Instructor
Svetlana Toohey
Instructor
Lana Toohey, CPA, MAcc, is Controller at SDII Global LLC, a multi-entity forensic engineering and consulting firm serving clients across the United States and Canada. She leads financial reporting, consolidations, foreign currency translation, lease accounting, and operational finance initiatives for a complex and growing organization.
Lana began her career as an auditor at Deloitte, building a strong foundation in discipline, structure, and technical precision. She later spent nine years with Mettler Toledo, supporting capital investments, factory transformations, restructurings, business-unit consolidations, and a major SAP migration.
These experiences shaped her leadership approach: strong fundamentals, collaboration, and respect for compliance in an increasingly complex business environment.
In recent years, Lana has focused on a critical question: How can finance operate smarter? That focus led her into automation, AI copilots, and coding. She now applies AI-enabled development and productivity tools to design better processes, troubleshoot reporting, automate data tasks, and accelerate analysis.
This journey led to PythonMuse (www.pythonmuse.com), a learning platform helping accounting and finance professionals use Python, AI, and automation in a responsible, audit-ready way.
Lana’s mission is to help shape the future of accounting by preparing finance professionals to work effectively alongside AI and an increasingly agentic workforce. Her message is simple: AI will not replace you—but professionals who know how to use it will redefine the role.
Most people on this webcast will spend more time reviewing and approving AI-assisted work than building it. This session focuses on the judgment needed to approve workflows, troubleshoot problems, and make informed decisions about AI—without becoming the bottleneck or approving something you don’t understand.
The session opens with a live, end-to-end accounting workflow, identifying the workspace, governing files, and evidence trail, with a brief connection to COSO’s internal control framework. The remainder of the session explores data security, authorization, system discrepancies, script validation, and evaluating whether claims are fully, partially, or unsupported.
Hands-on activities emphasize decision-making over technical skills, including classifying data, diagnosing errors, and reviewing scripts. Exercises are completed individually and followed by polls or group discussion.
Upon completion, participants will be able to:
Finance executives at every level who approve, oversee, or build AI-assisted accounting work