Maxa’s Essential AI Finance Roadmap, Featured in AI CFO Office
by Maxa team
Wouter Born, a CFOTech investor and founder of finstory.ai, interviewed our co-CEO Raphael Steinman about AI in finance.
He expected the standard pitch. Instead, he got uncomfortable honesty.
“You cannot put a Ferrari engine on a go-kart chassis and expect it to survive enterprise reality.”
That’s what Raphael told him. And it’s the truth no one else in our industry wants to say out loud.
Most AI vendors want you to believe you can skip the hard work. Connect your systems, ask questions in natural language, and get strategic insights instantly.
But here’s what actually happens:
- Your data lives in three different ERPs with conflicting chart of accounts
- AI pulls from fragmented sources and gets conflicting numbers
- It confidently gives you an answer that’s completely wrong
- Your team goes back to spreadsheets to figure out the truth
Speed without trust is worthless.
In his conversation with Wouter, Raphael walked through:
- Why 90% of AI value is in the harmonization work below the waterline that no one wants to talk about.
- Which finance roles will be extinct in three years, and which will thrive.
- Why you need deterministic accuracy with reasoning power—not just a chatbot on top of messy data.
Harmonization first. Finance-grade AI second.
If you work in the CFO office and feel the gap between AI promises and daily reality, Wouter captured something important in this interview.
The future belongs to people who understand the foundations, not just the headlines.