At Huntington Bancshares, the CFO is also the AI strategist

Good morning. For Zachary Wasserman, the role of CFO at Huntington Bancshares Inc. has expanded well beyond the balance sheet. He’s also an AI strategist.

“I’m actually leading the AI effort for the company,” Wasserman told me. “It’s an area of a lot of personal passion for me.”

That passion is translating into rapid change. In the fourth quarter of 2022, Huntington had just two AI agents—discrete programs running inside the business. Today, 50 are in production and more than 60 are in development, with roughly 15 new ones entering the pipeline every month. The acceleration, Wasserman said, is deliberate and foundational.

“It’s really a dramatic acceleration of agentic process transformation, which is really important, including in my finance team,” he said. That includes SEC reporting, tax filing, and data management supporting over 200 regulatory reports annually, along with broader productivity gains.

Huntington, No. 351 on the Fortune 500, a $285 billion asset regional bank holding company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and operates over 1,400 branches in 21 states. Colleague upskilling is a major focus, with a cultural shift underway as employees move beyond simple AI use. “We’re starting to use it like a thought partner for us,” he said. It’s aiding complex decision-making, software development, and, further out, customer-facing products and services.

To govern this, Wasserman has built a federated model—a central team setting strategy and handling advanced applications, paired with resources embedded in each business segment. Over the past year and a half, Huntington has stood up 13 teams focused on discrete parts of the business, driving data analytics and AI use cases.

“Our philosophy is that this is so foundationally transformational that basically every part of the company needs to start adopting it at pace and at scale,” he said.

A recent report found that when CFOs oversee AI projects and score outcomes, companies extract more value.

Three forces behind the quarter

While Wasserman builds out Huntington’s AI infrastructure, the bank on Thursday reported........

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