|
In looking at Zoom as a company, “everything's going to get touched by AI,” CFO Michelle Chang told me in a recent interview. Senior leadership at Zoom looked at manual processes, broken processes and potential areas where AI could help boost cost efficiencies, she said.
“We have two goals: Get the satisfaction of our customers up, get the cost down. It's very clear,” she said in a discussion with CFO Journal.
In that light, she delved into how central her role as CFO has become, particularly as a strategic partner to CEO Eric Yuan.
“The CFO now plays a much more strategic role and a much more operational role,” she said. “Eric and I have found a great way of working together, that bridges a lot of that and frankly the CFO does a lot of the operations so that he can get into more shaping where the product is going.”
“Like any CFO, you're intimately involved in the operations, and how you need to evolve those to scale,” she said. “The two things that I opened up with, you see the CFO go strategic and then you see the CFO go operational. I think it all stems out of one thing. There aren't that many roles at the company that can see left or right,” referring to a holistic view of the company.
“It's a blessing to be able to see a company left or right. It's one of the reasons I'm drawn to the role,” she said.
Chang spoke recently as well with Alan Murray, president of the WSJ Leadership Institute, for our latest Leaders podcast. Both Chang and Yuan spoke at our WSJ CFO Council Summit. You can watch that podcast series here.
For the full Leaders podcast interview, check it out on wsj.com, or listen on Apple or Spotify.
|
