EP 002 - Customer Value Enhancement through Internal Excellence with Jay Sahal, CFO at Yellow.ai

Strategy of Finance

This episode of the SoF podcast features a discussion with Jay Sahal, CFO at Yellow.ai, an NLP platform that allows enterprises to build chat- and voice bots in over 100 languages to automate customer support and conversational commerce.

Jay is a Chartered Accountant and Company Secretary by qualification and joined Yellow.ai in Dec 2020 after honing his craft for over 20 years in multiple large companies, including the IT giant Wipro. He spent over 15 years at Wipro leading the Finance function for various business units, including $1 bn+ Healthcare & Life Sciences BU.

In this episode, Jay shares his views on the evolving role of the modern CFO, the impact of technology and automation, the relationship with the CEO and the rest of the management team, what keeps him motivated, and advice for emerging professionals.

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Quotes:

"You are trying to change the tires of a fast-moving car, and you need that kind of agility, that kind of thinking process to do that. And you can't stop the car and change the tires... you should be able to manage dynamic environment in a better way, should be able to make quick decisions, and you should be able to do course correction very fast."

"Certainly right now, CFOs are business partners, CFOs are driving enterprise automation journey, CFOs are trying to manage risks for an enterprise end-to-end in a proactive way. I think going forward given that more and more automation is coming, what an enterprise can give value to a customer will be linked to how they are operating internally, and CFOs will play a bigger role in driving that journey."

"Collaboration is a key skill I seek in people. Are you able to work with others? If two people are aligned, they are able to do five people's work. If they are not aligned, put together, they'll not do half people's work."

"In your core areas, you should look for improvement every week, every month, every year... One step at a time, every day, you make a difference, and you can break a mountain with small steps. So small steps of efficiency, small steps towards better experience, better output, better way to work, I think you'll be able to transform the organization."

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Where to find Jay Sahal:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-sahal-1918067/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JaySahal

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Where to find Rohit:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohitagarwal001/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/podcast_SoF

Email: [email protected]

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Sponsor:

This show is brought to you by Krayo - the Unified Operating System for Corporate Spend. Krayo is bringing together the whole journey of Corp Spend - Buy > Pay > Manage - into one single platform in an intelligence-first and automated design. We promise to make you more profitable. https://www.krayo.io/

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