What finance leaders can learn from OpenAI and AssemblyAI’s hypergrowth journey

As AI keeps redrawing the boundaries of what businesses can do, finance leaders are being called to evolve at a pace that mirrors the underlying tech itself. During a recent Metronome fireside chat, two finance experts on the forefront of this shift shared practical, battle-tested insights on scaling finance operations in AI-native environments.

This conversation with Lauren Workman, founding finance member at OpenAI, and Nick Johnson, VP of Finance at AssemblyAI, wasn’t theoretical. These are two operators managing rapid growth, real-time complexity, and evolving expectations in some of the world’s fastest-growing companies. Here's what every finance leader can learn from them.

The finance role has fundamentally changed—and it’s still evolving

Lauren put it simply: the finance job today isn’t what it was five years ago. "Comparing ourselves today to even the best finance teams two or three years ago is just mindblowingly different. The things that finance people are capable of today, that they aren’t dependent on others to do, I mean, we’ve not yet discovered the ceiling."

Historically, finance was reactive—closing books, generating reports, and responding to business needs. But today’s finance leaders are building scripts, running queries, and proactively generating insights that shape strategy. And in high-growth AI companies, they’re doing it all with smaller teams.

Nick reinforced this evolution, noting that "A lot more stuff is in databases, a lot less stuff is in spreadsheets . . . and there’s just a huge bias toward not adding a bunch of unnecessary folks to the team."

Action item: Train your team to operate like internal analytics consultants. Encourage fluency in SQL, data visualization, and AI tooling—not just accounting. Modern finance isn't about memorizing ASC 606; it's about architecting automated systems that anticipate needs and eliminate manual work.

Scale is nonlinear—design your finance infrastructure accordingly

Lauren and Nick both described moments where usage growth and system load jumped by orders of magnitude overnight. Lauren described how intense that experience has been: "Literally overnight the thing that worked yesterday cannot work today because it will no longer fit in an Excel workbook, and the SQL query is taking a thousand years, and also the data warehouse is on fire, and all our logs are failing . . . "

In usage-based businesses—especially those building on AI—the demand curve is unpredictable. A feature can go viral, a use case can unlock a market, and suddenly your billing system, revenue model, or data infrastructure is on fire. "Build the skyscraper from the start—don’t build a house of cards," said Nick.

This means your finance stack can’t be static. You need flexibility, automation, and observability baked in from the beginning.

Action item: Model for long-tail events, even in early-stage companies. Think modular, API-first tooling, audit trails, and usage analytics. Choose partners who won’t become bottlenecks when growth hits 10x in a quarter. Metronome, for instance, helped both teams avoid "ripples on billing and invoicing," as Nick noted, even at hyperscale.

Redundancy isn’t just for IT—it’s a finance strategy

Redundancy—multiple bank accounts, usage caps, safety nets in free-tier programs—isn’t just an ops problem. It’s a core finance responsibility, especially in today’s volatile environment. Nick pointed to what happened with Silicon Valley Bank in the banking crisis as a wake-up call: financial fragility often emerges not from your core business model, but from adjacent risks. Nick’s advice? "Protect the downside in those black swan scenarios."

Lauren added one more requirement. "Understand how things are connected . . . learning that in the moment is not a good place to be." 

Action item: Create playbooks for "failure mode" scenarios. What happens if billing fails? What happens if usage spikes 300%? Who owns remediation? Map out dependencies across billing, engineering, and finance, and run quarterly simulations.

Empower the team to learn, tinker, and ship

Finance teams can’t just be static, and it’s clear that Lauren, especially, is passionate about enabling experimentation:

"Enabling people to feel comfortable spending time learning new tools—even in an industry where there’s a lot of pressure to finish something against a deadline—is a very bold thing. You can only get those gains by enabling a culture that celebrates that learning, even amidst all these deadline pressures."

This is the new finance career arc. Technical tinkering and cross-functional collaboration—not rote closing work—are what define upward mobility.

In a similar push for new ways of thinking about financial operations, Nick encouraged junior finance professionals to lean into what might traditionally be considered laziness. "I’m kind of being facetious, but be a little lazier. What I mean by that is: Why do you not have LLMs over your GL? It doesn’t make sense. You can just query it and figure out most answers in two seconds." A cheeky way to say: stop accepting drudgery. If something is tedious, automate it. Take the time back for higher leverage work.

Action item: Build a culture that treats AI as a co-pilot, not a threat. Give team members protected time to build, learn, and prototype—even during close cycles. Reward initiative and curiosity with visibility and growth.

Strategic finance = storytelling + systems thinking

"A good accountant is a good storyteller." – Lauren

In high-context, engineering-heavy cultures, finance has to translate numerical complexity into a usable, productive narrative. Metrics aren’t just metrics—they’re stories of product performance, customer behavior, and margin dynamics. And finance owns that narrative. Presenting certain numbers in certain ways can significantly affect the business, so deeply understanding how each number affects your P&L is critical. As Nick says, “You’ve just got to know what’s driving what. If a certain spend isn’t driving one thing or another, get rid of it. You’ve got to have the backbone to be the voice in the room that says that.” Modern finance teams are shifting from “doing the math” to “shaping the direction” in a meaningful way.

Action item: Build storytelling into your monthly rhythms. Annotate dashboards, host data walk-throughs, and narrate change. Shift from historical reporting to forward-looking synthesis. Finance must evolve from gatekeepers to guides.

Governance doesn’t mean saying no—it means asking how

In a world where AI-native companies ship fast and scale faster, finance must enforce discipline without stifling innovation. As Scott said, "Finance’s job is to explore the art of the how, not say no." That means supporting go-to-market experiments, flexible pricing models, and tiered contracts—all while staying compliant and audit-ready. In fast-moving and innovative companies, finance can and must drop the act of being “the enforcer” and become a true partner to growth and all that comes with it.

Action item: Frame governance as enablement. Don’t just say no. Offer structured alternatives. Build dashboards that flag risk early. Co-design controls with engineering and product teams, using shared language and first-principles reasoning.

Don’t just plan for next milestone—plan for the next switchback

Nick described managing growth as preparing for the next “switchback”—the next inflection point in company evolution. As teams grow and forecasts stabilize, finance’s role must expand from backstop to value creator. Nick noted that finance teams must know the answers to questions like, "What’s really driving our enterprise value? What’s going to drive our market cap up?"

It’s not about being an Excel expert anymore. It’s about seeing around corners, shaping pricing models, and identifying durable growth levers.

Action item: Design your org to scale in lockstep with the business—not ahead of it, not behind it. Build shared ownership of metrics with product and GTM leaders. And make sure your tooling evolves alongside your pricing and customer base.

Build for invariance, adapt for variability

This moment in finance is defined by change. Tools, expectations, business models—everything is in flux. The only certainty is that what works today won’t be enough tomorrow. "Everything is going to reset and change at a rate that is hard to understand,” Scott noted. “The nice thing about AI is it’s changing faster than you could even write it down."

Because of this, you can’t wait for a playbook. You’ve got to build your own. To keep pace with finance in this new world, focus on the invariants—data quality, customer trust, and storytelling—and stay relentlessly adaptable.

Watch the complete fireside chat with these finance leaders from OpenAI and Assembly AI to see how they're building the future of finance.