Our guest this week is Devon Briggs, a finance transformation leader at ATS Corporation, a global industrial automation company operating across more than 100 business units worldwide. The core of the conversation is “Compliance as Catalyst”: how SOX requirements across 100+ global business units became the forcing function for real, lasting automation and standardization at ATS. Devon’s story challenges the assumption that compliance and transformation are in tension. In our conversation, we explore: • Why the leaders who get the most out of standardization are the ones who treat compliance as a foundation, not a finish line. • How automating Journals, not just reconciliations, became the real unlock for shortening the financial close. • What a grounded, governance-first approach to AI actually looks like in a complex, multi-entity finance function.

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