A conversation with Andrea Ellis, Chief Financial Officer of Fanatics Betting and Gaming.
Our Executive Function series features perspectives from leaders driving transformation through AI.
Fanatics Betting and Gaming(opens in a new window) is the online and retail sports betting subsidiary of Fanatics, Inc., a global digital sports platform. We spoke with Andrea Ellis about the expanding role of the CFO, building internal enthusiasm for AI, and using AI to free up focus for higher-impact work.
How have you seen the CFO role evolve?
The CFO is a strategic thought partner for the business. On top of ensuring financial performance is reported accurately and on time, we really help guide corporate strategy and capital allocations, and use financial expertise to drive short and long term initiatives. Whether it’s telling the company story internally or externally, CFOs play a key role in that as well. CFOs are confidants for the CEO, and serve as a catalyst for growth and innovation.
In this sense, the role is now much more of an operational CFO that works closely with cross functional partners.
How do you ensure your finance team is operating at peak performance?
Similar to broader organization success, it boils down to people, processes, and routines.
A high-performing team needs the right skill set, motivation, and alignment to our objectives. Second, streamlining processes ensures that tasks are executed with accuracy and efficiency. Lastly, establishing robust routines leads to consistency, drives productivity, and a culture of continuous improvement.
In a fast-paced environment like a startup, it’s also crucial to create space for experimentation and learning. Mistakes happen, and they can provide valuable lessons if approached with the right mindset.
How do you think AI can contribute to the success of your team?
There are so many places where AI can be helpful to the finance org in areas like accounting, tax, strategic finance, etc.
AI is helpful in giving you space to focus on the big picture instead of having to go gather information from a bunch of places. It lets you focus on the ‘So what, what are we going to do about this?’.
“The question that I posed was really, how can we make our day-to-day jobs less manual which ultimately will allow our teams to focus on strategy, and less on execution.”
You took a bit of a different approach to AI adoption than other companies. Can you tell us how you got started?
When we got started, we soon realized there’s a decent chance of spreading yourself too thin across all the different use cases with AI.
That’s why we decided to go deep and land some big wins in key areas. One was finance, another area was some of the practices around automating customer operations.
But again, even though there were so many ways we could use AI, it always came back to using it to focus our time on strategy and less on execution. That’s why I raised my hand for my finance team because there are so many ways AI can help our organization.
But you also took a more structured approach as an organization?
We wanted our team to see ChatGPT as a daily partner and we wanted to make it a part of our day.
We took a structured approach that focused on broad-based adoption and usage.
So we formed an AI automation task force with this guiding principle. We asked all finance team members to detail processes that they felt could benefit from AI. We took that list and created a roadmap of projects we wanted to explore. We then ensured every team member completed basic training on ChatGPT. Once training was complete, we organized a ‘GPT-athon’—a full-day event where teams collaborated with data scientists to build custom GPTs for specific projects to experience the power of using AI.
Lastly, we provide regular AI updates, and celebrate new use cases during monthly all-hands meetings to maintain focus and make sure that AI is a part of the conversation on a daily basis.
“And you can use AI to also help you get those insights, and the more that we invest in it the more that we’ll get out of it.”
It’s still early, but we’re already seeing a number of early wins across our team.
One example is VendorID GPT, which automates vendor identification and contract summarization, saving us around 18 hours of monthly work. We’d normally spend an excess amount of time reviewing the information and now ChatGPT simply does the work for us. When you’re trying to close the books each month, saving 18 hours of work is quite impactful.
Another area is data analysis, where AI allows us to generate actionable insights faster, enabling better decision-making. That’s something I’m very excited about as we continue to integrate and link up different data sources on our side.
“The real way that ChatGPT has helped me is allowing us to get information much faster.”
How do you see the way you use AI evolving at Fanatics?
Currently, our focus is on using AI to create more operational efficiencies that can free up time for strategy and higher-impact work.
However, we have a forward-looking roadmap that includes generative AI for strategic planning and even scenario analysis. We’re seeing AI evolve into a thought partner, helping us think through different scenarios and complex challenges.
How has AI impacted you personally as a CFO?
The real way ChatGPT helps me is in helping me understand information much faster. We’ve reduced the time it takes us to close our books. So I can now read and understand performance and communicate faster. Instead of spending so much time searching for insights, we have them much faster, and this gives me more space to unpack them with my exec team to help us make better decisions. I can use ChatGPT to plot trends or analyze customer cohorts in a much more dynamic way. The interface and ability to iterate on requests is ideal for a CFO wanting to understand the micro and macro picture.
“Our ability to, my ability to […] read and understand performance and communicate performance faster has been definitely aided by us using AI.”
Fanatics Betting and Gaming uses ChatGPT and multiple custom GPTs across its finance department.
