Why AI Hasn’t Disrupted Accounting (And How it Will)

Описание: Learn more about Stacks at https://stacks.ai/

Stacks co-founder and CEO Albert Malikov joins host Alex Schmitt on Investment Memo to break down why the Office of the CFO is one of the biggest and most overlooked opportunities for AI-driven transformation. Stacks is building an AI-first operating system for finance teams, starting with accounting reconciliations and expanding into a broader AI-native finance stack for the enterprise.
In this episode, Albert explains the “perfect storm” hitting finance orgs today: a growing shortage of accountants, increasingly fragmented data across point solutions, and workflows that still rely heavily on Excel to close the books. The conversation dives into why AI has been slower to penetrate finance than other functions, and how Stacks approaches the problem differently by combining a strong data foundation with deterministic systems for accuracy plus AI agents that learn from real-world exception handling.

You’ll also hear how customers use Stacks to automate journal entries, accelerate bank reconciliations, and generate transaction-level explanations for variance analysis, cutting close timelines dramatically and giving teams faster visibility into financial performance. Finally, Albert shares how Stacks thinks about talent density and culture, why the company raised its Series A so quickly after seed, and what “success” looks like: flipping finance from spending most of its time on data manipulation to spending most of its time on insights and strategy.

Chapters
0:00 Accounting Workflows & Quick ROI
0:49 TIM Introduction
1:42 Why the CFO Office Is Ripe for Disruption
3:41 Monthly Close & Data Fragmentation Problem
7:31 Why AI Adoption in Finance Is Hard
11:31 Stacks Origin Story & Product Vision
19:02 Real Customer Use Cases & Impact
26:22 Series A, Culture, and Future of Finance

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The Investment Memo is a podcast interview series where founders see their original investment memo for the first time and revisit the deal that started it all. The memo becomes the spine of the episode — sparking honest conversation about early conviction, risk, growth and the relationship that formed between founder and investor.

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