Good morning. At Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the finance function isn’t just reporting results—it’s redefining how an enterprise works in the age of AI.
Until 2025, HPE’s finance team lived by a Monday ritual: a 90‑minute operational review powered by a 100‑page PowerPoint and hundreds of hours of manual prep. That weekly effort held the company’s heartbeat but left little time to focus on what mattered most—making faster, smarter decisions. CFO Marie Myers decided to change that.
Partnering with Deloitte, HPE’s finance team built “Alfred,” an AI‑powered platform running on HPE’s Private Cloud AI infrastructure. Nicknamed after Batman’s trusted butler, HPE estimates Alfred has removed about 90% of the manual effort that once went into preparing the weekly review. It has cut HPE’s financial reporting cycle time by about 40% and processing costs by at least 25%.
But the real story isn’t the technology—it’s the transformation. Myers and Gustav van der Westhuizen, COO for finance and strategy, had to come up with ways to reskill HPE’s finance professionals—more than 3,000 strong.
For Myers, Alfred is more than a tool; it’s a test case for the future of leadership. “Even though you have all these AI capabilities, you still have to have a human in the loop,” she says. You can read more about how HPE (No. 143 on the Fortune 500) is transforming finance in my new article.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
