The forecast was beautiful. Revenue to one decimal place. Six weeks later, the biggest customer walked — and the warning signs were everywhere except the ledger.

Episode 2 of Beyond Automation takes last week's fork — automation replaces the task, augmentation multiplies the person — into the one function where mistakes come with signatures: finance. Alex traces the three-way split the best finance leaders are already making, stress-tests it against three objections (including the strongest case for the machine), and lands the controls mindset that makes confident wrongness manageable: treat AI output like junior-staff work — reviewed, sampled, signed off.

In this episode

• Why AI adoption in finance has plateaued at about six in ten functions — and why the plateau is the interesting ...