Andrea Ellis, CFO of Fanatics Betting and Gaming, isn’t interested in AI for AI’s sake. For her finance team, the technology has one clear job: kill the busywork so people can actually think. In a recent conversation, Ellis laid out how a deliberate, people-first rollout is already shaving hours off monthly accounting closes, but the real prize is shifting her team’s focus from execution to strategy.
The problem, as she describes it, is that finance teams drown in manual processes—gathering information from disparate places, reviewing contracts, crunching data. That’s the grind AI can own. “The question that I posed was really, how can we make our day-to-day jobs less manual which ultimately will allow our teams to focus on strategy, and less on execution,” Ellis said. The answer required more than just flipping a switch on a new tool. It demanded a cultural nudge.
Ellis’s team took a structured approach to avoid the classic trap of spreading themselves too thin. They formed an AI automation task force, had every team member detail the processes they felt could benefit from AI, and then built a real roadmap. Basic ChatGPT training was mandatory, followed by a “GPT‑athon”—a full-day event where finance staff paired up with data scientists to build custom GPTs for specific projects. The goal was to make ChatGPT feel like a daily partner, not a novelty.
The early metrics back up the approach. One of their first custom tools, VendorID GPT, automates vendor identification and contract summarization. The result? About 18 hours of monthly work simply disappears. When you’re racing to close the books, that’s not marginal—it’s material. Beyond time savings, Ellis pointed to faster data analysis that’s already generating more actionable insights. Her forward-looking roadmap is even more ambitious, eyeing generative AI as a genuine “thought partner” for strategic planning and scenario analysis. The message to her team is clear: the machines will handle the gathering, so you can handle the “So what, what are we going to do about this?”
