Goodbye Excel? AI Agents for Self-Driving Finance – Pigment CEO

Video Description

The most successful enterprises are about to become autonomous — and Eléonore Crespo, Co-CEO of Pigment, is building the nervous system that makes it possible. In this conversation, Eléonore reveals how her $400 million AI platform is already running supply chains for Coca-Cola, powering finance for the hottest newly public companies like Figma and Klarna, and processing thousands of financial scenarios for Uber and Snowflake faster and more accurately than any human team ever could. Eléonore predicts Excel will outlive most AI companies (but maybe only as a user interface, not a calculation engine) explains why she deliberately chose to build from Paris instead of Silicon Valley, and shares her contrarian take on why the AI revolution will create more CFOs, not fewer. You'll discover why Pigment's three-agent system (Analyst, Modeler, Planner) avoids the hallucination problems plaguing other AI companies, how they achieved human-level accuracy in financial analysis, and the accelerating timeline for fully autonomous enterprise planning that will make your current workforce obsolete. Pigment Website - https://www.pigment.com Twitter - https://x.com/gopigment Eléonore Crespo LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/eleonorecrespo FIRSTMARK Website - https://firstmark.com Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap Matt Turck (Managing Director) LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck LISTEN ON: Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7yLATDSaFvgJG80ACcRJtq Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mad-podcast-with-matt-turck/id1686238724 00:00 - Intro 01:22 - Building Pigment: 500 Employees, $400M Raised, 60% US Revenue 03:20 - From Quantum Physics To Google To Index Ventures 06:56 - Why Being a VC Was The Perfect Founder Training Ground 11:35 - The Impatience Factor: What Makes Great Founders 13:27 - Hiring For AI Fluency In The Modern Enterprise 14:54 - Pigment's Internal AI Strategy: Committees And Guardrails 17:30 - The Three AI Agents: Analyst, Modeler, And Planner 22:15 - Why Three Agents Instead Of One: Technical Architecture 24:10 - Agent Coordination: How The Supervisor Agent Works 24:46 - Real Example: Budget Variance Analysis Across 50 Products 27:15 - The Human-In-The-Loop Approach: Recommendations Not Actions 27:36 - Solving Hallucination: Why Structured Data Changes Everything 30:08 - Behind The Scenes: Verification Agents And Audit Trails 31:57 - Beyond Accuracy: Enabling The Impossible At Scale 36:21 - Will AI Finally Kill Excel? Eleanor's Contrarian Take 38:23 - The Vision: Fully Autonomous Enterprise Planning 40:55 - Real-Time Supply Chain Adaptation: The Ukraine Example 42:20 - Multi-LLM Strategy: OpenAI, Anthropic, And Partner Integration 44:32 - Token Economics: Why Pigment Isn't Token-Intensive 48:30 - Customer Adoption: Excitement Vs. Change Management Challenges 50:51 - Top-Down AI Demand Vs. Bottom-Up Implementation Reality 53:08 - The Reskilling Challenge: Everyone Becomes A Mini CFO 57:38 - Building A Global Company From Europe During COVID 1:00:02 - Managing A US Executive Team From Paris 1:01:14 - SI Partner Strategy: Why Boutique Firms Come Before Deloitte 1:03:28 - The $100 Billion Vision: Beyond Performance Management 1:05:08 - Success Metrics: Innovation Over Revenue