How OpenAI automated accounting with AI
Spendsetter: Sowmya Ranganathan, Founder at Lumera (ex-Controller at OpenAI)
How do you build finance for the fastest growing company in history?
When Sowmya joined OpenAI in March 2023, ChatGPT had just become the fastest application to reach 100M users, creating unprecedented scaling challenges for the accounting team. With Excel breaking under the weight of their data, they needed to completely reimagine their financial operations.
Put data at the center of finance
The revolutionary solution was treating data as the foundation of finance rather than a downstream reporting function.
Sowmya made a bold trade — swapping a revenue accounting headcount for a finance data engineer. This created a system where raw financial data flowed into their data warehouse, got transformed with automated scripts, and fed real-time dashboards with automatic reconciliations.
The result? Accounting processes like revenue recognition became completely "touchless," handling growth from 100M to over 400 million weekly users without breaking.
Build the talent you need
When you can't find accountants with SQL skills, hire for finance expertise and develop technical capabilities internally.
Sowmya reveals how they used AI tools to help team members build coding skills over time, and shares the specific approach they took to handle compute costs that completely exceeded Excel's capacity.
Foster innovation from the bottom up
Rather than mandating AI adoption, OpenAI created "finance hackathons" during team offsites — low-pressure sessions where employees could experiment with automation.
Starting small with uploading CSVs to ChatGPT and progressing to generating code, this approach let finance professionals identify their own pain points while creating massive efficiency gains.
Download Sowmya's top three ChatGPT prompts for accounting now.
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