For decades the finance team's choice was binary: buy off-the-shelf software, or wait six months for engineering to build something custom.

AI collapsed that choice.

Finance and accounting teams are now shipping their own tools in days, not quarters - and the question has shifted from "what should we buy?" to "what should we build?"

In this session, three operators leading the shift walk through exactly what they've built, how they built it, and the framework they use to decide what to vibe-code versus what to leave to a vendor.

What you'll walk away with

  • A practical build-vs-buy framework for 2026 - where building yourself wins, and where SOC compliance, audit trails, and vendor intelligence mean buying is still the right call
  • Three real, deployed examples of AI-built finance tools (hoteling, procurement intake, close management) with the prompts and scripts to recreate them
  • A working understanding of "vibe coding" - what it is, what it isn't, and why finance is one of the best functions to apply it in
  • How the finance and accounting roles are reshaping around AI fluency, and the new archetypes (Finance AI Lead, Strategic Accounting Ops) emerging at AI-native companies
  • Templates and scripts you can adopt into your own stack the same day

The problems we're solving

"Month-end close is a 20-day exercise in chasing visibility we should already have." When spend, contracts, and approvals live in separate tools, you find out what happened weeks after it happened. You'll see the lightweight tooling that closes the gap without an ERP migration.

"We're a lean team being asked to scale without adding headcount." The old playbook said hire. The new playbook says build. You'll see what to automate first and what's not worth your time.

"Contract review is eating my week, but Legal is six months out." AI contract review isn't a future state, it's a working tool already running inside Ramp. You'll see the prompts and the workflow.

Meet the speakers

Brock Beyer - Controller, Jump
Brock is the Controller at Jump, the AI operating system for financial advisors, and a CPA who went from zero coding experience to building deployed finance tools in three months. As Jump's first accounting hire, he's taken an AI-first approach to scaling the back office through vibe-coded apps for hoteling, procurement, and close management.

Stephen Hedlund - Head of Finance, Rillet
Stephen leads finance and marketing at Rillet, the AI-native ERP rebuilding financial infrastructure for the modern era. He's deep in Claude Code, building custom tools like a 13-week cash forecast in about an hour, and is currently leading a multi-city AI coding roadshow for finance professionals.

Dave Wieseneck - Expert in Residence, Ramp
Dave sits at the intersection of finance and product at Ramp, building and prototyping what modern AI-powered finance operations look like. He's a frequent host of Ramp's live sessions and recently vibe-coded internal tools including an AI contract reviewer and a Slack-native image generator.