Revenue growth is the top priority for Adriana Carpenter as she steps into the role of CFO at AI sales performance platform Xactly, but to achieve that goal, "we want to make sure we optimize operations and scale efficiently," she said in an interview with CFO Dive.

For Carpenter, the role is still in its early stages: Xactly announced her on July 14as CFO. The company offers AI-driven sales performance orchestration products. In her first days on the job, her focus was on "truly being a strategic partner to the business, thinking about how to improve and enhance revenue performance," Carpenter said.

Telling stories with visuals

Before joining the Los Gatos, California-based company, Carpenter spent four years as CFO at spend management platform Emburse (according to her LinkedIn profile). Her background also includes eight years at Ping Identity, where she served as senior vice president and chief accounting officer.

Carpenter said she has "always been driven by the intersection of financial strategy and operational scale," which is why she accepted the senior finance role at Xactly. She also noted that the business attracted her as an "AI innovator" in the industry—the company is focused on integrating AI into its products and changing how customers manage their revenue cycles.

Prior to the CFO appointment, Xactly had already released multiple new products and established several partnerships this year to solidify its position as an AI innovator. In May, the company launcheda suite of AI agentson its existing revenue intelligence platform, designed to help customers handle manual revenue work and bridge the disconnect between different systems, according to a press release at the time.

In April, as part of a partnership with ServiceNow, Xactly launched an AI agent focused on dispute management. Customers canuse the agentto automate compensation inquiries and better manage the dispute submission, investigation, and resolution process, the press release said.

Although Carpenter is still early in her CFO role at Xactly, "when I think about priorities, my first priority is ensuring that financial capital and resource allocation are aligned with the company's mission," she said, to ensure the company invests in areas that deliver tangible results.

Carpenter will also bring lessons learned during her first CFO role at Emburse to Xactly. For example, "I think one of the biggest lessons is that people often learn better through visual cues," she said.

Whether communicating with board members, investors, or lenders, being able to show the story you are telling is crucial, she said.

"If you compare a point you are making with visual data—such as operational data tied to financial metrics, and show the story, trend, or outliers, then the message is better remembered and your point is more easily accepted," she said.

Career growth opportunities

Another area Carpenter is focusing on as she settles into Xactly is how to apply AI not only to the company's external products but also to internal processes and its workforce. At Xactly, she wants to approach this work in a way that is "very disciplined, but also very exploratory," she said.

"How do we think about adopting and investing in AI to truly drive internal operational excellence?" she asked.

One challenge Carpenter is focused on is ensuring the company can continue to develop the data architecture needed to support AI, because the technology "is fundamentally dependent on data," she said. Xactly is also "very deliberate" about the privacy and security challenges that come with implementing AI, she added.

Carpenter is also spending significant time thinking about how employees collaborate with technology.

"Some people are very excited and ready to dive in headfirst—they are already experimenting with various applications," she said. "But for others, starting to use AI can be intimidating, or even frightening."

As AI tools and solutions evolve, experimenting and engaging with them is "a fantastic career growth opportunity," so "we need to make sure we are effectively upskilling our teams," she said.

Ensuring team members can effectively use AI is crucial, as the technology is increasingly permeating daily tasks and processes—for example, Carpenter herself uses AI to summarize incoming information.

"Also, I hate making presentations, so I often use AI to help me build various slides and things like that—it works amazingly," she said.

In her day-to-day work as CFO, Carpenter also sees AI usage changing the communication expectations between finance teams and other leadership. For example, one changing perspective is that "the delivery of financial views... should no longer take days and days," but should be closer to real-time, she said.

AI helps enable this faster, more timely delivery because finance professionals are no longer bogged down in the details—instead, they can automatically gather key information and spend more critical time looking at the business holistically.

"This pushes the finance function to be more deeply integrated into the business, to be a better business partner, and to truly drive business outcomes, not just report financial metrics," she said. "That's not enough. You have to truly understand the connection between metrics and operations, and how to drive operational results."