IMB Innovation Team · April 23, 2026
AI for the Modern CFO
From Microsoft Copilot to the AI Dividend — practical intelligence for the financial leaders building tomorrow's organizations.
View Today's Agenda ↓IMB Innovation Team · April 23, 2026
From Microsoft Copilot to the AI Dividend — practical intelligence for the financial leaders building tomorrow's organizations.
View Today's Agenda ↓Today's Session
An honest introduction — who Don is, how IMB is approaching AI, and why this moment matters for every financial leader in the room.
Don is Director of Innovation & AI at the IMB, where he has led AI strategy for three years. Not a theorist — someone shipping production tools to 3,500+ global workers. The sessions he runs trade on specificity, not novelty.
Why CFOs specifically: AI is a capital allocation problem before it's a technology problem. You're the leverage point. The question isn't whether to engage — most orgs are already spending. The question is whether that spend produces an AI Dividend or just runway burn.
What this session isn't: a vendor pitch, a futurist talk, or a "AI is scary but exciting" overview. What it is: specific, CFO-calibrated, opinionated, and built for people whose job is deploying capital under constraints.
Open conversation plus a quick self-assessment. How are you and your teams actually using AI today — and where does your organization land on the AI readiness scale?
Ten minutes of open conversation, then five minutes to take the AI Readiness Assessment.
The assessment isn't a gimmick — 18 questions across six dimensions (strategy, data, people, process, risk, execution). At the end it produces your organization's level on a five-tier scale (Unaware → Exploring → Operational → Integrated → Transformative) and three concrete next-step recommendations per dimension.
The questions are strategic, not technical. You don't need to know what a transformer is. You need to know where your spend is landing and who's making the call. Do it honestly; the output is only as useful as the input.
Most of you are already in the Microsoft ecosystem. Here's what Copilot actually does — and where the ROI shows up for finance teams.
If you're already in Microsoft 365, this decision is in front of you. The five-minute CFO version:
The single biggest concept for CFOs to internalize. The AI Dividend is the compounding return — in time, cost, and capacity — that organizations capture when AI is embedded into core workflows.
The formula is plain math, but it's almost always under-applied. Run it on your actual org:
A 50-person team, each person saving 30 minutes a day on routine work → 25 hours per day recovered → ~6,250 hours per year → roughly 3 FTE equivalent in recovered capacity.
A 3,500-employee organization, same 30 minutes a day per person → 1,750 hours per day → ~437,500 hours per year → roughly 210 FTE equivalent. That's not a rounding error. That's a strategic reallocation at the scale of a business unit.
Not fired; redirected. The failure mode most orgs hit: measuring the gain in aggregate but not redirecting the recovered capacity to anything strategic. The AI Dividend only compounds when time saved flows into higher-leverage work — close the books faster so analysts can actually analyze, not so they can extend the coffee break.
How to make the case internally: pick one workflow. Measure before and after. Publish the number. Then pick the next one.
See what's actually running in production at IMB — real tools built and deployed for our global workforce — and walk away with frameworks, training, and resources IMB has built that translate directly to nonprofit and ministry contexts.
This session has two halves. First: see what IMB is actually running. Second: here's how you use what you've seen.
The tools, live in production:
The takeaway isn't "buy these." None of them required an AI research team. The question is always what's the workflow? — not what's the model?
Two ways to engage after today:
IMB-built resources assume mission-driven constraints: limited budgets, high-trust governance, compliance that matters. You won't waste time translating corporate playbooks into your context.
Four concrete moves you can make this week — from auditing one workflow, to piloting Copilot, to calculating your AI Dividend, to running an AI Canvas session. Pick one. Don't leave with inspiration. Leave with an assignment.
Don't start with a strategy. Start with one workflow. The best AI wins happen when a leader points at something specific and says "this takes too long."
Pro tip: the best first workflow is usually a weekly report or a recurring email someone hates writing. AI is exceptionally good at those.
Most organizations already have Copilot access or can get a trial. The mistake is rolling it out to everyone at once and calling that a pilot. Do this instead.
Watch for: people underestimate time saved because they forget what the task used to feel like. Encourage logging before using Copilot, not after.
The AI Dividend isn't a theory — it's a number.
Full framework: The AI Dividend — Don's article walks through this in depth with real examples.
Most organizations don't lack AI ideas — they lack a structured way to evaluate them. The AI Canvas moves a team from "we should use AI for that" to a clear, honest decision.
Try it now: aicanvas.donbarger.com — walk through it with your team before your next meeting.
No clock. Ask anything — about AI strategy, specific tools, org dynamics, making the case to your board, or what Don would do in your situation.
Things worth asking — but don't feel limited to these:
If 15 minutes isn't enough: Don stays until the questions stop. No hard stop on the conversation.
Take-Home Resources
IMB's AI-powered biblical guidance and engagement platform — a working example of AI at scale in a mission organization.
IMB's rapid AI prototyping platform — explore and experiment with AI tools built for organizational work.
The full portfolio of AI tools and projects from the IMB Innovation Team — updated regularly.
Official adoption hub, training resources, and ROI calculators for Microsoft Copilot and Copilot 365.
Don's full article on the AI Dividend framework — the compounding ROI model for leaders making the case for AI investment.
Questions after today? Don is available for follow-up conversations, consulting, and speaking engagements.
Director of Innovation & AI Strategy · IMB
Don leads AI strategy and innovation at the International Mission Board. He also leads the digital engagement, digital communities, and innovation incubator teams. He builds AI tools that equip thousands of global workers, speaks on the intersection of technology and organizational transformation, and advises leaders navigating the shift to AI-native operations.