Video
How OpenAI automated accounting with AI
Scale your financial operations at hyper-growth speeds by prioritizing a data-first infrastructure and empowering your team to replace manual Excel workflows with automated, AI-driven scripts.
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.
Altre finance risorse
Inside Rippling Finance, Ep. 1: AI governance for accounting
Rippling's Chief Accounting Officer walks through the governance framework his team built to use AI in a controlled, auditable way.
Video
Payroll has a banking problem
Payroll has been stuck in a 2-4 day clearing cycle for decades, and it's not an accident. This video breaks down why, and how Business Banking fixes it.
Video
How an AI unicorn runs Finance without a budget
Learn how Clay's Head of Finance runs one of the fastest growing AI startups without traditional budgets
Video
AI in finance: what's working, what isn't, and where it's heading
Watch finance leaders from Higgsfield, Arta, and Rippling break down how they're actually using AI today—the wins, the frustrations, and what they're building toward.
See Rippling in action
See how Rippling can help you manage all your employee data and operations in one place, no matter your business’s size.