Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Jeff Cobourn leads finance, business operations, and strategy at Gusto, where he's spent nearly nine years building out the company's financial infrastructure. Rohit Divate recently joined Tide as VP of Finance after seven years in corporate finance and strategy at Gusto.
Somrat Niyogi, General Partner at Recall Capital and Village Global Network Investor, sits down with Jeff and Rohit to unpack how AI has rewired the finance function from the inside out. They trace the shift from spreadsheets and BI tools to Claude Code as the default daily workflow, including how board decks that once took two weeks and five people now come together as pull requests against an HTML file. The conversation moves through what finance skills and attributes still matter in an AI-native world, whether teams will shrink or simply cover more ground, and how roles like BI, investor relations, and data visualization are starting to merge. Jeff and Rohit also get into the practical mechanics of the shift: how Gusto scores AI fluency across the entire company, how they're budgeting for token spend the way they once budgeted for headcount, and where the real build-versus-buy tension is playing out across ERP, FP&A software, and internal tools. They close with predictions on what's dead, what's dying, and what the first hire at a finance team in 2026 should actually look like.
00:00 Cold open
00:43 Welcome to Recall Sessions
01:24 Why finance feels like the center of everything right now
02:01 AI's inflection point: the last 3-4 months
03:14 How Claude Code changed the day-to-day
04:26 90% of the day now happens in Claude Code
05:50 Is the spreadsheet finally dead?
06:36 Replacing Tableau with Claude-built dashboards
07:42 What's changing about the role of finance
09:43 Skills vs. attributes: what's changed and what hasn't
10:18 Doing more with less, or hiring for more surface area
13:14 What's the ceiling for a single finance hire now?
15:23 Which finance functions get eliminated first
17:10 The merging of BI, IR, and finance roles
18:15 Budgeting for token spend like a new headcount line
19:57 How much AI spend per person is reasonable?
23:21 Inside Gusto's AI fluency scoring system
26:24 Why Tide isn't measuring AI fluency yet
27:48 Will headcount ratios shift as AI boosts productivity?
29:03 The build vs. buy debate for internal tools
36:29 Why nobody loves NetSuite, but nobody leaves it either
39:03 Could FP&A software be replaced by a custom Claude model?
41:29 Is enterprise application software actually dying?
43:21 The "company Jarvis" nobody's built yet
45:38 Advice for the first finance hire at a startup in 2026
46:14 Why data architecture comes before anything else
47:38 The second hire: a head of IT and security
48:05 Rapid fire: dead, dying, or here to stay
49:54 Closing
Jeff Cobourn leads finance, business operations, and strategy at Gusto, where he's spent nearly nine years building out the company's financial infrastructure. Rohit Divate recently joined Tide as VP of Finance after seven years in corporate finance and strategy at Gusto.
Somrat Niyogi, General Partner at Recall Capital and Village Global Network Investor, sits down with Jeff and Rohit to unpack how AI has rewired the finance function from the inside out. They trace the shift from spreadsheets and BI tools to Claude Code as the default daily workflow, including how board decks that once took two weeks and five people now come together as pull requests against an HTML file. The conversation moves through what finance skills and attributes still matter in an AI-native world, whether teams will shrink or simply cover more ground, and how roles like BI, investor relations, and data visualization are starting to merge. Jeff and Rohit also get into the practical mechanics of the shift: how Gusto scores AI fluency across the entire company, how they're budgeting for token spend the way they once budgeted for headcount, and where the real build-versus-buy tension is playing out across ERP, FP&A software, and internal tools. They close with predictions on what's dead, what's dying, and what the first hire at a finance team in 2026 should actually look like.
00:00 Cold open
00:43 Welcome to Recall Sessions
01:24 Why finance feels like the center of everything right now
02:01 AI's inflection point: the last 3-4 months
03:14 How Claude Code changed the day-to-day
04:26 90% of the day now happens in Claude Code
05:50 Is the spreadsheet finally dead?
06:36 Replacing Tableau with Claude-built dashboards
07:42 What's changing about the role of finance
09:43 Skills vs. attributes: what's changed and what hasn't
10:18 Doing more with less, or hiring for more surface area
13:14 What's the ceiling for a single finance hire now?
15:23 Which finance functions get eliminated first
17:10 The merging of BI, IR, and finance roles
18:15 Budgeting for token spend like a new headcount line
19:57 How much AI spend per person is reasonable?
23:21 Inside Gusto's AI fluency scoring system
26:24 Why Tide isn't measuring AI fluency yet
27:48 Will headcount ratios shift as AI boosts productivity?
29:03 The build vs. buy debate for internal tools
36:29 Why nobody loves NetSuite, but nobody leaves it either
39:03 Could FP&A software be replaced by a custom Claude model?
41:29 Is enterprise application software actually dying?
43:21 The "company Jarvis" nobody's built yet
45:38 Advice for the first finance hire at a startup in 2026
46:14 Why data architecture comes before anything else
47:38 The second hire: a head of IT and security
48:05 Rapid fire: dead, dying, or here to stay
49:54 Closing
