CFOs as transformation architects: Deloitte and HPE envision a new era in AI-driven finance

Finance leaders in large enterprises know the struggle all too well: siloed data, manual reconciliations, repetitive processes, and reporting cycles so long that insights are outdated before they’re delivered. These inefficiencies erode their organization’s agility and hinder strategic decision-making.

HPE CFO and Executive Vice President Marie Myers has refused to accept that status quo. Instead, she has embraced a “transformation with purpose” mindset to shift the CFO’s focus from retrospective performance analysis to forward-looking enterprise intelligence that actively drives growth. To achieve this, Myers has prioritized greater technology adoption at HPE and cross-functional operating rhythms with a strong foundation in data hygiene, governance, and change management.

Collaborating with Deloitte, Myers launched a journey [beginning in 2025] to transform finance operations and pioneer agentic solutions that can reimagine how CFOs lead their organizations. They started by examining HPE’s regular Operational Performance Review process in an effort to uncover opportunities for greater efficiency and value creation across the entire enterprise.

Together, HPE and Deloitte co-developed CFO Insights, which combines agentic and generative artificial intelligence (AI) in one solution powered by Deloitte’s Zora AI™ platform. Known internally at HPE as “Alfred” in a nod to the role Batman’s trusted butler plays, the solution runs on HPE’s Private Cloud AI, which provides the infrastructure and orchestration layer for the workloads.

CFO Insights’ agentic AI is replacing static, backward-looking reporting with a dynamic insight-driven executive reporting platform that interacts with HPE’s underlying data (in excess of roughly 300 million line items) in near real time. In other words, CFO Insights doesn’t just equip leaders with timely information; the agentic platform distills what they need to know, recommends next steps to investigate issues, and accelerates time-to-insight for faster, more actionable decisions. No more waiting for data to be pulled or PowerPoint decks to be built. This enables leaders to focus on ensuring performance targets are on track versus simply reporting past results.

What really sets CFO Insights apart, however, is its generative AI’s breakthrough ability to behave deterministically. When you ask a GenAI solution the same question multiple times, it will provide a slightly different answer each time. That probabilistic-like behavior is fine for creative tasks, but in finance, where consistency, auditability, and trust are non-negotiable, it poses a problem.

Together Deloitte, NVIDIA, and the HPE team reengineered the foundational NVIDIA NIMs, or AI building blocks, to ensure deterministic outcomes in Alfred, a Zora AI™ CFO Insights implementation at HPE, meaning users get the same answer every time they ask the same question. That might sound simple, but it solves a long-standing theoretical challenge in enterprise generative AI: making large language models (LLMs) behave predictably in inherently non-repeatable LLM environments.

In other words, a known limitation of GenAI and underlying LLMs was turned into a practical capability, one that unlocks real trust in AI-driven financial decision-making. And that’s what makes CFO Insights not just useful, but genuinely innovative. It delivers consistent, auditable, and trustworthy outputs every time.

The impact is real. CFO Insights is cutting financial reporting cycle time at HPE by approximately 40% and processing costs by 25% (at a minimum), while driving more productive and targeted discussion around operational performance. It is empowering leaders with faster access to performance data, self-service natural language queries, and the agility to make insight-driven decisions. This isn’t just a test pilot; it’s a purpose-built solution delivering measurable value.

The transformation doesn’t stop there: HPE is now co-sourcing several processes in its finance organization with Deloitte to reimagine finance operations empowered by AI automation and allow its teams to move forward with agility and scale. Through this collaboration, HPE is redefining the future of finance, focusing on AI solutions to optimize critical CFO functions such as credit and collections, accounts payable, payroll, internal audit, and procurement operations.

The need for agile, efficient, and future-ready finance operations has never been greater. And the vision of CFOs as transformational architects, driving strategy and shaping decisions, has never been more attainable. Together, HPE and Deloitte are proving that an AI-native mindset can elevate the CFO’s role from financial steward to a strategic driver of enterprise performance and growth.