That call was the “heartbeat of the company,” and finance was the “back engine” orchestrating every data point, Marie Myers, EVP and CFO of HPE, told Fortune.
But the effort required to assemble the deck left little room to shift the conversation from what happened to what the company should do next. Solving this is one of the examples of what prompted Myers and her team to embark on a finance transformation in 2025.
Partnering with Deloitte, the team codeveloped CFO Insights, an AI-powered solution built on Deloitte’s Zora AI platform and running on HPE’s Private Cloud AI infrastructure. Inside HPE, the system has a more personal name: “Alfred,” a nod to Batman’s trusted butler. For Myers, Alfred is more than a tool; it’s a platform to rethink how finance operates and how a CFO leads.
CFO Insights has cut HPE’s financial reporting cycle time by about 40% and processing costs by at least 25%, while driving more focused discussions around operational performance. It gives leaders faster access to data, self-service natural-language queries, and the agility to make insight-driven decisions, according to Myers.
Myers said the first move wasn’t to switch on AI, but to redesign the work. Myers and Gustav van der Westhuizen, COO for finance and strategy, began by centralizing preparation for the Monday call within a single FP&A organization. Instead of each business unit scrambling over the weekend to pull reports, a unified team now owns the workflow and data inputs. That centralization created a clean foundation for Alfred—and a group equipped to drive change management.
