Why This. Why Now
Most finance teams are not standing still; they are stuck. Adoption has roughly doubled since 2023, but the majority of it is individuals pasting fragments into a chatbot on a personal account. Only a small minority have AI running inside a core workflow. Thus structured understanding of strategic business cases where AI can help is becoming critical
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87% of CFOs expect AI to be very or extremely important to finance operations this year |
17% of finance teams have AI running in a core workflow rather than a pilot |
68% of CFOs say they have been slow to adopt because they don’t know where to start |
85% of CFOs feel that AI in finance can actually be a business growth driver |
Who This Is For
– CFOs, Finance Directors and Financial Controllers
– FP&A leads and analysts
– Internal Audit, Risk and Compliance heads
– Accounts Payable, Receivable and Shared Services leads
– Treasury, Tax and Investor Relations
– Finance Transformation and Systems owners
No technical background required. If you can write an email, you can do every exercise in this room.
What This Programme Is
| This programme is | This programme is not |
| Hands on with group exercises | A lecture on how large language models work |
| Built around Finance workflows you own | Generic prompt-writing tips |
| Real life case studies | An enthusiasm session that fades by Friday |
| Vendor-neutral, and tool agnostic | A demo of a platform you would then have to buy |
| Building your own AI road map | A certificate and a slide deck |
What You Take Away
Every participant leaves with:
- The CRAFT prompting framework
- A finance prompt library
- The AI Use Case Scoring Sheet
- The Agent Design Canvas
- A finance AI roadmap template
The Programme
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Opening – A live poll of the room: what people are using today, and on whose account – The three assumptions about AI that finance teams most often get wrong
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Module 1: What AI actually is – What is and LLM and what does it do – AI tools and their applications – What is hallucination and why is AI is confidently wrong – Predictive AI – Generative AI – Agentic AI – What AI is genuinely good at, and where it reliably fails
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Module 2: Generative AI and the Craft of Prompting – The anatomy of a prompt – Chaining, persona, tone and iteration – Understanding RAGS – Applications: Research, Data analysis, Query drafting, report presentation, scenario analysis, procurement, submission of tenders
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Module 3: Hands-on: Five Generative AI Builds Groups Exercises: Solve a finance domain problem, read out to the larger team, get feedback, discuss and learn
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Module 4: Agentic AI: Where Software Starts Doing – Components of an agent: a goal, memory, tools, autonomy, feedback loop – How agents reach into your systems – Real life examples of agents – Single agent versus multiple agents working in tandem – Human-in-the-loop
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Module 5: Hands-on: The Agent Design Lab Groups Exercises: Solve a finance domain problem, read out to the larger team, get feedback, discuss and learn
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Module 6— Building the Finance AI Roadmap – Scoring projects based on value, feasibility, data readiness and risk – Where to start – What are the challenges, what are the opportunities – Guardrails and governance – Creating a structured 30, 90,120-day plan |
Your Facilitator: Hareesh Tibrewala – Founder & CEO, Manabu | Certified Independent Director
Hareesh has spent over three decades building technology businesses. He founded Indias’ first ecommerce portal in 1999. Later, he co-founded Mirum (formerly Social Wavelength), one of India’s largest digital agencies, which was acquired by WPP in 2023
As a Certified Independent Director, he serves on multiple corporate boards and chairs Audit, CSR and Digital Risk Management committees. He is also Non-Executive Chairperson of MeruLife; a mentor with Stanford Seed; and a Lead Partner at Social Venture Partners.
Through Manabu, he works at the intersection of leadership, learning and artificial intelligence, and has led AI masterclasses for boards, leadership teams, and industry bodies internationally.
An engineering graduate from VJTI Mumbai, with a Master of Science from the University of Southern California and executive education from Harvard Business School.
Important Note: Participants must carry laptops. Limited seating is available — prior registration is mandatory

