The authors
Meet Ben, Weston,
and Jacob.
A finance executive, a transformation leader, and an AI builder: the operating team behind Feasible, Not Achieved and Broken, Rebuilt, Ready. They argued about every chapter from all three positions. Where a chapter reads as settled, it survived all three of them.
CFO · Finance, cash, and controls
Ben S. Jones
Ben S. Jones has spent more than thirty years in finance: audit and tax, corporate controllership, international finance leadership, and leading companies of his own. His career has centered on the disciplines that make a business measurable and believable: cash, forecasting, financial controls, profitability, working capital, and the confidence of investors and lenders.
He began at EY in Indianapolis as an auditor and then a senior consultant in taxation. At Tupperware Brands he moved from international internal auditor to senior financial analyst in Switzerland, then served as financial director and controller for the United Kingdom, based in London, responsible for a full country finance function. He later served as assistant controller at Federal Signal Corporation, a publicly traded manufacturer, and consulted to 24 Hour Fitness.
He spent more than ten years at Becker Professional Education, which prepares accountants for the CPA exam and other credentials, rising from director of business operations to vice president of North American operations and then vice president of its healthcare business. In 2015 he founded Opus Financial Solutions, a fee-only registered investment advisor and fiduciary. He then served as President of CasePacer, a cloud case-management software company for the legal industry, and is now Executive Vice President of Finance at Elpis Capital Group, general partner of the Elpis Opportunity Fund.
Ben has taught as well as practiced throughout his career. That shows in this book’s insistence that every number be one a board, a lender, or an auditor can trust, and that people understand the work before an agent is asked to do it. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago’s International Executive program and a BS in Accounting from Indiana University, and is a CPA, a CFA charterholder, and a Certified Financial Planner.
Co-author of
Broken, Rebuilt, Ready: Turnarounds and Roll-Ups with AI That Sticks
Chief Transformation · AI and business transformation
Weston A. Jones
Weston A. Jones has spent three decades leading finance and business transformation from the inside, sixteen of those years at the forefront of automation and artificial intelligence, beginning well before either was a boardroom priority.
He began at IBM in finance and business transformation, building deep expertise in outsourcing and finance shared service centers: how work moves between teams, locations, and providers, and how service levels and controls hold up when it does. He carried that work to EY, where he founded the firm’s global automation practice, expanded it into the Intelligent Automation practice, and led both worldwide. He later served as PwC’s U.S. Intelligent Automation Leader, and has founded multiple AI and automation companies of his own.
He has worked alongside many of the founders of the industry’s most successful technology companies, and put these technologies to work for clients ranging from privately held startups and middle-market companies to private equity firms and the Fortune 500, from shared services teams to the C-suite and the boardroom. He has helped deliver programs that generated billions of dollars in savings for clients around the world, and focuses on the operating model, process redesign, AI adoption, and the governance that makes change stick.
He has published extensively on automation and enterprise transformation, has been quoted in CIO, CFO, and other leading publications, and has given keynote addresses at conferences around the world. He is a CPA, a graduate of Harvard Business School, and a co-founder of Jones-Roxon Nine, LLC.
Co-author of
Feasible, Not Achieved: Why AI Transformation Stalls and the Nine Decisions That Finish It
Broken, Rebuilt, Ready: Turnarounds and Roll-Ups with AI That Sticks
Chief AI · Technology strategy
Jacob C. Roxon, PhD
Jacob C. Roxon has spent fifteen years building artificial intelligence: not simply studying its potential, but training models, creating products, founding companies, and putting AI to work inside complex organizations.
He earned his PhD at MIT, where his research focused on data science, statistical models, and machine learning, after a bachelor’s degree in engineering sciences at Harvard. At MIT he also conducted research at the Concrete Sustainability Hub and on smart city networks.
He co-founded two AI startups and has advised multiple technology ventures. He is Director of AI Strategy at a private-equity-owned global manufacturer with more than a century of history, where he leads the deployment of AI, including agentic systems, across the enterprise: delivering measurable value, integrating with complex legacy systems, and extending AI to work with external suppliers and sales teams.
His work bridges technology and organizational change, helping leaders and employees build the skills and confidence to turn new tools into new habits. He can move from the mathematics of a model to the realities of a production environment, and explain to executives why the technology itself is often not the hardest part. For a finance team, that matters: whether an agent holds up under an auditor’s questions usually depends on data, controls, and ownership more than on the model. He is a co-founder of Jones-Roxon Nine, LLC.
Co-author of
Feasible, Not Achieved: Why AI Transformation Stalls and the Nine Decisions That Finish It
Broken, Rebuilt, Ready: Turnarounds and Roll-Ups with AI That Sticks
From the authors of
Feasible, Not Achieved
Why AI Transformation Stalls and the Nine Decisions That Finish It
Weston A. Jones and Jacob C. Roxon
Broken, Rebuilt, Ready
Turnarounds and Roll-Ups with AI That Sticks
Ben S. Jones, Weston A. Jones, and Jacob C. Roxon
Why tell it as a story?
Because that is how this work is learned.
The story shows a finance team working through the decisions, including the parts that go wrong. The guide at the end of each chapter turns it into questions and steps you can use.
The company is unnamed and its industry unstated, so you can see your own organization in it. The characters are fictional composites, not representations of the authors or clients.
Read the book or talk with the authors.
Read an excerpt, browse the chapters, or ask how the team could help your finance function.
Chapter 1 excerpt
Start with a Clean Sheet
Read an excerpt from Chapter 1.
The board met on the second Thursday of the month, and Mark Bennett had three slides nobody wanted to present.
The first showed the cash forecast finance had given the board at the start of the quarter and the cash the company had actually ended with. The gap was not large enough to threaten anything. It was large enough that Helen Ashby, who had chaired the board for six years and remembered every number anyone had ever given her, had asked about it twice before the meeting started. Behind her question sat a date. The company’s revolving credit line came up for renewal in fifteen months, and the bank had seen the same forecast.
The second slide was about a control. A supplier had been paid twice for the same delivery, once from each of two entities that had come with an acquisition and still kept separate vendor records. The duplicate had sat in the books for seven weeks. The auditors had found it, not finance.
The third slide was the one Mark had argued about with himself for a week. It was a single quotation from the operating leaders’ survey Vivian Cole had commissioned in the spring: “Finance tells us what happened. By the time they tell us, it’s too late to matter, and when we ask for help, the answer is usually no.”
Nobody in the room was surprised by any of it. That was the problem.
Helen let the silence run a little longer than was comfortable. Then she said what she had come to say.
“This is a good company. It’s growing. It’s profitable. The finance team works hard and passes its audit. None of us thinks finance is failing.” She looked at Mark. “But we think it can be something it isn’t yet. We want finance to see problems before they’re problems. We want it to help the business leaders run their businesses, not just score them. And we want the people in it to come out of this more capable than they went in.”
Vivian picked it up. They had clearly rehearsed. “We want you to rebuild finance as an AI-native function. Not a pilot. Not a project. The function.”
Excerpt from Rebuilt Finance. The company and its people are fictional composites.
