Business

Diary of a CFO | Financial Strategies for Smart Business Growth

Diary Of A CFO is a global Top 2.5% business finance podcast hosted by Ademola Odewade, MBA, ACA. Elite CFOs, founders and business leaders share practical strategies for cash flow, profitability, financial planning, AI-powered finance, leadership and sustainable business growth.

Built for founders, CFOs, fractional CFOs, finance leaders and consultants who want to make smarter decisions, scale with confidence and lead with data.

Expect real-world insights, proven frameworks and executive lessons for building stronger, more profitable businesses.

Follow: @k-demsconsultingltd

Latest Episodes:

Why AI Agents Must Be Verified (Calum Chace Explains) | Voices From The Future (2036) Oct 29, 2026

Show notes

When AI can do almost every job, people can no longer earn their living through wages. Futurist Calum Chace calls this the economic singularity, and he says almost nobody is planning for it. For finance leaders, that is not a distant theory. It is a question about cost bases, controls and who owns the value AI creates.

Cop a copy of my new book NOW: https://ademolaodewade.com

Get paid to help train the AI models reshaping work: Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw

Put your expertise to work on frontier AI projects: Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb

Turn your AI strategy into a board-ready deck in minutes: Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h

Build and test your first AI agent workflows without code: Make (paid link): https://www.make.com/en/register?pc=kingdemspodcast

This is Episode 1 of Voices From The Future (2036), a new series on Diary of a CFO and The King Dems Podcast. Each episode asks one of the world's leading futurists, founders or finance leaders what the decade to 2036 will demand of leaders, and what they should do now so it does not catch them by surprise.

Calum Chace, known to many as "the AI guy", is a futurist, keynote speaker and bestselling author of Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity. He is one of five co-founders of Conscium and its Chief Marketing Officer. Conscium explores whether machines can become conscious and runs an agent verification platform. Before writing about AI, Calum spent 30 years in journalism and business, including at KPMG.

Calum grew up on Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, but assumed human-level AI was centuries away. Then in 1999 he read Ray Kurzweil and realised superintelligence could arrive in his lifetime. Colleagues tired of hearing about it and called him "the AI guy" sarcastically. He kept the name.

In this episode:

The economic singularity, a term Calum coined in 2016, and why economists must design the post-automation economy now
Who will own a fully automated economy, and why sharing its wealth may be the hardest problem of all
Shadow AI and the "phony war": why most large companies have not deployed AI at scale yet
Conscium's five levels of AI agents and why agents need verifying before and during deployment
Ademola's offload, extend and elevate model for AI agents
Calum's timeline: possibly 10 to 20 years, and a 50 per cent chance of AGI by 2035
Why AGI is a fleeting moment and superintelligence is the issue that matters
The "jagged edge": judgement, volition, common sense and a world model that AI still lacks
The five human revolutions (fire, cognition, agriculture, industry, information) and why AI is not the fourth industrial revolution
Host and guest disagree: Ademola argues AI will remain a tool given uneven adoption across Africa and the developing world. Calum counters that this argues for slow dispersal, not against arrival, pointing to how fast smartphones and large language models spread

Calum Chace, futurist and co-founder of Conscium, on the economic singularity, AI agents, AGI and the future of finance and work, on Diary of a CFO with Ademola Odewade.

More from Calum Chace:

Website: https://calumchace.com

Conscium: https://conscium.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calum-chace-bb68168/

Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.

Diary of a CFO: Financial Strategies for Smart Business Growth. Global top 2.5% on Listen Notes.

The King Dems Podcast: Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Global top 2% on Listen Notes.

Conceive, believe, strive to thrive and achieve.

Disclosure: links marked (paid link) are affiliate links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

#DiaryOfACFO #VoicesFromTheFuture #EconomicSingularity #FutureOfFinance

Why Customers Can't Explain Why They Buy (Cultural Anthropologist Explains) | Johanna Faigelman Oct 11, 2026

Show notes

Your customers are not lying in your surveys. They simply do not know why they do what they do.

Cop a copy of my books NOW:

https://mybook.to/TheAI-PoweredFuture

https://mybook.to/HumanLedFinance

Host live webinars and restream them to LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook: WebinarGeek (paid link): https://webinargeek.com/product?red=kdemsc

Get paid to put your expert judgement to work training AI: Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw

Earn from your professional expertise on frontier AI projects: Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb

Turn customer insight into a boardroom-ready deck in minutes: Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h

Automate the analytic grunt work so your team can focus on the human questions: Make (paid link): https://www.make.com/en/register?pc=kingdemspodcast

Johanna Faigelman is a cultural anthropologist, speaker and the founder and CEO of Human Branding, the Toronto consultancy she launched in 2006 to apply anthropology to business strategy. She is the pioneer of Applied Anthropology Thinking (AAT)™, studied at York University and ran planning at a large advertising agency before going out on her own. Human Branding now has more than 40 people working across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America, with clients including 11 of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies and brands such as Nestlé, Visa and Logitech.

She is an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026 Ontario finalist, an EY Winning Women 2025 honoree and a 100 Women to Know Winner 2026.

In this episode:

Why Johanna works on the principle that roughly 80 per cent of decision making sits at the unconscious and subconscious level (her working rule, not a cited study)
Why she places almost zero value on the answer to a direct question
Every business problem is a human problem: why doctors who say in surveys they will prescribe a drug still do not
Applied Anthropology Thinking (AAT)™, the approach she created when she founded Human Branding
The Who Say Do principle: who people are, how they say things and what they actually do
Ten years with no holidays: the unglamorous reality of building a bootstrapped consultancy
Why saying no protects a company's vision more than saying yes
How Human Branding uses AI: a closed model built about five years ago, with Johanna reporting 30 per cent efficiency gains overall and 80 per cent on analytic grunt work
Where they differ: Ademola asks what AI will do better than humans in anthropology, and Johanna is not convinced it will do anything better, only that it frees people for the human work
Her one piece of advice to women founders: your difference is your advantage

Johanna Faigelman, cultural anthropologist and founder and CEO of Human Branding, on consumer behaviour, decision making, Applied Anthropology Thinking, bootstrapping and human-led AI, on The King Dems Podcast and Diary of a CFO with Ademola Odewade.

What is Applied Anthropology Thinking?

It is Johanna Faigelman's approach to using anthropology's methods, especially ethnography, to uncover the hidden drivers of customer behaviour and turn them into marketing and strategy. She built Human Branding around it in 2006.

Can AI replace market research?

Johanna's view is no. AI speeds up the analysis of transcripts and data, but the insight that changes behaviour depends on human wisdom that is often not captured in language at all.

More from Johanna Faigelman: https://humanbranding.com · linkedin.com/in/johannafaigelman

Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.

Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.

This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

#BusinessAnthropology #HumanLedAI #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast

Why Great CFOs Sound Different: Pace, Pauses and Presence | David Pope Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

The voice you hear when you speak is not the one your team hears.

Cop a copy of my new book NOW: https://ademolaodewade.com

Turn communication expertise into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw

AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb

Build your next board deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h

Automate the admin and spend the time rehearsing — Make (paid link): https://www.make.com/en/register?pc=kingdemspodcast

David Pope is an executive voice coach based in Hong Kong for 32 years. He started in 1980s London at a Soho production company making music videos for Wham!, Dire Straits and A-ha, then joined the BBC as an assistant film editor. He founded All Voice Talent in 2010, has spent more than 30,000 hours in recording studios and coaches leaders from law firms and financial institutions in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Australia, the Middle East and London.

About 20 years ago he was told that growing his business meant leaving the studio for stages and workshops. He did, made mistakes in public and built the confidence he now teaches.

In this episode:

- The three most common executive presence faults: speaking too fast, a monotone delivery and filler words

- Why a slightly slower pace reads as authority when you present results, and rapid delivery reads as nerves

- The emphasis pause before a key figure, such as a 33% rise, so the number lands with the room

- The rhetorical question pause before the answer

- Chunking: mark a script with slash marks and stress one word per chunk, what Pope calls "audio punctuation"

- Speakers who think they paused for five seconds usually paused for half a second

- Gravitas is a balance of authority, energy and warmth, not a booming voice

- In Center for Talent Innovation research, 5% of senior leaders named appearance and 28% communication as core to executive presence; the majority named gravitas

- Pope's Voice Influence Framework: voice, presence and messaging

- Pope says charisma can be developed; Ademola argues it is largely natural

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Diary of a CFO | Financial Strategies for Smart Business Growth

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected