INTHEBLACK November 2026 - Magazine - Page 34
MEMBER PROFILE
ONE PIECE OF ADVICE
“Embrace change.
Be curious.
Be courageous
to take on
a challenge.”
with the technology and look for somewhere
to use it. She starts with the problem, identifies
the business outcome needed, works out what
needs to change and then learns enough about
the technology to understand what might
be possible.
That distinction is becoming increasingly
important for finance leaders as AI moves
from an emerging technology to something
businesses are actively incorporating into
the way they work. For La Fontaine, the
future of the CFO is not about becoming
a technologist. It is about being able to work
equally with technology, data and people, and
understanding what can be automated, what
still requires human judgement and what the
organisation should do with the information
that technology makes available.
“I think it is really about trying to get a handle
on translating complexity into clarity.”
34 INTHEBLACK November 2026
RETHINKING THE WORK
Earlier in La Fontaine’s career, improving
efficiency often meant finding a cheaper
way to carry out the same work.
At Hewlett Packard, where she spent
nearly 20 years, that increasingly meant
outsourcing and offshoring — moving
transactional work to lower-cost
locations so entities could reduce
their operating costs.
“Organisations would look to
transition part of the work overseas
into an offshore model,” she says.
“Through labour arbitrage, they would
drive improvements in costs.”
La Fontaine is not dismissive of the
model. These methods solved a specific
problem at a particular point in the evolution of
business technology. They allowed organisations
to scale transactional work, access different skills
and reduce costs relatively quickly.
Today, there are a range of choices available
to finance leaders. Technology now makes
it possible to examine the work itself before
deciding how it should be resourced. A process
that once appeared to require a team of people
may contain a relatively small amount of work
that genuinely needs human intervention and
judgement, surrounded by tools to handle
repetitive activities.
That changes the question from where
work can be done more cheaply to what
professionals should be doing in the first
place. “I think now I would ask, ‘What parts
of it can I automate and essentially keep the
knowledge in-house or within my control?’”
A UNIQUE ABILITY
That thinking has also shaped how La Fontaine
sees the evolution of the CFO role.
More recently, in her current role as an
advisory board member with digital software
business Specia AI, La Fontaine is helping
clients to understand automation possibilities.
This could look like refining accounts payable
processes where dashboards can flag unusual
transactions, identify irregular spending
