AI Tools
There are hundreds of AI tools. Most of them aren’t worth your time. Here are the ones that genuinely move the needle for finance professionals.
CFAIO runs on AI tools, every single day — not as novelty, but because they make finance professionals measurably faster and better at the job. The tools below are the ones that have actually stuck. If they disappeared tomorrow, the workflow breaks.
Claude (Anthropic)
Best for: long documents, complex analysis, following precise instructions
Claude is the daily driver here. It handles long context better than most — you can paste an entire board pack or a 50-page contract and ask meaningful questions about it. It also follows complex, multi-part instructions better than other models in my experience, which matters when you’re trying to produce a specific type of output for a specific audience.
Free tier available. Paid plan (Claude Pro) gives you access to the most powerful models and more usage. Worth it.
ChatGPT (OpenAI)
Best for: general tasks, code writing, broad knowledge questions, image generation
ChatGPT-4o is excellent across a huge range of tasks. For finance work, it’s particularly good at writing Excel formulas and VBA macros — describe what you want to achieve and it writes the code. It also has the most mature ecosystem of integrations and plugins if you want to extend what it can do.
GPT-4o is available on the free tier. ChatGPT Plus gives you access to newer models and more features. If you’re choosing just one paid tool to start with, start here or with Claude.
Microsoft Copilot
Best for: working inside Office 365 — Excel, Word, Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint
If your organisation has the right Microsoft 365 licence, Copilot is the most practical AI tool for day-to-day finance work — because it lives inside the tools you already use. In Excel, you can ask it to analyse your data, build formulas, or explain what a complex spreadsheet does. In Outlook, it summarises long email threads. In Teams, it takes meeting notes and surfaces action points.
Copilot for Finance is a separate add-on that connects directly to your ERP for reconciliation and variance analysis. If it’s available in your environment, it’s worth exploring.
Perplexity
Best for: research with cited sources
Perplexity is the tool of choice when the question is what’s happening right now. It searches the web in real time and summarises the answer with sources you can check. For keeping up with AI news, regulatory changes, market movements, or anything where currency matters, it’s faster and more useful than Google for most finance-related queries.
The free tier covers most use cases. The Pro plan gives you access to more powerful models and higher usage limits.
Gemini (Google)
Best for: Google Workspace users, analysing data in Google Sheets
If your organisation runs Google Workspace rather than Microsoft, Gemini is the equivalent of Copilot — AI built into your existing productivity tools. Gemini in Google Sheets can analyse data, generate charts, and answer questions about your spreadsheet in natural language. It’s improved significantly in the past year and is worth testing if you’re in the Google ecosystem.
Otter.ai or Fireflies
Best for: meeting transcription and action point extraction
Finance professionals spend a lot of time in meetings. These tools join your calls, transcribe them in real time, and then use AI to extract action points, decisions, and summaries. The time they save on post-meeting admin adds up quickly — especially for project meetings where following up on commitments is critical.
The honest recommendation
Don’t try to use all of these at once. Pick one — Claude or ChatGPT — and use it every day for two weeks on real work tasks. That’s how you build the habit and develop the prompting instincts that make it genuinely useful. Once you’ve got that down, layer in the others.