AI Tools for Everyday Work: What Finance Leaders Tried (and Loved)

Jenny Kay Pollock
Sep 26, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Sep 27, 2025

📍 Event: FEI SF Bay Area • Sept 25, 2025 🤝 Hosted by: FEI SF Bay Area & WOMEN x AI 🎤 Speakers: Holly Uber, Reut Lazo, Jenny Kay Pollock

Why this workshop mattered

Finance leaders are being asked to move faster without adding risk. This session gave executives a chance to try AI tools side-by-side with guided prompts. Everyone left with practical prompts, a 30+ AI tools list, and a simple framework to start piloting AI safely at work. Thank you to Josette and the entire FEI team for hosting us and creating the space to learn AI in community.

Hands-on tools we explored

✍️ Writing & Research ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude — compared outputs, citations, and follow-up behavior.Prompts included executive summaries, scenario planning, and research briefs.

📊 Strategic Planning 90-day CFO action plans with ROI, risk, and compliance factors. Perplexity for cited research, ChatGPT for synthesis/formatting.

🧩 NotebookLM (crowd favorite) Turned uploaded docs into audio/video overviews, mind maps, and study aids in Studio.Real use cases: personal branding, internal reports, quick learning.

📝 Meeting Notes Granola + Otter to capture conversations, summarize, and even draft posts.

🎨 Visualization Napkin AI made finance concepts (like PE “dry powder”) instantly visual and shareable.

💻 Code / “Vibe Code” (quick peek) Lovable + bolt scaffold prototypes from plain-English specs.Tip: write prompts like product manager instructions.

Copy-paste prompts (from the worksheet)

At the FEI x WOMEN x AI session, participants didn’t just hear about tools—they got a worksheet designed for hands-on practice and real-world finance application of AI.

The worksheet highlighted four core tools to start with:

ChatGPT for writing support and quick image generation,
Perplexity for research with citations,
NotebookLM for personal branding and turning documents into audio, video, or mind maps, and
Napkin AI for transforming complex finance ideas into clear visuals.

The heart of the worksheet was a set of ready-to-try prompts. Instead of vague examples, we gave concrete scenarios tailored for finance leaders: summarizing Bloom Energy’s quarterly earnings, creating optimistic and downside scenarios for interest rate changes, or drafting a CFO report that blends AI trends with a 90-day action plan. Each exercise showed how different tools handle the same task, giving participants a side-by-side view of what’s possible.

We also explored NotebookLM’s ability to create strategic briefings from real company documents, and Napkin AI’s knack for turning data points like private equity’s $2.6T in “dry powder” into visuals you could drop straight into a presentation. AI Use Cases for CFOs

Executive Summary: Summarize Bloom Energy Q2 2025 into 3 key points for executives.
Scenario Planning: Rising interest rates at Alphabet → optimistic, base, downside (2–3 sentences each).
Deep CFO Report: Healthcare CFO, 2025 AI finance trends, 90-day action plan with ROI.
NotebookLM Briefing: Turn uploaded docs into an executive summary with clear recommendations.
Napkin AI Visual: Create a graphic to explain PE’s $2.6T “dry powder.”

From there, we introduced additional options Claude, Gemini, Granola, and even “vibe coding” tools like Lovable and bolt so attendees could see how different AI platforms overlap or specialize. In short, the worksheet doubled as both a guide for the evening and a take-home playbook. Attendees left with tools to test, prompts to copy, and practical ideas they could put into practice the very next day.