Agents of Scale · 2026-03-05 · 37 min
Most companies wait for their tech team to lead AI adoption. At Howard Hughes, the push started from the CFO's office. Carlos Olea spent decades mentally cataloging process inefficiencies - as an auditor, he'd spot problems he had no authority to fix; as a finance leader, he'd hit budget or technology walls. When AI broke through both barriers, he pulled out his backlog and started building. His first project? A tool that parsed vendor bids to surface the best value - not just the cheapest price. That small win opened the door to automating lease abstraction, a notoriously manual process in real estate, with higher accuracy than humans. Carlos talks about the risks of being a "very different CFO," why imagination - not tools or budget - is now the real bottleneck, and how he assembled a tiger team that moves at startup speed inside a public company. His playbook for winning over skeptics: fix the tasks everyone hates first.
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