Trust but Verify Applies to AI Too | Elizabeth Ferrell

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Recorded10 Sep 2026

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Elizabeth Ferrell is the Assistant Corporate Controller and Finance AI Leader at The Kroger Co., which means 450,000 paychecks and the numbers behind the federal filings all run past her. So I opened with the hardest question I had. Would you let AI touch one of those numbers?She would. Trust but verify has been the whole job for her entire career, and she says it applies to humans or AI the same way. The thing I hadn't thought about is that you used to hand-test maybe 10% of the numbers and AI can test close to all of them, and she still runs the manual 10% on top of it. Her way of putting it is that the audit controls are maturing as fast as the AI is.Then the conversation turns human, which is where Elizabeth is at her best. "I'm not looking for different people," she says. "I'm looking to enable the people I have." She runs an exercise on her finance teams where you boil your job down to one sentence, and hers is "put the right number in the right box at the right time." Anybody whose sentence is a list of tasks is in trouble, and her new funnel to leadership is people who can ask the right questions and find the flaws in the AI's logic. Yes, she said that on my show. (She was subscriber number three to this podcast, after my mother and me. I'm told my producer held off until she saw whether we'd make it to three.)Sixty AI use cases turned up in under three weeks, and everything at Kroger is floating in what she calls the AI soup. When I asked why anyone should give up two days for a conference, she got to the line I've been repeating since we recorded: "That's what AI's good at, but it's what we're better at... And so go be it. Go human this thing."I'm Edward Roske, and this is Asking Good Questions. New conversations with the people figuring out the human side of AI. If one of these questions stuck with you, subscribe and send it to someone who'd take the other side.Elizabeth speaks at the Caribbean AI Summit this October in San Juan, which she points out is a lot sunnier than Ohio in October. She's right, and you can come verify that yourself: CaribbeanSummit.AILINKSCaribbean AI Summit (Elizabeth speaks, Oct 9-10): https://CaribbeanSummit.AIElizabeth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-ferrell-606695b/ODTUG, the Oracle developer and technology user community: https://www.odtug.comBOOKS & RESEARCH MENTIONEDODTUG and Kscope (the Oracle developer and technology user community)Also mentioned: Oracle, Essbase, Excel, MCP, The Kroger Co.This episode of Asking Good Questions is brought to you by Caprus.Ai.Check how we empower the office of the CFO to harness the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and revolutionize their operations.

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