How top finance teams at Hex, Sierra, Quora, and Notion use AI

The promise of AI in finance is no longer just a bold vision for the future. Finance leaders at innovative companies like Hex, Sierra, Quora, and Notion are integrating AI into daily workflows and seeing immediate gains.

Momentum is building—quickly.

“What excites me is I can feel that slope of technological growth in only the last few months,” Hex Head of Strategic Finance Lawrence Dann-Fenwick says. “That just tells me there's more to come over the next few months.”

Each of these businesses have learned valuable lessons in their journeys with AI that can inform any company’s strategy. Below, we summarize their findings and then pull together a number of tactical, real-world finance wins to give your team a head start.

Finance-tested strategies to put AI into action

Encourage experimentation

Hex, Sierra, Quora, and Notion all actively foster a culture of experimentation with AI. And employees have the latitude to run with any promising use cases they find, like a custom GPT that can help with a specific writing task.

“We're always trying to question the status quo, and if there's better ways to do it, we're all for it,” Hex Accounting Manager Manny Castillo says.

Notion provides employees “Curiosity Cards”—budgets specifically to explore new AI tools—which recently led to discovering AI software to help with the company’s financial close.

“This enables employees across the organization and in finance to start experimenting with third-party tools,” Notion CFO Rama Katkar says.

Keep trying AI—even if it falls short

Persistence matters as much as initial exploration. Dann-Fenwick stresses the need to give AI frequent “at-bats” to benefit from frequent improvements. A new model might be able to handle an entire process autonomously rather than just helping with one or two steps, for instance.

“It's easy to try something once, say ‘OK, well that did 80% of what I wanted but the experimentation took time and now I'm behind on this other thing,’” he says. “And then you slip into this subconscious mentality of, ‘well, I won't try that again.’ What I'm coaching myself on is to keep trying it again and again.”

Scott Clark, Sierra’s head of finance operations, takes it a step further: use AI tools daily to stay ahead.

Start with lower-risk use cases

Risk appetites vary among different departments within finance. Quora Finance Manager Richard Gobea points out that accounting is taking a more cautious approach to AI since the entire company depends on that team giving them accurate numbers.

“I'm not building something new that's kind of siloed in a protected state,” Gobea says. “I'm dealing with live data that is being used by internal and external users.”

That’s why Gobea prefers AI embedded in finance tools he already knows well, such as Notion AI to search internal docs and Ramp to automate expense receipt matching and coding. Quora’s FP&A group, on the other hand, is testing a variety of emerging AI tools because their work is centered on estimates and forecasts.

That mirrors the strategy at Hex.

“Are we going to take an experimental approach to payroll? Probably not,” Dann-Fenwick says. “But are we going to try it out on an ad-hoc financial analysis? Absolutely.”

Understanding AI limitations is key to these assessments. Tasks that require nuanced judgment or are more complex, such as revenue recognition, aren't ideal for AI yet.

Build teams with AI in mind

Leading finance teams are building out their teams with AI in mind. Sierra thinks through the standard roles (such as an AP clerk or FP&A analyst) on a finance team to evaluate what work AI could automate. Then it can determine what specific expertise—ASC 606 experience, for example—and roles to prioritize.

“Every time I've started a new role at a hypergrowth early-stage company, the first thought was ‘what systems do you need and and what people do you need?’” Clark says. “And this is the first time I've joined where the first thought is ‘what does the agent world look like for finance and how can I implement it?’”

Notion now includes AI proficiency in job requirements to build future-ready teams. Candidates don’t need to be expert-level prompt engineers, but they should clearly demonstrate interest in AI.

“I think in as soon as six, 12 months and then going out multiple years, AI is going to be infused into many, many finance workflows,” Katkar says. “I really want to make sure that we're building a team that's embracing that.”

Real-world AI finance wins

So where are these forward-thinking teams finding real success with AI?

• Answer billing questions: Castillo created a custom GPT trained on the company’s billing practices to save multiple hours every week responding to customer billing inquiries. Castillo now simply inputs customer questions and relevant invoices and receives thorough, ready-to-send responses.
• Analyze tax risk: Quora’s tax team uses AI to help compose tax risk analyses and memos, dramatically cutting down on research time and “revolutionizing how they’re working,” Gobea says. Gobea’s team is exploring how they could use the same tool to write technical accounting memos.
• Answer policy questions: Notion employees now self-serve questions about the travel and expense policy with Notion AI, meaning the finance team spends much less time answering questions every day. The AI tool provides clear, detailed answers, with links to relevant documents. “Notion AI can summarize what you need to know prior to going on a trip—let's say how much our per diem is, what our flight policy, hotel policy is,” Notion Accounting Lead Michelle Wen says.
• Create journal entries: Another custom GPT Castillo created automatically organizes and formats raw Excel data into journal entries. AI attaches information such as dates, vendors, memos, accounts, and departments to recurring monthly transactions so they’re ready to upload to Hex's ERP system.

“We're always trying to question the status quo, and if there's better ways to do it, we're all for it." —Manny Castillo, Accounting Manager, Hex

• Automate budget insights: Sierra utilizes an AI agent to pull bills from Ramp and run them through an LLM to deeply analyze budget variances. "Within seconds, you can generate insights across very detailed vendor bills to provide explanations of spending trends that previously would have taken hours to manually pull together,” Clark says.
• Self-driving flux analysis: Notion automates monthly flux analyses using AI to identify and explain month-over-month and year-over-year changes. This automation provides quick, accurate insights into shifts in financial performance.
• Assist with advanced reporting: Dann-Fenwick uses Hex Magic, an AI tool in the data analytics software, to write SQL and Python code, extracting deeper insights from go-to-market data without needing a data scientist.
• Plan financial projects: Dann-Fenwick previously spent hours manually assembling tasks, dates, and responsibilities into Gantt and flow charts. GenAI now streamlines this process, saving him approximately two hours weekly and accelerating project kickoffs.
• Automate expense reviews: Both Quora and Notion have started using Ramp’s AI agent for controllers to automatically review expense reports. The agent applies company expense policies to flag or approve transactions with a level of accuracy that’s impressed Gobea. “I want to be at a point where most of the transactions are reviewed and signed off by the agent and I'm doing a weekly or monthly high level review of 10% or 15% of them,” Gobea says.

The impact of AI in finance

Time saved with AI means more time for interesting, strategic work. In the case of Hex, that team can now focus on revamping its order-to-cash process and mapping its move to a new ERP system. Quora can now spend more time experimenting with the latest software that could give the entire finance team a big boost. Notion has more time to analyze what the results mean rather than just presenting the numbers. Sierra, operating in an incredibly fast-paced and competitive industry, can deliver key data and insights to decision-makers faster.

“These tools are enabling finance executives to live a little bit more in the moment alongside the peers that are running the business,” says Clark.

“I think AI will enable folks within the finance organization to really focus on the ‘why’ and focus on the ‘what do you do about this’ versus just presenting the ‘what.'" —Rama Katkar, CFO, Notion

Change is not just coming; it’s here. AI isn’t just reshaping tasks—it’s reshaping the day-to-day of finance professionals so they can focus on more strategic, satisfying work.

“I think AI will enable folks within the finance organization to really focus on the ‘why’ and focus on the ‘what do you do about this’ versus just presenting the ‘what,’” Katkar says.

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