Stop Pricing It Like Software. AI Is 'A Ticket You Must Buy' to Stay in the Game.

The first wave of enterprise AI was about subtraction: point the technology at basic, repeatable processes, cut headcount, shrink the structure, book the savings. The companies furthest along have moved past that, and the second wave inverts the logic. AI now sits beside the team rather than in place of it, expanding how much a smaller group of people can analyze, hypothesize, and challenge. The scarce resource is no longer the analysis, which AI produces in abundance, but the judgment to frame the right question, call the decision, and own the outcome.

Fernando Andrade is a Regional CFO and Global Transformation Executive who has led value-creation and finance functions across Latin America. He has deep experience in the healthcare and medtech industry spanning operations in Brazil, the US, and beyond. Fernando has spent his career turning data into decisions under real accountability, which makes him skeptical of the idea that more analysis is the same as more clarity.

"AI will never produce a good strategy by itself. It belongs to senior management," Fernando asserts. That conviction frames his view of where AI actually earns its place.

From cutting headcount to raising the ceiling

Fernando frames the current moment as a deliberate break from the cost-cutting reflex that defined early adoption. The advanced companies are wiring AI into their teams to raise their analytical ceiling rather than to thin them out.

"Companies that are already advanced in AI adoption are trying to bring AI to be together with the teams, not to replace the teams," he notes. The value shows up in general and administrative work, where AI helps people frame the right problem, challenge assumptions, and read insights in context. The tool widens the aperture. The human still decides what to look at and what it means.

Framing the question is the human's job

For Fernando, the division of labor is clean. AI is unmatched at speeding up hypothesis generation, comparing data, and running benchmarks across more ground than a person could cover. What it can't do is decide what problem is worth solving in the first place.

"Framing the right question is something really human," he says. "AI is there to provide different angles, different hypotheses. But the most important thing in building a strategy is framing exactly what my real issue is." Without that framing, the analytical power turns into an endlessly expanding net of data that never resolves into a decision.

This is why he insists on a deadline. Senior leaders can spend unlimited time gathering and cross-checking, but the more senior the role, the more accountable it is for calling a stop. "We can invest lots of time producing more data, but let's transform this data into information," he suggests. The seniority is precisely what converts open-ended analysis into a choice the company can act on.

The CFO's real job is the non-financial number

Fernando is direct about a trap specific to his own function. The instinct of a finance leader is to compress everything into one financial figure, like the EBITDA line or the return on capital, and treat that as the target.

He argues for the opposite. Drawing on his experience leading value creation and transformation at a company spanning medtech and clinical operations, he says the financial number is an outcome, not a lever. The CFO's job, with AI now capable of surfacing the operational picture, is to find the non-financial KPIs underneath it.

"The CFO should be fluent enough on the business to identify the key non-financial KPIs—the operative ones, the ones related to people—to then influence the finance ones as an outcome and not as a main target," he says. Pointing AI at the single financial KPI misreads where the business is actually moving.

The second wave exposes communication gaps

The most common failure Fernando sees isn't of the technical variety. It is middle managers using AI as a pass-through, answering every email and request with copy-pasted output they never actually absorbed.

The antidote is oral communication, a skill he thinks a decade of slide culture let atrophy. Anyone can generate a polished deck in seconds now, which means the deck no longer proves anything. What proves something is being able to walk away from the screen and explain the problem and its solution in whatever time the listener has.

"Shut down the computer, go to a coffee shop, and then I can explain you my problem and the solution I got with AI in 30 seconds, or if you have time, in three hours," he says. That only works if the executive has genuinely internalized what the AI produced and reached the conclusion themselves.

Judge the investment like a strategy bet

The framing Fernando most wants leaders to drop is AI as another software purchase to be justified on a one-year return. He sees it as a new capability employees are acquiring, closer to fluency in a language than a tool in the stack. "You don't judge this kind of investment in a pure return-on-investment, return-on-capital calculation."

He compares it to hiring a top management consultancy against a strategic challenge, which is an expense you accept to improve the company's odds of surviving, not one you expect to pay back on a clean schedule. It belongs in the strategy budget, not the IT budget, and it has to be sustained on a recurring basis or the spend is wasted.

Fernando is blunt about the stakes of sitting out. Plenty of companies still hesitate, wary of cost and, more legitimately, of the data-management and privacy exposure that comes with opening their information to AI. That's where he assigns IT its central role, securing the environment so employees trust it enough to experiment, because experimentation is how the organization actually learns. Restricting AI to R&D or the senior ranks defeats the point. "It's a ticket you must buy to participate in the more modern ways of management. If you don't have it, you're going to be out of the game. If you have it, the return will be there or not, depending on your business," he says.