Every CFO and finance department is moving toward AI, but it’s not a direct journey. Financial professionals often have a very different user experience than what’s envisioned, largely because of infrastructure issues, knowledge gaps, technology not responding as expected, or overlooked data and tech needs.

Rohini Jain, CFO of Bill Holdings, is at the intersection of dealing with CFO needs for small and medium business finance departments, and her own use of AI as a CFO herself. I talked to her about her observations and tips for improving AI in the finance department. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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It’s already been a bad week so far across global markets. Stocks dropped Monday amid concerns about tech infrastructure costs and kept going early Tuesday as investors brace for Micron’s earnings on Wednesday, since the memory chip maker is seen as a barometer for AI demand.

SpaceX, which took off like a rocket during its IPO earlier this month, has come back down to Earth. Early Tuesday, its price dropped below its $150 debut, though it quickly recovered. But this is the continuation of a trend for the company, which saw its stock drop 16.4% on Monday alone. Monday’s drop started as SpaceX announced it would issue bonds to refinance an existing loan, leading other tech investors to consider the money being spent—a rout that spread to South Korean and Japanese markets.

Zooming out from markets, the Federal Reserve did as expected and unanimously voted to hold interest rates steady at between 3.5% and 3.75%, in its first meeting chaired by Kevin Warsh last week. Nine of the board’s 18 members favored at least one interest rate hike later this year—but Warsh, who has said he wants the Fed’s deliberations to be less public, said he did not make any projections of his own.

The policy statement issued after the meeting shifted toward that end. Under Warsh’s predecessors, it would explain the reasoning behind the decisions made, as well as provide forward guidance about how policymakers expect rates to move. Last week’s statement was much shorter and included no forward guidance. At the post-meeting press conference, Forbes senior contributor Simon Moore writes Warsh said the statement just provides the facts. Warsh also has said he wants to omit the forward guidance because he feels markets should interpret policy based on actual economic data, not Fed projections—something Forbes senior contributor Erik Sherman........

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