The Person Behind the Tools

A CFO Who Adopted AI
and Never Looked Back

I'm James Carey, a Chief Financial Officer who stopped waiting for AI to be ready for finance and started building the tools to make it so. What you'll find here is the architecture, the experiments, and the hard-won instincts from doing this work at the CFO level, in the real world, every day, over the last three years.

Curiosity Built This. Results Kept It Going.

I started using AI in 2023 not because someone told me to, but because I saw clearly what the technology could do. Routine tasks were eating time that should have been spent on strategy. Brainstorming had a ceiling. The tools existed to change both of those things, and I was not willing to wait for the finance industry to catch up before I started building.

My first serious experiments were with ChatGPT. Over time, I migrated toward Claude and a broader toolkit of AI models, driven partly by a commitment to privacy and partly by the belief that understanding the full landscape matters. If you only ever use one tool, you only ever see one way of solving a problem. That has never been how I operate.

What emerged from that period of exploration was something I did not fully anticipate: a genuine architectural instinct for how these systems fit together. I began building agentic workflows, interconnected systems where AI handles the repeatable and surfaces the meaningful. Today that work is focused on something specific and intentional: a scalable, sustainable architecture designed to plug and play with future Claude models, so that what I build now compounds in value rather than becomes obsolete.

I am a CFO working in the technology sector, based in Chicago. The work I do with AI is not theoretical. It lives inside real business processes, real reporting cycles, real management decisions. That grounding is what I bring to everything on this site.

I share this work because I believe in community and because I have benefited from the generosity of others throughout my career. AI can feel overwhelming from the outside. The goal here is to make it approachable, actionable, and genuinely useful for people who want to build with it rather than just talk about it.

How I Work

Three Principles That Drive Everything

01
Curiosity Over Certainty

I have never waited for a clear consensus before experimenting. The people who understand AI best right now are the ones who started before it was comfortable. That willingness to learn in public and iterate in real conditions is what separates a practitioner from an observer.

02
Real Work, Not Theory

Everything on this site comes from actual CFO work. The tools I build run inside live financial processes. The frameworks I share are the ones I use. There is no gap between what I write about and what I do, and that keeps the output honest.

03
Community Compounds

I have learned from people who were generous enough to share what they knew. Building in public and creating a space where finance professionals can learn, ask questions, and share what works is how I give that forward. Knowledge shared does not diminish. It multiplies.

"The future of finance belongs to the people who are building with AI today, not the ones who are waiting to see how it turns out. This site is where that building happens, in the open."

James Carey  |  Chief Financial Officer  |  Savvy AI CFO

See the Tools Behind the Story

AI-powered finance tools built for CFOs who want results, not slide decks.