The AI Exhale is a five-minute, weekly, fly-on-the-wall chat between Jez and Cam from Vibe CFO - the sound of AI finally making sense for accountants and business owners.
Every week we take one thing happening in AI and do the filtering for you: does it matter, who's it for, and what you'd actually do about it. Sometimes the honest answer is "ignore this one."
Whether you run the firm, run the business, or you're the one who's quietly become everyone's "AI person" - no jargon, no sales pitch. Just real talk that leaves you calmer and a little sharper. New episodes every Friday. Vibe in 5.
The AI Exhale: AI Hype vs Financial Reality - Firmus Pulls Its Float (and Zuck’s first Guinness)
Firmus started out in Launceston mining bitcoin on cheap Tassie hydro, pivoted to AI, and was about to pull off the biggest float since Telstra. Then it pulled the whole thing at the last minute. Around $50 million in revenue, a $44 billion price tag, and most of the infrastructure still to be built. Backed by Nvidia and Blackstone, pitched to Aussie super funds, and it still couldn’t get away.
It feels like the moment the AI hype wave runs into the financial world. The people writing the cheques are starting to do what accountants do, and ask to go through the cash flows one more time. When the story gets ahead of the substance, people can smell it, and here in Australia they smell it pretty quickly.
The same smell test is everywhere this week. Zuck sipping a Guinness like it was his first. Two AIs left alone in a meeting, politely saying goodbye to each other on a loop. And in France, a novel pulled from the country’s top literary prize over AI claims, after the detectors scored it anywhere from very likely human to 100 percent AI. If even the machines can’t tell, that’s a battle nobody wins, and it comes back to whether the work is any good.
Which brings it back to finance, and deterministic versus probabilistic. Same input, same answer every time, versus a very good guess that can drift the more it loops. Jez and Cam on why hallucinations are still holding back confidence to act on the data, and why human judgement, traceability and checking the plumbing matter more than ever.
Five minutes. One thing that matters. We ignore the rest, so you can too.
Vibe CFO is Australian founded. An AI CFO for small and medium business, out of the box, governed and secure.
Vibe in 5.
vibecfo.ai (http://vibecfo.ai)
16 Oct 2026
The AI Exhale: Feature vs Product - Anthropic’s Dashboards and Motion (and a cartoon for the tradies)
Anthropic has made pretty pictures free. Ask Claude a question and get a live dashboard back in 30 seconds, or turn your quarterly report into a short animated video. The tech bros were quick to declare the data amalgamators finished. It looks a lot more like something we’ve seen before. Artifacts, the interactive pages Claude has been able to build for a while, now come with a nice bow on them, a bit like when Power BI arrived as Power Pivot and Power Query in a shiny new wrapper.
Credit where it’s due on traceability. Each chart shows its working, which accountants will appreciate, and a lot of small business owners are visual people, like the salon owner who loves picking the colours. But it’s still garbage in, garbage out. A slick chart on dodgy numbers is just a prettier mistake, nobody has published any accuracy figures yet, and the real value sits in shaping the data properly before it ever reaches a chart, rather than tipping raw connections straight in.
Motion is a harder sell. A cartoon of the numbers might work for an internal annual report, but it’s hard to picture a tradie watching one and getting much out of it. It feels like a feature looking for a product.
Then there’s the bigger question of software going headless, where you never open the app and the AI does the work for you. Salesforce has opened every door, while Xero has only opened some. Jez and Cam on why going headless looks like ammunition for startups, while the big players with a loyal customer base would rather keep that relationship in their own world.
Five minutes. One thing that matters. We ignore the rest, so you can too.
Vibe CFO is Australian founded. An AI CFO for small and medium business, out of the box, governed and secure.
Vibe in 5.
vibecfo.ai (http://vibecfo.ai)
9 Oct 2026
The AI Exhale: Just Asking vs Going Deep - The New Stats on What People Spend on AI (and a cheeky Uber tip)
Most people paying for AI spend around $25 a month and use it the same way every day. They ask it questions and have a chat. Meanwhile the top 1% are spending around $900 a month, up 80% in just 18 months. That’s from new card-spending data published by Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, and it shows how early most of us still are.
What we land on is that the difference is asking versus building. Most people pay for one AI and stop there, like a gym membership. The people spending more have set up scheduled triggers and workflows that wake the AI up to check a report, do a job and come back with an answer, all while they’re away from the desk. That’s when it stops feeling like a chatbot and starts feeling like help. It’s also when the tokens add up, which is why the spend climbs.
So why move up? Because that’s where the value is. Most people stall because they don’t know what’s possible yet, and the deeper workflows will increasingly sit on higher plans. Once an assistant is sorting your calendar, writing your emails and booking your travel, the higher price starts to make sense.
One thing to watch as agents start spending money for you. Researchers ran 325,000 experiments and found AI agents nudge people toward pricier options, even when asked for the cheapest. Staying price aware pays off.
Jez and Cam on why most people are still just asking AI questions while others have it doing the work, what it takes to make that jump, plus a cheeky tip for knocking a few dollars off your next Uber.
Five minutes. One thing that matters. We ignore the rest, so you can too.
Vibe CFO is Australian founded. An AI CFO for small and medium business, out of the box, governed and secure.
Vibe in 5.
vibecfo.ai (http://vibecfo.ai)
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