Good morning. CFOs are moving from the sidelines of AI strategy to the center of the conversation, and Cursor’s new CFO Council aims to turn that shift into a playbook for AI ROI.
Cursor, the AI coding company being acquired by SpaceX in a $60 billion all-stock transaction, has launched a CFO Council that will meet quarterly in rotating cities, beginning Aug. 18 in San Francisco. The group brings together finance leaders from tech-forward and legacy companies.
Newly announced members on Wednesday include Michael Brophy, CFO of Natera; Bea Ordonez, CFO of Payoneer; Dinesh Jain, CFO of Firstsource; Matthew Wajner, CFO of First American; Ed Grabscheid, CFO of JFrog; and Andrew Casey, CFO of Amplitude. They join members announced on July 6: Sonalee Parekh, CFO of SentinelOne; Madhur Deora, CFO of Paytm; and Aziz Megji, CFO of Asana. New members are being accepted on a rolling basis.
I sat down with Cursor COO Jordan Topoleski, who helped develop the council, to discuss why the initiative came together.
“Everyone’s spending on AI…but it’s really hard to actually understand how we can measure the tactical ROI,” he told me, describing a common concern among Fortune 500 customers using Cursor’s agentic platform at scale.
While CIOs and CTOs still lead AI implementation, CFOs are increasingly expected to answer a tougher question, for example: Where does a dollar of AI spending reliably generate $10 in business value rather than 50 cents? Measuring that return has become a growing priority for finance leaders.
Topoleski announced the initiative with a simple LinkedIn post and was surprised by the response, receiving numerous requests to participate. Rather than using a formal application process, Cursor assembled the council through a mix of inbound interest and outreach to customers. The goal is to create a cross-functional group spanning industries, public and private companies, and sectors.
The council is designed as a working forum focused on practical tools, Topoleski said. Expected outputs include shared benchmarks for AI productivity, a framework for measuring “return on intelligence,” and guidance on model allocation and cost controls that encourage adoption rather than stifle it.
The objective, Topoleski said, is to help CFOs avoid runaway AI spending while identifying areas—from coding to finance analytics—where investments produce meaningful returns.
That focus reflects what he is hearing from finance chiefs, who are increasingly being pulled into customer discussions as AI spending shifts from an experimental line item to a material operating expense. I also asked him about AI’s role within the finance function.
At Cursor, the company’s agent framework routes work to the most appropriate models for specific tasks, he explained. At the same time, its “canvases” feature lets finance teams connect directly to live data and build AI-powered dashboards without additional software layers. Internally, two of Cursor’s 10 most active users are in the finance department, underscoring how much AI-driven analytical work is already happening outside engineering, he said.
As Topoleski sees it, adoption is no longer enough. The next phase is proving that AI intelligence translates into durable economics that CFOs can defend in the boardroom.
Sheryl Estrada
[email protected]
Leaderboard
Wes Gilbreath was appointed CFO of Daybright Financial, effective July 20. Gilbreath will lead Daybright’s finance organization. Matt Riordan, who has served as Daybright’s CFO for the past 18 years, will continue with the company as operating CFO, where he will focus on ensuring continuity across the finance organization and supporting Gilbreath’s transition. Gilbreath joins Daybright from Integrity Wealth and brings nearly 20 years of experience.
Andrew “Andy” Aberdale was appointed president and CFO of AiM Medical Robotics, a developer of advanced robotic systems for MRI-guided neurosurgery. Aberdale brings more than 30 years of experience. He has spent the past 20 years exclusively within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, specializing in taking early-stage startups through commercialization.
Big Deal
Nearly a quarter of U.S. workers are now “job locked,” staying in roles they’d rather leave to preserve employer-sponsored health coverage—a trend with direct implications for labor mobility, talent strategy, and long-term productivity.
A new study from the West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America finds that 24% of employees, roughly 23 million adults, say they are in jobs they want to quit but remain because of fear of losing health insurance, up eight percentage points since 2021. Job lock is most acute among workers with chronic health conditions and those highly stressed by health care costs, signaling rising benefits-driven risk aversion that can distort career decisions, delay entrepreneurship, and impede optimal workforce reallocation.
For finance leaders tasked with managing labor costs and retention, the findings underscore how health benefits design and medical cost inflation are shaping employee behavior in ways that may support short-term stability but ultimately constrain organizational agility and human capital deployment.
Going deeper
“Sam Altman and Jony Ive formed a dream team to reinvent hardware. Now it’s at the center of a battle for OpenAI’s future” is a Fortune report by Emily Forlini and Sebastian Herrera.
The authors write: “As Jony Ive and Sam Altman hugged and sipped espressos at a picturesque North Beach cafe in May 2025, a new war was brewing. The coffee date was featured in a viral video to announce that Altman’s OpenAI was acquiring io Products, a small hardware startup founded by Ive, the legendary designer of the Apple iPhone and perhaps the world’s most famous tech product designer.” Read more here.
Overheard
“People come to the restaurant as an escape from whatever’s going on in their lives, and your job really is just to put a smile on their face and engage with them.”
—Red Lobster CEO Damola Adamolekun told Fortune. “You become good at managing difficult people and situations, which is an important skill,” Adamolekun said. “You learn how to lift people from one mindset to another one.”
