The most successful enterprises are about to become autonomous — and Eléonore Crespo, Co-CEO of Pigment, is building the nervous system that makes it possible. In this conversation, Eléonore reveals how her $400 million AI platform is already running supply chains for Coca-Cola, powering finance for the hottest newly public companies like Figma and Klarna, and processing thousands of financial scenarios for Uber and Snowflake faster and more accurately than any human team ever could.

Eléonore predicts Excel will outlive most AI companies (but maybe only as a user interface, not a calculation engine) explains why she deliberately chose to build from Paris instead of Silicon Valley, and shares her contrarian take on why the AI revolution will create more CFOs, not fewer.

You'll discover why Pigment's three-agent system (Analyst, Modeler, Planner) avoids the hallucination problems plaguing other AI companies, how they achieved human-level accuracy in financial analysis, and the accelerating timeline for fully autonomous enterprise planning that will make your current workforce obsolete.

Pigment

Website - https://www.pigment.com

Twitter - https://x.com/gopigment

Eléonore Crespo

LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/eleonorecrespo

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(01:22) Building Pigment: 500 Employees, $400M Raised, 60% US Revenue

(03:20) From Quantum Physics to Google to Index Ventures

(06:56) Why Being a VC Was the Perfect Founder Training Ground

(11:35) The Impatience Factor: What Makes Great Founders

(13:27) Hiring for AI Fluency in the Modern Enterprise

(14:54) Pigment's Internal AI Strategy: Committees and Guardrails

(17:30) The Three AI Agents: Analyst, Modeler, and Planner

(22:15) Why Three Agents Instead of One: Technical Architecture

(24:10) Agent Coordination: How the Supervisor Agent Works

(24:46) Real Example: Budget Variance Analysis Across 50 Products

(27:15) The Human-in-the-Loop Approach: Recommendations Not Actions

(27:36) Solving Hallucination: Why Structured Data Changes Everything

(30:08) Behind the Scenes: Verification Agents and Audit Trails

(31:57) Beyond Accuracy: Enabling the Impossible at Scale

(36:21) Will AI Finally Kill Excel? Eleanor's Contrarian Take

(38:23) The Vision: Fully Autonomous Enterprise Planning

(40:55) Real-Time Supply Chain Adaptation: The Ukraine Example

(42:20) Multi-LLM Strategy: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Partner Integration

(44:32) Token Economics: Why Pigment Isn't Token-Intensive

(48:30) Customer Adoption: Excitement vs. Change Management Challenges

(50:51) Top-Down AI Demand vs. Bottom-Up Implementation Reality

(53:08) The Reskilling Challenge: Everyone Becomes a Mini CFO

(57:38) Building a Global Company from Europe During COVID

(01:00:02) Managing a US Executive Team from Paris

(01:01:14) SI Partner Strategy: Why Boutique Firms Come Before Deloitte

(01:03:28) The $100 Billion Vision: Beyond Performance Management

(01:05:08) Success Metrics: Innovation Over Revenue

Goodbye Excel? AI Agents for Self-Driving Finance – Pigment CEO

The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck