Alan de Sousa Caires, founder of AI Finance Office and interim Finance Director, charts an unconventional route from GE and Six Sigma to building AI tools that transform how charity finance teams operate.

1. How did you land your current role, and what was your career path leading up to it?
I built it. After six years as Director of Finance & Operations at The Film and Television Charity, I left at the end of 2025 and spent the following months developing AI automations for charity finance teams. In March 2026 I launched AI Finance Office — a consulting practice that automates month-end close processes: bank reconciliations, payroll journals, fund accounting, management accounts and board packs. Alongside that, I continue to take on interim Finance Director roles in the sector — live environments where the work is real.

The career path is an unusual one. I spent fourteen years at GE, with a Six Sigma Black Belt posting in Florence, Italy and major projects including compressing a 19-country consolidation to a two-day close. That gave me a permanent conviction that finance teams shouldn't spend their time doing things a well-designed system can do for them. In 2005 I made a deliberate pivot to mission-driven work — across a range of UK and international charities, including five years at BBC Media Action managing a £40m finance function across 25 countries.

The thread running through all of it — from finance systems implementations to Six Sigma to AI automations — is the same instinct. The tools changed. The conviction didn't.

2. What is the most interesting part of your job?
Discovery. Even now, after months of building these tools, I'll point AI at a process I've been doing manually for thirty years and it will produce something sharper than I had planned. The ceiling keeps moving. What makes it genuinely exciting rather than technically interesting is what it means for the people on the other side of it — Finance Directors and their teams spending hours every month on things that should take minutes. The gap between where charity finance teams are right now and what's already possible is larger than most people realise. Closing that gap matters to me.

3. What would be your alternative career?
Teaching. A lot of my career has been about building other people's capability — mentoring people to Six Sigma certification at GE, training finance teams through major system implementations, and building local finance capacity in Papua New Guinea. If finance hadn't worked out, I'd have ended up in a classroom somewhere.

4. What inspired you to work in the charity sector?
After fifteen years in the commercial world — GE, three countries, Six Sigma, multinational consolidations — I wanted to apply those skills somewhere with direct social impact. Notting Hill Housing Association was the first step: a large organisation, just with a different kind of mission. The commercial discipline transferred completely — the efficiency focus, the systems thinking, the rigour. It still does.

5. What challenges do you face in your day-to-day work?
Persuading people to find time they don't have. Charity finance teams are typically stretched — so busy running month-end the way they've always run it that there's rarely time or headspace to step back and improve it. Helping a team carve out that space is often the hardest part of the work, before a single thing is changed.
Even when that headspace exists, a second challenge emerges: imagination — knowing which processes to question and being open to possibilities that might at first seem ambitious. The finance teams I have spoken to are already convinced by AI in principle, but haven't seen what it can actually do in a real finance environment. Without that picture, it can be hard to know where to start.

6. What would make the biggest positive difference to the sector right now?
Finance teams getting their time back. Charity finance teams care deeply about mission impact but spend most of their working hours on mechanical processes — reconciliations, journals, management accounts — that AI can now handle well. If the sector started treating "we don't have enough time" as a design problem rather than a fixed constraint, the mission impact would be significant. The tools to close that gap already exist — the question is how quickly they'll be adopted.

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