On Thursday, March 12 at 12:00 PM ET, we’re running a live session on how AI is changing the way finance teams work — eliminating hours of manual data entry while improving the quality of insights delivered to the business.

We’ll cover real-world AI workflows across AP/AR, expense management, variance explanations, cash flow forecasting, and audit prep. If your finance team is still spending most of its time on admin instead of analysis, this is the session to attend.

Ideal for CFOs, Controllers, and finance leaders who want their teams focused on the numbers that matter, not the ones that just need entering.

Date: Thursday, March 12
Time: 9am PT / 11am CT / Noon ET
Register here

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company will not build mass surveillance tools or fully autonomous weapons, forgoing "several hundred million dollars in revenue" while continuing to support the Department of Defense for intelligence and cyber operations. (Anthropic)

• OpenAI finalized a $110B funding round at a $730B valuation, with Amazon investing $50B, Nvidia $30B, and SoftBank $30B, making it the largest private funding round in history. (CNBC, TechCrunch)

• Anthropic’s Claude had a Monday outage with “elevated errors” on claude.ai and its apps, while Anthropic said the business API was unaffected; the company later told Mashable service had been restored. The outage came just hours after Claude reportedly reached #1 among free apps in the U.S. App Store. (Mashable)

• Multiple government agencies raised safety and reliability concerns about xAI's Grok before the Pentagon approved it for use in classified settings. (WSJ)

• Anthropic launched enterprise agent plugins for finance, engineering, and design, letting Claude complete multistep actions autonomously inside tools like Excel, PowerPoint, Google Drive, and Gmail — which means "I had my AI do it" is about to shift from a parlor trick to an actual workflow. (TechCrunch)

• Meta signed a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar deal to rent Google's TPUs for AI model training, diversifying its compute supply beyond Nvidia as it targets $135B in AI infrastructure spending for 2026. When a company with its own custom chips still needs to rent from a competitor, that tells you something about how constrained compute really is right now. (SiliconANGLE, Dataconomy)

• AI accounting startup Basis raised $100M at a $1.15B valuation, with agents that autonomously complete end-to-end tax returns now used by 7 of the top 25 US accounting firms, delivering 20-50% efficiency gains. If your accounting firm isn't talking to you about how AI is changing their workflow, ask them — because their competitors are already using it. (Bloomberg, SiliconANGLE)

• Anthropic acquired Vercept (AI that sees your screen and acts on your behalf) and released Cowork, a desktop app that lets Claude work autonomously on local files with scheduled tasks, plus Claude Code Remote Control for continuing coding sessions from a phone or any browser. The through-line: AI is moving from “a tab you switch to” to something running in the background of your actual work. (Vercept, Anthropic, Claude Code Docs)

Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise survey of 3,235 leaders across 24 countries found that surveyed companies have broadened worker access to AI by 50% in just one year—growing from fewer than 40% to around 60% of workers now equipped with sanctioned AI tools. While only 25% of respondents said their organization has moved 40% or more of their AI experiments into production to date, 54% expect to reach that level in the next three to six months. AI is already boosting productivity and efficiency; just a subset is using it to rewrite the business. Today, 34% of companies are starting to use AI to deeply transform their businesses, 30% are redesigning key processes around AI and the remaining 37% are only using AI at a surface level with little or no change to underlying business processes. While each are capturing productivity and efficiency gains, just the first group are truly reimagining their businesses rather than optimizing what already exists.

The technology isn't the bottleneck. It's whether your organization is designed to actually use it — rethinking workflows and roles, not just handing people a new tool and hoping for the best.

Sources: Deloitte State of AI in the Enterprise (2026)

Last quarter you spent money on marketing. Some of it brought in customers. Some of it didn't. If you're like most mid-market companies, you have a rough sense of what worked, but you're making next quarter's budget decisions on that rough sense instead of actual numbers. Marketing teams that review channel performance quarterly catch 15-25% in misallocated spend that would otherwise compound all year.

AI finds the patterns your spreadsheets won't show you on their own. Try this with: email campaign reports, ad spending summaries, trade show or event costs, website traffic numbers, or even just a list of what you spent and what came in, from the past quarter or two.

Try both as a single comprehensive prompt and by running each part separately. You'll often get better results starting with the spending breakdown first, then building to the recommendations.

Role: "Act as a plain-spoken marketing analyst helping a [your industry] company figure out where its [$X/quarter] marketing budget is actually going, and what it's actually getting back."

Task: "Look at these marketing results and tell me what's bringing in customers, what's not, and where I should move money next quarter."

Context: "We spent [$X] across [list your channels: email, Google ads, social media, trade shows, etc.] last [quarter/6 months]. We track [whatever you track: website visits, leads, new customers, revenue, whatever you have]. Most of our best customers seem to come from [source if you know it]. Next quarter we want [specific: more leads, more customers, lower cost to get each one]."

Format: Deliver:
SPENDING BREAKDOWN | What we spent on each channel; how many leads or customers each one brought in; what it cost to get each customer; how much revenue came back (if known)
WINNER/LOSER RANKING | Table ranking every channel from best return to worst, so it's obvious where the money is working and where it's not
WHAT'S HIDING IN THE DATA | Channels that seem to work better together; campaigns that used to work but are fading; any customer groups that responded noticeably better than others
WHERE TO MOVE THE MONEY | Specific shifts: move $X from [what's not working] to [what is]; one experiment to try in the next 30 days; proposed budget split for next quarter with expected improvement
WHAT PEOPLE RESPONDED TO | Which messages, offers, or subject lines got the best response; which ones fell flat; specific language worth reusing

Constraints: Separate spending meant to build awareness from spending meant to get direct results; Flag anywhere you're spending money but can't tell if it's working; Figure out whether a bad result is because the channel is wrong or the message is wrong; Be honest about what the numbers can and can't prove.

Tip: Run this quarterly. Marketing teams that regularly review what's working and shift budget accordingly tend to catch wasted spend faster — and the compounding effect of reallocating even small amounts toward what's actually converting adds up quickly.

Spreadsheet Outlier Spotter
Paste any list of numbers you're reviewing, expenses, invoices, transactions, budget line items. Flag every entry that looks unusual compared to the rest: amounts that are way too high or low, duplicates, round numbers that look like estimates, or timing that doesn't fit the pattern. For each flag, explain in one sentence why it stands out. Return as: flagged entries ranked by how likely they are to be an actual error + what to check first.

Scope Creep Calculator
Paste the original agreement, proposal, or scope of work for a client or project. Then describe what you actually delivered. Compare the two and identify every task you did that wasn't in the original scope. For each, estimate the time it took and whether the client asked for it, the work demanded it, or it just happened. Return as: total unbilled scope as a percentage + draft language for a scope conversation.

Decision Stress Test
Describe a decision you're about to make, a hire, an investment, a partnership, a big purchase. Include what you know and what you're assuming. Predict the five hardest questions a skeptical advisor would ask about this decision. For each, tell me whether your current information answers it or whether you have a gap. Return as: five tough questions ranked by how likely they are to derail the decision + prepared answers where you have them + gaps to fill before committing.

I'm not a salesperson. Never have been, probably wouldn't be great at it. But I've spent enough years in digital marketing, jumping industries, researching how different businesses actually work, to recognize what a real shift looks like versus what just sounds like one.

The more industries I dig into, the more the same pattern shows up. This isn't about getting employees to use a new tool. Companies are rethinking how the work itself gets done. When you see that happening in healthcare, financial services, legal, and real estate all at once, it stops being a tech trend and starts being something else entirely.

We've seen this scale of change before. Word processors didn't just make typewriters faster. They changed what "writing a document" meant. The internet didn't speed up mail. It rebuilt how businesses find customers and communicate. AI is following the same pattern — and the companies figuring that out now aren't going to wait for the ones who figure it out later.

Kiingo is an AI consultancy & advisory firm that helps companies unlock real business value with artificial intelligence. From hands-on training to strategic planning and tailored implementation, we partner with growth-minded organizations to build AI fluency, generate more value per team member, reduce inefficiencies, and create lasting competitive advantage. We believe in humans, amplified by AI. Whether you're exploring AI for the first time or ready to scale your efforts, we'll meet you where you are and guide you forward with clarity, confidence, and results.

We help teams go from "we should probably use AI" to actually using it. If that sounds familiar, let's talk.