Ecom CFO Notebook - March 2026 AI reality tracker and a group call

Ecom CFO Notebook is a (mostly) strategic finance publication for $10M+ ecommerce operators.

What I write comes from the patterns, problems, and decisions from our client work at Ecom CFO - providing brands outsourced CFO, accounting, and financial operations.

I write because I enjoy it. And because it brings in great clients.

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First, a shoutout to Ashley (subscriber) for alerting me about a small miscalculation in our last benchmark report and the very kind words.

Like the NYC subway, if you see something, say something. Thank you!

Now let’s get into to.

Two weeks ago I wrote about AI and DTC finance. Four layers of finance work. Where AI is compressing the analysis. Why the judgment layer is where value is actually expanding for founders.

I thought it was a decent framework.

But I realized I messed up.

As I was meeting with a client last week, I asked him how he was using AI. He said he hadn't touched Claude at all. "I literally read your newsletter this morning and I was like, man, I need to talk to Sam about this."

That's not a knock on him. He's got inventory to order, campaigns to manage, and a team to run. He reads all the AI insanity like the rest of us but just hasn't started and feels a little overwhelmed.

I contributed to this problem by jumping into the more advanced items like Claude skills and plugins.

I think we CFOs and professional service firms are 6 to 12 months ahead of the average ecommerce founder on AI adoption. Not because we’re smarter but because we have more incentive and arguably more opportunity.

Of course, AI is already happening around the founder/ CEO, but I’m seeing relatively few founder / CEOs building web apps in Claude.

Ecommerce companies sell physical goods, not knowledge like I do. Obviously AI is coming for us all at some point, but AI adoption is slower to climb up the DTC CEO’s priority list.

So please allow me to try again and explain where founder / CEOs are currently getting the most value and where they shouldn’t waste their time.

As of March 2026.

DTC Finance Reality AI Tracker - March 2026 Edition

I took the top 10 biggest financial pain points from my last 30 calls with founders $10M to $100M in revenue and scored each one on two dimensions: 

1. How much can AI actually help right now?

2. How much founder effort does it take to get something useful?

The result was that most of the AI conversation in DTC finance is focused on the wrong problems.

Here are a few of the most important areas where I think it’s worth and not worth spending your time. 

Lowest Effort, Highest Impact — start here

Tactical, Quantitative, One Off Data Questions

You already have the data. And the data set is finite. It's sitting in your P&L, your Shopify reports, Triple Whale, your Amazon settlements.

The problem has never been that the data doesn't exist. The problem is that founders aren’t excel wizards and rely on their agencies and apps to tell them answers.

Export your P&L, Shopify orders, marketing spend. Paste it into Claude. Ask:

• What are my worst-performing SKUs?

• What should I not reorder?

• What's my customer LTV by channel?

You don't need world class knowledge of Claude to do this. 

There’s no skill that needs to be built or advanced setup of a plugin, and you don't need perfect prompt engineering.

You just put the box around what you want analyzed, ask the question, and you can still get pretty good output. And if you don’t know what to ask, start with asking Claude what to ask.

If you do this and are able to say “actually I can spend $85 to acquire this customer instead of $60” - or least get to 80% confident - then that makes a really meaningful impact in your business immediately.

A real example of this was when a client came in with 10,000 SKUs that needed cutting. We ran it through Claude against three different methodologies — by revenue, by gross margin, by vendor and completed the analysis in under two hours. We had meaningful insights that the client could make decisions based on. 

That kind of analysis used to take days and most founders never got around to it at all.

CFO Review: What Happened and Why

Most of what happens in a monthly financial review with clients is telling you what happened and explaining why it happened.

Your fixed costs went up 20% because of a marketing initiative, you had a new hire, etc. Your margins went down 2% because you ran a big sale last month or supplier costs increased.

You can get to these answers by loading your financials into Claude and asking those same questions directly. 

Why did contribution margin go down? Where did costs spike? For the surface-level stuff, AI gets you there fast and the founder effort to do it is pretty low.

Is it going to be perfect or have all the necessary context? No.

But it can help you get the headlines fast, so when you do sit down with your CFO the conversation can go deeper instead of spending the whole time on surface-level stuff.

Obviously, we’re starting to implement this internally. But most founders don’t want to wait. So knock yourself out.

A more informed client is a better client.

Middle zone — manage expectations

Bookkeeping and accounting quality

Can AI help with bookkeeping? Yes, but the output is going to be messy and there are going to be a bunch of different directions to take it. 

It requires institutional knowledge about accounting that most founders don't have, which will keep you spinning your wheels.

If you're more advanced with Claude and want to dig in, then we actually built a QBO diagnostic specifically for this.

Download the skill, pull your reports, and you'll get a 33-point ecom-specific assessment of where your books stand. It takes some effort to set up, but if you're the type who wants to get into it then this tool will be extremely helpful

For everyone else: hand it to whoever manages your books. Use the output to ask better questions than you've been able to ask before. That's where your time actually goes further.

Low-leverage zone — don't bother

Scaling and growth decisions

This is the one that surprises people. Because it feels like AI should be great at big strategic questions like when to hire, when to invest, and how to read the market.

But the real answers require your vision, all of the context, and the judgment that AI can't provide yet. 

While you can load in your financials, you can't load in the fact that you've got three kids, that your ops team is already stretched, and that you're not sure you even want to scale this to $50M or just run it well at $15M. 

Claude doesn't know any of that and it'll give you something that sounds right but it's going to regress to what everyone else is doing.

This is what your advisors, your coaches, your CFO, and your marketing team are actually for. Once you've formed your own thesis, sure use Claude as a sparring partner. But the vision has to come from you.

Want to go deeper?

I'm hosting a live call specifically for DTC founders on getting real leverage from AI.

We’re going to discuss the entire map in more detail with real ecom-specific use cases. This will help you understand where to focus, what to skip, and how to stop feeling behind on this fast moving world of AI.

If you’re looking to ease your anxiety around AI, then come join me next Wednesday April 1 at 2 PM CST to learn where to start. 

— Sam

P.S. Can’t make the call live? No problem, you can still register and the recording will be automatically sent after.

Looking for more? Some of our most popular posts:

1. 2026 Annual Benchmark Report: Key insights from financials across 30+ companies – including revenue growth, margins, ad spend, and more.

2. 2026 Revenue Planning Guide: Our report on macroeconomic indicators, Shopify GMV trends, and same-store revenue benchmarks to give operators a clear, data-backed outlook for 2026.

3. The issue with KPIs: Everyone has tons of data, but doesn’t know what to do with it. This is my take on managing the right metrics.

4. Responsibility Map: I walk through how to define who owns, participates in, and supervises every key finance & accounting deliverable

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