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Published on:

7th Sep 2025

1124: Rewiring the Marketplace for the AI Era | Craig Foster, CFO, Pax8

When Craig Foster talks about artificial intelligence, he begins with scale. Pax8, the enterprise marketplace where he serves as CFO, connects vendors like Microsoft and CrowdStrike with 43,000 managed service providers. Those MSPs, he tells us, serve between 700,000 and 800,000 small and midsize businesses worldwide.

Against that backdrop, Foster describes how AI is reshaping both internal operations and external opportunities. Inside Pax8, teams are experimenting across functions—from customer support to accounting—to automate what was once manual. The company, he tells us, has set a target “to do 20% more with 20% less,” relying on AI tools that are already available. Efficiency gains are not hypothetical; they are part of the current planning cycle.

Externally, Foster sees what he calls “agentic marketplaces” emerging—ecosystems where AI modules act as labor components. Vendors are already building such agents, and Pax8 is designing its own. “We’re a marketplace,” he tells us, “so we need to incorporate those different… AI components and enable our downstream clients for efficiency.” He believes this wave, unlike earlier technology cycles, is reaching SMBs with unusual speed.

The finance leader is also watching economics evolve in real time. Data aggregated across Pax8’s network shows strong interest, but pricing remains unsettled. Foster compares today’s uncertainty to the early days of API marketplaces, when usage-based models became standard. The question now, he tells us, is how to split value between provider and customer—whether by consumption, per interaction, or shared outcomes. “That’s probably the biggest challenge in industry right now,” Foster says.

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CFO THOUGHT LEADER
CFO THOUGHT LEADER is a podcast featuring firsthand accounts of finance leaders who are driving change within their organizations.
We share the career journey of our spotlighted CFO guest: What do they struggle with? How do they persevere? What makes them successful CFOs? CFO THOUGHT LEADER is all about inspiring finance professionals to take a leadership leap. We know that by hearing about the successes — (and yes, also the failures) — of others, today’s CFOs can more confidently chart their own leadership paths across the enterprise and take inspired action.

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