacy is the flashpoint. Opting out will stop future use of your data, but anything collected beforehand stays in the system. The rollout spans the EU, EEA, Switzerland, Canada, Hong Kong, and likely the UK, while U.S. users will feel the impact through expanded ad data sharing.
ChatGPT is getting more personal with Pulse, a brand-new feature designed to act like a
morning briefing assistant. Pro subscribers will wake up to 5–10 tailored “cards” covering news, schedules, Gmail, Google Calendar, and even past chats. OpenAI says the plan is to roll Pulse out to Plus and free users next.
Waymo is shifting gears into corporate travel with “Waymo for Business.” Companies can now set up accounts to manage employee robotaxi rides in five major U.S. cities. Employers gain tools to control ride policies, track budgets, and generate reports — all while letting staff tap into autonomous mobility.
Microsoft 365 Copilot just expanded its AI lineup with Anthropic’s Claude. A new “Try Claude” button unlocks Claude Opus 4.1 for complex reasoning and Sonnet 4 for
content-heavy projects. Flexibility is the big win here. Businesses can now toggle between OpenAI and Claude while building in Copilot Studio, mixing models from Azure’s growing catalogue. The strategy turns Microsoft’s suite into a multi-model AI hub and ramps up competition among top providers.
Alibaba has taken the spotlight with Qwen3-Omni, a powerful multimodal AI that processes text, image, audio, and video in one system. Unlike OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen3-Omni is open source under Apache 2.0, offering free commercial use and modification. Hosted on Hugging Face at $0.25 per million API tokens, Alibaba claims its model sits at the cutting edge of benchmark performance.
Perplexity is carving out new territory with its AI-powered Email Assistant. Aimed at Max plan subscribers ($200 per month), it helps organize inboxes, draft replies, and manage meetings across Gmail and Outlook. The assistant won’t train on emails but can adapt to mimic a user’s personal writing style — a premium feature for heavy email users.
CFO´s – be careful with “workslop”. Stanford researchers are warning of this emerging workplace problem. This refers to AI-generated content that looks polished but lacks substance. In a survey of 1,150 companies, 40% of employees said they’d received such low-value reports or memos in the past month. Companies pushing AI without proper training may be fueling the trend. Workers often copy and paste unchecked output, turning what should save time into wasted hours. The result? Confusion, weakened collaboration, and a growing sense of mistrust among colleagues.
Why this news is important to CFOs and their teams:
This edition of AI news underscores how rapidly the landscape is shifting — from privacy risks tied to data-sharing policies, to the growing integration of AI assistants in core productivity tools, to the emergence of new competitors offering open-source alternatives. For CFOs, the challenge lies in balancing efficiency gains with risk management. Features like ChatGPT Pulse and Waymo for Business hint at new ways to streamline operations, while Microsoft’s multi-model approach points to flexibility in enterprise AI adoption. Yet, issues like LinkedIn’s data practices and the spread of “workslop” highlight the reputational, compliance, and productivity risks finance leaders must weigh. For those guiding financial strategy, the key is to stay alert: AI can be a driver of competitive advantage, but only when deployed responsibly, with strong governance and a clear eye on both opportunity and risk.
Identify your path to CFO success by taking our CFO Readiness Assessmentᵀᴹ.
Become a Member today and get 30% off on-demand courses and tools!
For the most up to date and relevant accounting, finance, treasury and leadership headlines all in one place subscribe to The Balanced Digest.
Follow us on Linkedin!
