The Teikametrics CFO says he could not follow the same career path today. What he did for the first 10 years of his career, AI now does. And he thinks that changes everything about how you build toward the CFO seat.

"Quite literally, what these AI tools are doing today is what I did for the first 10 years of my career."

That one sentence contains more career advice than most finance development programmes. Beaupre built his chops in FP&A at NetSuite, CloudLock, Digital.ai and others, building models in Excel, rolling up his sleeves, understanding what was happening in the business and creating scenarios that helped people plan with high-fidelity forward-looking analysis. He is describing that as a disappearing path. Not because the judgment that came from it is less valuable, but because the entry point has moved.

The skills that got you here are not the ones that will get others there

If the first decade of a finance career used to mean building models, the next decade's entry point is data fluency. Beaupre is explicit about what that looks like: "If you have a baseline understanding of coding, databases or tools like Databricks, SQL and similar technologies, and you combine that with financial acumen, that's what the modern CFO is going to look like in 10 to 15 years." He is careful to clarify that he does not mean writing code. He means understanding the data warehouse and the business logic behind the numbers, the same way his generation needed to understand everything sitting behind the spreadsheet. The skill has moved one layer deeper.

This has real consequences for how CFOs think about developing their teams. The apprenticeship model that once worked, juniors building up analytical muscle through repetition on spreadsheets and variance commentary, is being disrupted at exactly the entry point where judgment and pattern recognition used to form. If you are not thinking about what replaces that developmental foundation, you are not thinking about your succession pipeline.

The CFO is absorbing the COO role

Beaupre's CEO tells him the CFO is the most powerful person in the company, because nobody else combines analytical rigour with big-picture strategic thinking the same way. Beaupre agrees, and he goes further: he thinks the modern CFO already serves many of the same functions as a traditional COO. "CFOs aren't just reporting on performance anymore. They're helping determine where the business goes next." This is not an unusual view in 2026, but hearing it from a CFO who came through the FP&A track rather than a strategic finance or consulting track is useful context. The path matters less than the posture.

Don't try to be what you think a CFO should look like

The most unexpected part of Beaupre's conversation was his answer on what makes CFOs ineffective. His answer had nothing to do with technical skill or business acumen. "Early in my time as a CFO, I probably spent too much energy trying to fit what I thought the profile of a CFO should be instead of simply being myself." His advice is to take the best qualities from every mentor you have had and build a mosaic, rather than copying any single person or defaulting to a prescribed CFO posture. "You earned the role because of who you are, not because you're trying to imitate someone else."

That is harder to act on than it sounds. Most first-time CFOs walk into the role with a mental image of what the seat is supposed to look like, often pulled from the most directive, numbers-first leader they ever reported to. Beaupre's point is that the image is usually wrong, and often incomplete.