Fanatics Betting and Gaming uses AI to focus on the big picture
OpenAI
Fanatics Betting and Gaming's CFO is leaning on AI to cut through busywork. She says it's freeing her finance team to actually think, not just crunch.
Based on reporting by OpenAI — read the original for the full story.
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Andrea Ellis runs finance for Fanatics Betting and Gaming, and her pitch is refreshingly unglamorous: AI's biggest win isn't some flashy prediction engine, it's getting people out of spreadsheets. In a conversation shared on OpenAI's blog, Ellis describes a finance org that used to burn hours on reconciliations, variance reports, and the kind of manual data-wrangling that makes smart people feel like clerks. Handing that grind to AI tools, she says, has let her team spend more time on judgment calls — forecasting, scenario planning, actually advising the business — rather than just producing numbers for someone else to interpret.
That shift matters more in sports betting than in most industries, because the business runs on volatility. Odds move, promotions shift, and betting volume can spike or crater depending on what happens in a single overtime period. Ellis frames AI as a way to keep pace with that chaos: instead of closing the books and then trying to explain what happened, her team can get closer to real-time reads on performance and risk. It's less about replacing financial analysts and more about giving them a faster, less tedious starting point.
Ellis is also candid that this is early-stage stuff, not a finished transformation. The conversation reads less like a victory lap and more like a progress report from someone who's watched her team's day-to-day change gradually. Adoption, in her telling, came from letting people experiment with the tools directly rather than mandating a top-down rollout — a pattern that's become common across companies quietly integrating generative AI into back-office functions.
What stands out is the modesty of the ambition. There's no talk of AI-run finance departments or eliminating headcount. It's a CFO arguing that automating the boring 80% of the job frees humans for the interesting 20%, which is the least controversial AI pitch in corporate America right now — and maybe the most durable one, precisely because it doesn't promise anything it can't deliver.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the OpenAI blog publishing a customer testimonial, so treat the enthusiasm accordingly — of course a company platformed by OpenAI says AI is going great. But the underlying claim, that AI's real value in most businesses is quietly eating drudgery rather than staging some dramatic takeover, is the boring truth nobody wants to write headlines about, and it's exactly why it'll stick around longer than the hype cycle.
Read more about this at: OpenAI