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Oliver Deacon, a seasoned Executive Coach with a distinguished background in finance. With years of industry experience under his belt, he has earned a reputation for guiding leaders with insight, clarity, and strategic vision.
We recently sat down with him to explore his dynamic career journey, uncover how he transitioned into executive coaching, and got a preview of the powerful insights he'll be sharing at Finance Forum 2025, taking place 7th October.
Q: In your session, you're going to be tackling how we make AI a habit. What sparks your interest in this topic?
A: I've always been interested in technology, alongside finance. I've had previous roles at Microsoft and generally in and around technology. But for me, the real thing that has got me most excited about AI is I'm always looking, in my career, for the best lever to drive productivity and get the most out of what we're doing. I've never seen anything else that gives finance teams more of an ability to increase their productivity through one single lever. That's why I'm so passionate about this topic.
Q: When you're coaching, what would you say is a common reaction finance leaders have when the subject of AI comes up?
A: I think it's been a bold thought for the last six months, but the first thing was, I had a lot of coaching clients come to me six months ago. The first thing people are saying is, I just don't understand this. My team are getting into it and people are starting to do it, but I don't know what it means for me, and I don't know how I can lead my team through this. I think people are starting to get past that initial stage, but they're still very confused. The question that I'm asking most of my CFOs at the moment is, how are you evolving your strategy given that your finance team will probably be AI powered in two years? I think people don't yet have a good answer to that. So, we're working through a lot of thinking about how we approach our strategies given that. I think leaders are still confused and a bit concerned about it now.
Q: Without giving too much away about your session at Finance Forum, what shift in thinking do you hope attendees will leave your session with?
A: I think the clue is in the title, it’s about making AI a daily habit. That's really the change in mindset and for me, it's not a set of skills. People come to this for an hour long session, or sometimes a little bit longer, and afterwards they ask, what other training can I go on? There's no other training. This is not about training. This is about a mindset shift and a culture shift across our organisations in terms of how we embrace something that's very different to what we've done in the past. For me, the key shift in thinking is taking a different approach to how this new technology can help us.
Q: You work with finance leaders who are going through change, whether that's organisation or within their department industry. What is one small behaviour you think signals that someone is future ready?
A: From a leadership perspective, and, in fact, probably through most levels in finance it's partly the doing. Of course, it's the doing. What I love is when my finance clients come back a few weeks or months later and say, I'm now using it all day, every day. That's great, but that's not the number one signal. The number one signal for me is when they are actively recognising people on their team for living the change they want to see. I would say that's the biggest thing a CFO should do. They might say, “Well, of course they're going to do it”, but they're not really thinking about the power they have as a leader to recognise and call out what you want to see more of. When I was at Microsoft, we would see the CFO, Amy Hood, if she wanted everybody to suddenly head in a certain direction, she would stand up in an all hands meeting in front of 3,000 people and say, “Well done to Brian in Ohio, everyone should be more like Brian in Ohio!” and thousands of people would head off in that direction in the next 3 months. I think that CFOs don't appreciate that enough, how much, if you keep banging that drum of appreciating people and saying, “Wow, this is amazing”, that is the behaviour you'll get from your teams.
Q: What would you say is one thing that you wish more finance leaders would stop doing?
A: A lot of finance leaders get their position, get promoted, based on all the great technical work they do. They reach senior positions and say, “Yes I'm a technical guru on this stuff”. I understand they’re starting to think more about leadership but I think one thing they struggle with is the shift from being execution first to strategy first. So, something I’d like them to stop doing is looking at problems through an execution lens, “Wow we're going to get this done?”, and through more of a contextual lens, “Is this the right thing to be doing? How do I structure this against what's going on? How do I think about this, the lens of my business partners?”. That “stop doing” piece, in fact at all levels, would be, how do we become less execution first and more strategy first. In a world where AI is doing 80% of the execution for us, what will be left is the strategy and the business partnering, so starting to make that shift now is important.
Q: I've got one bonus question, if you don't mind. When you're speaking at Finance Forum on the 7th October, between now and then, what would your advice be to our attendees for something to start doing now with AI? They'll get a lot more information at the session, but what's one thing might they might want to do in the meantime?
A: The biggest thing that’s going to make a difference between now and when I see you in October would be paying £20 a month for ChatGPT Plus. That is the single thing that, out of your own money, not the company's, fork out of your own pocket, if you do that for the next three months, and you use it most days, you will see a massive difference to your career. We'll talk more about why that's the case in October.