In this episode of Terminal Value, Nik Singh sits down with Austin Gardner-Smith, Founder & CEO of Drivepoint, to discuss why financial planning and forecasting are especially critical in consumer, retail, and CPG businesses.

The conversation covers why forecasting can be “life or death” when inventory, cash flow, and margins are on the line; why vertical software may beat horizontal FP&A tools; how AI changes the value proposition of SaaS; and what happens to finance teams as software moves from organizing work to actually doing the work.

Drivepoint is building agentic planning software for consumer and retail brands, helping teams connect data across Shopify, Amazon, retailers, ERP systems, inventory systems, and finance workflows.

Chapters:

00:00 — Why forecasting is life or death in retail and CPG
00:50 — Welcome to Terminal Value
01:00 — What Drivepoint is building
01:20 — Why this is about more than FP&A software
01:50 — What FP&A actually does inside the CFO office
04:10 — The evolution of FP&A tools: Oracle, Anaplan, Adaptive, Workday, Pigment
06:30 — What Drivepoint does differently
07:50 — From financial models to proactive scenario planning
09:50 — Why Drivepoint focuses on consumer and retail
12:30 — Why inventory makes forecasting high stakes
13:40 — How AI changes FP&A for business leaders
15:40 — Trust, permissions, and governed access in AI finance tools
16:30 — Why the UI layer is collapsing
17:20 — Why data quality matters more in AI-native software
19:30 — How software pricing may change in an AI world
22:30 — Will Anthropic or OpenAI build this?
25:10 — How AI changes finance team org design
27:10 — Where Drivepoint goes next
28:40 — Nik’s closing thoughts: context, vertical AI, and where software value accrues

Topics covered:

• FP&A software

• Vertical AI

• Agentic planning

• Retail and CPG forecasting

• Inventory planning

• Strategic finance

• Office of the CFO

• SaaS pricing models

• AI and finance jobs

• Data quality and context layers

• Drivepoint

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For years, cloud cost management was mostly about visibility: dashboards, budgets, showback, chargeback, and rate optimization. But as AI usage, token costs, observability bills, and cloud consumption become material parts of software gross margin, the problem is moving closer to the code itself.

In this episode of Terminal Value, I sit down with Mike Weider, Founder & CEO of Frugal, to discuss the shift from traditional FinOps to Application Cost Engineering.

We cover why legacy cloud cost tools mostly helped companies measure spend, how Frugal maps cloud and AI costs back to the code driving them, why AI-native companies face a more urgent gross margin problem, and why cost optimization may become part of the developer workflow.

Chapters:
00:00 Cold open: AI’s gross margin problem
00:25 Welcome to Terminal Value
01:20 Why cloud cost management matters more because of AI
01:50 Interview begins
02:00 The first wave of cloud cost management
04:20 Showback, chargeback, and the finance/engineering tension
06:35 What Frugal is building
07:00 Why cloud cost optimization is too reactive today
09:35 Moving cost visibility into the developer workflow
10:00 Mapping cloud, AI, and observability costs back to code
12:10 How FinOps and engineering work together
14:45 Building trust in cost-to-code automation
17:45 Why Frugal uses a forward-deployed engineer model
20:00 Why AI still needs the right context
21:45 Frugal’s ICP and where customers get the most value
23:25 Why AI-native companies have a gross margin problem
24:35 Frontier models, cheaper models, and evals
28:00 Pricing AI-native software
31:20 How AI changes engineering teams
32:35 Engineers as conductors of AI agents
35:20 Where Frugal sits in the software stack
37:20 Why FinOps dashboards still matter
39:00 Competition from FinOps, observability, and coding agents
41:05 The future of cost-aware code
43:00 Key takeaways from the conversation

Terminal Value explores where value accrues across markets, software, AI, and infrastructure through deep dives with founders, operators, and investors.

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