Ex-Warner Bros Finance Exec Robert Dika Reveals How AI Will Transform Agricultural Harvesting Within Years

In this forward-looking episode of "Asking Good Questions," host Edward Roske explores the technological revolution reshaping finance with Robert Dika, Chief Financial Officer of the Primex Group of Companies.

As Primex undertakes a comprehensive ERP system selection to replace their highly customized Microsoft Navision platform, Robert shares invaluable insights on evaluating technology partners in the age of artificial intelligence. The conversation reveals how modern finance leaders are navigating the integration of AI capabilities into their ERP implementations, ensuring their systems remain future-proof while addressing industry-specific challenges.

Robert provides a compelling perspective on automation's accelerating role in finance operations, particularly in response to the accounting talent shortage. He details how AI will transform routine accounting processes—from three-way matching purchase orders, invoices, and bills of lading to handling month-end reconciliations and journal entries—freeing finance professionals to focus on higher-value strategic activities.

The discussion extends beyond the finance department to examine how robotics and automation are revolutionizing agricultural operations. Robert explains how Primex and other California agricultural enterprises are leveraging robotics for harvesting and field operations, helping them maintain global competitiveness despite regulatory and cost pressures.

For finance leaders evaluating their technology roadmaps, Robert offers practical wisdom on:

• Selecting ERP systems that incorporate AI capabilities responsibly
• Balancing automation opportunities with human oversight
• Using technology to enhance productivity amid talent shortages
• Maintaining accounting principles like conservatism in increasingly automated environments

This episode provides essential listening for finance professionals, technology decision-makers, and business leaders seeking to understand how ERP systems, AI, automation, and robotics are transforming financial management across traditional industries.

Takeaways

• Accountants must prioritize ethical considerations in their work.
• A passion for numbers can start from a young age.
• Technology has transformed the finance industry significantly.
• Career paths can be non-linear and filled with unexpected opportunities.
• Agriculture presents unique financial risks due to external factors.
• Tariffs can complicate the food industry landscape.
• CFOs must adapt to rapidly changing financial environments.
• AI is becoming essential in finance and accounting roles.
• Communication skills are vital for finance professionals.
• The accounting profession needs to attract more talent.

Chapters
00:00 The Role of Accountants in Business Ethics
03:09 Journey into Accounting and Finance
06:00 The Evolution of Technology in Finance
08:49 Career Path: From Entertainment to Agriculture
12:01 Managing Financial Risk in Agriculture
15:13 The Impact of Tariffs on Agriculture
18:02 CFO Insights: Navigating Financial Challenges
20:49 The Future of AI in Finance
23:57 Operational Efficiencies in Agribusiness
27:09 Key Metrics for Success in Agriculture
30:06 The Role of Communication in Finance
32:55 AI's Role in Transforming Finance
35:50 The Future of Work in Accounting
39:02 Final Thoughts on the Accounting Profession

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.

Transcript

Asking Good Questions: Interview with Robert Dika

Introduction

Robert Dika (00:00):
It's the accountant's role to be the gatekeepers and be the person in the room that says, even though this may be according to GAAP or this may be legal or there's no law that's preventing us from doing this, the accountant always has to think in terms of what is best, not just for the company, but for the employees, for the industry as a whole and the global economy.

Edward Roske:
Hello and welcome to Asking Good Questions, the podcast where we dive into the nuances of the business world by, well, it's kind of in the name, asking good questions. I am your host, Edward Roske, hopefully today asking great questions. And today I'm joined by someone who has navigated multiple industries, fresh produce to entertainment to pistachios and a whole lot more. At this point, you could probably make a really entertaining and delicious trail mix with just companies he's been involved in. And that someone is Robert Dika, Chief Financial Officer at the Primex Group of Companies. Robert, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

Robert Dika:
Thank you for having me, Edward. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Early Career and Background

Edward Roske:
Thank you for the time. So Robert, you have, we're just going to politely say a quarter century of experience in finance strategy, corporate development. You've worked at KPMG, Warner Brothers, Dole Food Company, now you're the CFO of Primex. We're gonna go all the way back in the way back machine to the beginning. What first drew you into the world of accounting and finance?

Robert Dika:
So interesting that you asked that question. When I was about five or six years old, and this is a little bit of an unusual story, I love to draw grids on a blank sheet of paper. And then I loved filling in numbers into those empty cells that I created in that grid. And I never knew what it was. I just thought that there was a certain elegance to having numbers in an organized fashion. And I completely forgot about that.

And then in high school, my best friend at the time who wanted to become a CPA, that was his career path, asked me if I was interested in joining the accounting class with him, with Ms. McBride in our high school in Toronto, Canada. And I said, sure, why not? Accounting sounds like something that might be a useful tool later on in life.

Even though I never really thought about becoming an accountant professionally, the teacher that we had in high school was just incredible. And she really, I think, connected maybe that innate passion and interest that I had in organization and numbers and money and connected it to a real world example of where you can build a profession around it. And then long story short, I did pretty reasonably well in my high school accounting classes and then decided to pursue accounting and finance in university and the rest is history as they say.

Edward Roske:
So do you remember this inspiring accounting teacher's name from back in high school?

Robert Dika:
Yeah, Miss McBride, Gail McBride. Yeah, from Forest Hill Collegiate Institute which, as an interesting side note, even though he's not popular nowadays, but that's the same high school that the artist Drake went to in Forest Hill, Toronto.

Edward Roske:
That is an amazingly small world. He came this close to theoretically being an accountant. So shout out to the awesome teacher McBride. So you began, for lack of better way to put it, instead of making a spreadsheet and printing it out, you just wrote some numbers down and made paper spreadsheets, which is I think awesomely adorable. So do you ever miss the days when the numbers in the spreadsheets didn't have to tie out?

Robert Dika:
So I am very particular. When I was five years old, when I first started doing this as a hobby, I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't summing them or anything like that. But in university, when I started learning Lotus 123, because Excel was not the main spreadsheet software at the time, I quickly realized the importance of knowing what you're doing. But just as I started learning Lotus 123, I got thrust into KPMG, and by that time they were heavily into the Excel world.

And at KPMG, interesting side story, some of the partners that had been there for 20-30 years, they could literally take a yellow pages and some of your younger viewers may not know what that is. I don't know you have a way of doing a subtitle of explaining what a yellow pages are or white pages.

Edward Roske:
We'll do call out on the side yellow pages for anyone under 50.

Robert Dika:
Yeah maybe with a Wikipedia link, but these CPAs were so highly trained and their brains were so in tune with calculations and with numbers that they could literally run down the white page's telephone list and tally up the total to the penny in their head. I mean, it was absolutely incredible what the human mind can handle.

So I obviously never reached that stage because from an early, really from the beginning of my career, I had spreadsheets as a tool. But I was so inspired by the ability of these partners that I always admired and respected and learned a lot from to follow their lead and their experience and emulate them, obviously with more modern tools. So I was very, very, very particular about things tying out to the penny. I know some of my colleagues would put plugs in and would try to monkey around with the formatting to make the numbers match. And most of those ended up either at Arthur Anderson or Enron. But I did not want to monkey around with the numbers. A trial balance has to tie out, a balance sheet has to balance.

Edward Roske:
Bless you for saying that. By the way, I now want to see someone do this awesome add up the phone book bar bit. Nowadays, my kids don't even understand that when there's a contact, there's some phone number behind the scenes that we used to have to remember. So being able to add up an entire list of phone numbers is a magic trick. They were like, that is the most amazing thing I've ever seen.

Technology Evolution in Finance

Edward Roske:
So we talked briefly just now about technology, going from the paper world to the world of Lotus 1-2-3, which is another fun thing you all should look up in your spare time. And then eventually to Excel, the modern duct tape of business. Is anything else in addition to Excel in your tech toolbox that you've learned to use during the years that you can't live without? And what did you find interesting about those tools that you've said, yeah, this is now a key part of my success?

Robert Dika:
So I've always been very progressive and very accepting of new technologies, even though they get more painful to learn how to use as we, you know, get more experienced to put it kindly. I've always been very open to using technology to not just make my job easier, but to make my teams and my bosses lives more efficient and productive.

But since nowadays we do have a plethora of tools, as I've changed positions and as I've changed roles, I've learned to accept whatever is available, whether it's SAP, whether it's Oracle, whether it's NetSuite, whether it's Microsoft Outlook, whether it's Google, Google Docs, I've been agnostic to all of them. However, Excel has always been my backup.

So whenever I was faced with a situation where the other tool could not exactly generate the reporting or the analysis that I needed and after exhausting, you know, my team that are always much more tech savvy and a lot smarter than I am, then I would always revert back to Excel because I know that in Excel I have complete control of what I need and then I can custom design either a rudimentary spreadsheet or a complicated analysis to fit like a highly unusual situation, whether it's trying to calculate royalties for Warner Brothers for a country that we've never sold to before, to buying a pistachio orchard, to looking at an acquisition in an adjacent industry. So Excel was always there as my safety blanket, as my comfort food that could see me through any difficult situation.

Edward Roske:
So suffice to say, we'll get Excel out of your cold dead hand. It is the, sometimes I call it the duct tape, sometimes it's the super glue. I don't think anybody ever sat down and said, I think our key enabling technology should be Excel, but you put it correctly, nobody can stop you. Like you have power, you have control, you can create something, you don't have to wait for anybody else. It's not shocking. I'm positive it's open on my computer. When I have to reboot my computer, if it doesn't automatically reopen, I get really annoyed at Microsoft.

Career Trajectory

Edward Roske:
You did bring up a few other things that you've done in the past. So let's talk about that for a bit. So you went from audit at KPMG, launching into that accounting world, entertainment at Warner Brothers, Dole food was... Was that a planned trajectory? Did you simply follow interesting opportunities as they rose up?

Robert Dika:
Neither, actually. So as I mentioned earlier, or the third option, which you may elaborate on, go for it in the interview. I'm kind of a happy-go-lucky kind of person. So and I have a hard time saying no. So just like when my best friend in high school said he was going to take an accounting class and just kind of went along for the ride, my other best friend in high school wanted to be an actor. So he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career. And, you know, I had a pretty generous vacation policy at KPMG. So instead of freezing my behind off in Toronto, every opportunity I had, every time I had accrued three or four vacation days, I would get on a plane and I would fly into LAX and crash at his place, which was a block west of Rodeo Drive in Wilshire in Beverly Hills.

So I got to meet a lot of his fellow actors and actresses. I got to meet some directors and I'm like, wow, the entertainment industry seems like a really good time. And at the time, this was during the dot com boom of the early 2000s. There was a massive shortage of CPAs in Southern California because anybody that wanted to develop their career had moved to the Bay Area to capitalize on the dot-com boom.

So I called a recruiter in Los Angeles and I said, I'm interested in perhaps pursuing a career in Los Angeles. And he said, what industry do you want to work in? And I'm like, well, you know, my best friend's in entertainment, so I said entertainment. He's like, OK. So he got me interviews with all the major motion picture studios and just kind of, you know, took the one that seemed like the best fit, which was Warner Brothers back in the day. And it was an amazing experience. I was on the lot, you know, would run into Steven Spielberg all the time, would run into George Clooney. And for about three years, was just something different that not too many of my colleagues and friends from childhood got to experience. So in retrospect, it was just kind of a fun thing to try and do. But it certainly wasn't a plan, any master plan or any master strategy that I was formulating when I was a kid or a teenager.

Edward Roske:
So I love the journey. And then before we go from like Warner Brothers over to Dole, I do have to say, I actually helped build reporting analysis systems for a few companies out there in the Hollywood area. I helped Paramount. They implemented a tool called Hyperion and S-Base to do some analysis. And then oddly, I spent a great deal of time on Rodeo Drive myself. No, for anyone listening, I was not dressed appropriately to be on Rodeo Drive. But, and Robert will back me up on this, MGM was headquartered on Rodeo Drive. And whenever I would like walk out at lunch with like these, I can't afford to walk through the front door, let alone actually buy anything at any of these places. But yeah, so believe it or not, everybody listening, MGM used to be an independent company and not a division of Amazon. So we'll see if that comment actually ages well. But I love that you ended up over at Warner Brothers. I've been on there a lot, a bunch, but I don't think I helped them build anything. So tell me how entertainment becomes food.

Robert Dika:
So even though it was a great experience, entertainment traditionally didn't exactly pay a living wage for the cost of living in Los Angeles. And being exposed to Beverly Hills and being exposed to the opportunities that seem to be present in other industries, I got it out of my system and it was fun. But when you're kind of living paycheck to paycheck, reality sets in. And I decided to kind of go back to back at KPMG.

The reason that KPMG was my choice for my first company was they had a owner-managed group. And most of my clients were entrepreneurs that had started their companies and I was responsible for performing the audit. I was responsible for preparing the corporate tax returns and I was responsible for preparing the personal tax returns. So even though myself, I never saw myself as an entrepreneur nor did I ever have a desire to be an entrepreneur, I always had a tremendous amount of respect for the women and men that were willing to risk all their money, all their time into pursuing their business passion and their business ideas at great, great personal risk and expense to themselves.

So after Warner Brothers, I decided to go work for an owner managed company. And now most people don't see Dole Food Company as an owner-managed company, but it was in fact owned by Mr. David Murdoch. And I was very, very lucky enough to get a position at his corporate office, initially in Westwood, Los Angeles, and then in Westlake Village, which is a suburb of Los Angeles.

Managing Financial Risk

Edward Roske:
So at Dole, versus Warner Brothers versus KPMG, you're definitely in industries that can be cyclical. Definitely some that value more than others, some that get involved heavily in M&A, some that are kind of independent or just always a step away from getting acquired or buying something else. I'm gonna ask you a couple of questions. In a second, I'm gonna talk to you about M&A, but right now for all the companies, including Primex, although we haven't really turned to them yet, which of those industries has taught you the most about managing financial risk?

Robert Dika:
Definitely agriculture, because agriculture is, as you can imagine, incredibly susceptible to weather events and geopolitical events. Things can turn from sunny to cloudy overnight. And then you have to, and that's not a metaphor, it is literal. And at that point, you got to sit down. You got to throw all the work that you've done planning for the future out the door or in Excel's case, you just save a new file with an updated date and the file name. And you have to pull together a diverse team of individuals spanning the globe to come together and motivate them and say, now what? How do we handle this catastrophe or this change in tariff regimes or this hurricane or this flood or this revolution that now we have soldiers or we have armed people on our farms overseas. How do we handle this? What do we do now?

Edward Roske:
So I don't mean for this to turn political, but just out of curiosity, having been through probably on the giving side and the receiving side, thoughts on tariffs in the food industry, other than that they clearly add some risk to what you're doing.

Robert Dika:
They do, they do. Agriculture, actually, I was doing an event at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the moderators said that there was only two types of people that choose to work in agriculture. You're either born into it or you marry into it. So by nature, people that make their living in agriculture are very, very resilient. They know the risks. They know it's tough. They are people that are very fiscally conservative, and they're prepared for anything.

So when times are good, they invest in technology, they invest in innovation, they put some money aside, they pay down debt, they open new lines of credit for that emergency when things go south. But in the back of their minds, they always know that people have to eat. So real estate and agriculture are two commodities that no person on this earth can live without. So as long as you're willing to innovate, to be nimble, then there's always a path forward in the agricultural industry.

Edward Roske:
Yeah. Well put. I heard the term the other day, share of stomach, but it's not trying to grow people's stomachs or to try and increase. It's like you, as you said, everyone has to eat. So it's what portion of that goes to whichever direction, which makes for an amazing pivot. I may have accidentally just given myself credit for my own pivot over to the present.

Primex Group of Companies

Edward Roske:
So fast forwarding to today, you're now the CFO of the Primex group of companies. They are a fourth generation to your point about being born into it and then born into it and born into it, grower, processor, international trader of nuts and dried fruits. Tell me how you came into the position and then tell me how you've structured finance under your leadership.

Robert Dika:
So I was helping out an investment banker friend of mine back in late 2019, early 2020 with a project in Watsonville. It was supposed to be a six month project, but then COVID hit and kind of changed the nature of the project that I was working on. And what's supposed to be a six month project turned into a three year project. And at one point during COVID, it was just myself and two other passengers on the Burbank to San Jose Southwest flight on Monday morning and Friday afternoon. So there was more pilots and crew than there were passengers on the plane.

So I have a young son and I kind of sensed that me being away for five days out of the week was starting to impact him and growing up not without a father, but with an absentee father was probably not something that was in the long-term interests of my family. So I talked to my bosses in the Watsonville company and I told them that the commute was just not working out for me and I apologized and they were supportive.

So I started a search and I applied for this very kind of obscure CFO ad and it was in the food industry with hardly any other details. So at that point, you know, I just sent my resume and I got a call back, we did some Skype interviews, we did an in-person interview, and I was one of the finalists, and they chose me without really knowing too much about the company.

So I joined, and I remember the first day on the job, I went to the processing facility in a small town called Wasco, California. And I was expecting, you know, just kind of something on the smaller side and maybe like a small agricultural concern. But it turns out that this is one of the largest tree nut companies in the world. And the business that the owners have created is absolutely spectacular. I mean, from automation to systems to the global trading presence and I really was just in awe of what they'd been able to accomplish in the last 20 to 30 years between their different entities.

And even though they had built a very successful and very well respected business, I did see very quickly that I could add value in some of the peripheral areas, such as automation, such as internal reporting organization. There was a lot of low hanging fruit cost savings initiatives. So even though I came into a well run business, I still felt like I could contribute to the bottom line and help the company out. Hopefully, if their children are interested to pass it on to the fifth generation.

Edward Roske:
That's awesome. Before we talk about some of the changes that you've made there, in yet another parallel between us, I also did a financial project in Watsonville. It was really weird because you drive over from the Bay Area and you end up kind of passing through all the amazing, just everybody growing everything as far as you can see. But I was actually there for a company called Granite Construction.

Robert Dika:
Yes.

Edward Roske:
Yeah, headquartered in Watsonville, helping them build their financial reporting and their consolidation system. For anybody keeping track at home, you might have said, wait, what are all the parallels? Well, there's one you may not have noticed. We actually are also chair twins. We have the identical lazy boy chair from Costco, who apparently will be our unofficial sponsor for today's episode. Later on, we will hear from our actual official sponsor.

Technology Initiatives at Primex

Edward Roske:
So in terms of what you've been doing at Primex, in addition to preparing for the fifth or the seventh or the 17th generation down the line, what else did you want to focus on on changing and improving while you were there?

Robert Dika:
So the company was on Microsoft Navision, a highly customized ERP system that was built specifically for the very unique vertically integrated circumstances that Primex, the Primex group of companies had. So we were kind of forced into looking at a new ERP partner. So we are in the final stage. We hired an amazing project manager that came with over 20 years of ERP and process engineering experience. He joined our team about a year ago and together, including the subject matter experts at various parts of the company, we went through an official ERP selection process.

We interviewed over 20 companies, brought it down to three finalists and we are now in the final stages of selecting the one finalist where we are going to negotiate the price and the timeline, etc. So that is one area that is critical as everybody knows nowadays. And just as we were getting really deep into this, then the whole artificial intelligence boom came in.

So obviously ERP systems take years, if not decades to develop. So obviously the project manager, he asked them how is artificial intelligence gonna slot into this and factor into it? And it definitely threw, not a curve ball, I would say, but it made the whole process more interesting because we cannot bury our head in the sand and think that AI is going to go away. So we wanted to make sure that we are partnering with an ERP company that is aware of the potential of artificial intelligence and that can then incorporate the best parts of AI and the most reliable parts of AI into the ERP system so that we can really take the productivity improvements and efficiencies to the next level.

Edward Roske:
I definitely want to explore more about that after the break, but before we go into the break, so my bit of research shows that Primex owns and farms something like over 5,000 acres of pistachio orchards. It's got state-of-the-art processing facilities. Do you balance getting operational efficiencies with financial efficiencies and financial oversight? I mean, it's a very, it seems like it'd be a very integrated business.

Robert Dika:
By working 16 hours a day. So I really have two jobs. I have the traditional CFO job where, you know, responsible for, for reporting and CPA reviews and tax returns and bank relationships. And at the same time, because our processing operations are in a very rural area where it's sometimes difficult to find qualified staff, I actually get in my car and every Wednesday I drive up to the Central Valley and I spend my whole day there to be an available resource for whoever needs my help, whether it's in accounting, reporting, purchasing, IT, risk management, however they need me, I'm there to help them out in person because ultimately, you have to do what you have to do to support the entrepreneurs.

Edward Roske:
My final week working for someone else back when I used to be in consulting, like you, had a child I wanted to see that was about to be born and I worked 108 hours in one week. 108 billable hours and I went and told my boss, he's like, Edward, you look a little tired. You know, why? I said, to get the job done, I had to work 108 hours. And he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, well, there are 168 hours in a week. So it looks like you got 60 more you could bill. And shockingly, I resigned to go start my own company. So you have my support in your 16 hour plus journey and your Wednesday commitment.

When talking about the operational side, one of the key themes that we've heard a lot from CFOs is being able to bridge that gap between the financial side and then, which tends to be somewhat of a lagging indicator, everything on the income statement to those leading indicators. Are there any key metrics that you found indispensable in the agribusiness space?

Robert Dika:
Yes. So obviously the size of the crop is something that is highly, highly susceptible to a myriad of factors. Even though Primex does farm and own over 5,000 acres of our own orchards, we actually buy pistachios from an additional 100,000 acres of other processors and growers. But like everything else in agriculture, that's susceptible to other events.

So just when you think that you're gonna have a bumper crop, California weather can do its thing and can be really, really hot one day and then really, really cold the next day and then get really, really hot the next day. And because the trees are living things, if that hits them during a certain time of the year, they don't exactly love it. So they kind of go into a defensive mode and instead of expending their energy on producing pistachios, they kind of batten down the hatches and go back to sleep.

So the size of the crop is something that not just people at the processing plant, but the farmers were always continuously looking at because we need to have as good of an estimate of what our handle, basically what our market share is gonna be, so that we make sure that we have the capacity at the plant to handle all the farms that are contracted with our company. So that really drives everything from there on down. Like how much product we're gonna have to process. So I would say that's the one master KPI that everything else trickles down from.

Edward Roske:
Very good. Well, thank you for everything you do to support and drive the pistachio industry. I didn't know I loved pistachios until recently and then I tried something called Dubai chocolate.

Robert Dika:
Yes.

Edward Roske:
Which is just proof that the gods love us and want us to be happy. It's absolutely amazing and everybody I know is addicted to it right now and if you haven't tried it everybody go try it. It has lots of wonderful things and one of the keys is pistachio cream. You must go try it. And with that we are going to take a break not to hear from our unofficial sponsor Costco because they did not actually pay for this segment. Let's take a quick break to hear from today's actual sponsor, an amazing AI company that helps bring AI to the real world, Capris AI.

[Commercial Break: Capris AI Sponsor Message]

The Future of AI in Finance and Agriculture

Edward Roske:
Welcome back everyone from that brief break where I believe we just heard from also Edward speaking on behalf of our sponsor. So I'm back here with Robert Dika.

So looking ahead, you talked about AI and how it's hit us like a wave. It's interesting. I got my masters of data science and all the AI that I learned about was things focused on making the math really accurate. You know, things like linear regression, or let's look for patterns or breaks from patterns. Let's do really accurate forecasting. And then all the AI anybody wants to talk about today is more probabilistic. And what is the right way to talk about this? Or can you find insights in my information? It's less about the accuracy side of things.

But for anybody who thinks AI was just invented, it hasn't been. You can argue it's, well, you can argue it dates back to automatons, but definitely we can give Turing credit for it, and that was 80 years ago. But you're correct. This boom is here, and we're gonna look back and have the world before AI and the world after AI. So let's talk about that rapidly evolving world. So first, the role of CFOs in industries like agriculture, like global trade, it's evolving rapidly. What do you see as the biggest changes coming in those next five, 10 years?

Robert Dika:
So I think we have no choice but to intelligently incorporate AI in not just our accounting, finance, analysis, but in all of world trade. And that's driven by two factors. The global marketplace is becoming increasingly complicated. Regulations, phytosanitary requirements, tariffs, trading blocks, logistical interruptions because of COVID, because of wars. So the global economy is becoming far more complicated and it's possibly reaching the point where it may be the point where an individual cannot have all the information for all the countries all the time.

So AI will absolutely be a powerful tool to provide data and perhaps some rudimentary analysis to help the leadership teams at companies such as ours make the right decisions. So that's one aspect that is gonna be driving AI here for the next, for as long as humanity chooses to exist.

The other driving factor is that on the accounting and finance side, especially on the accounting side, there's fewer and fewer young people that choose a career in accounting. It is becoming very difficult to find and hire individuals that wanna make a career out of accounting. So with that shortage of qualified staff, we have no choice but to resort to productivity tools, including AI, to get the work done, Edward.

Edward Roske:
So I want to drive in on that one more because you have a key insight there. A lot of people think of AI as something that will require needing fewer people, that it's going to take however many people we have and we can replace some portion of their job. But you raise an excellent point, which is the flip side of that. We don't have enough going forward. So if you doubled in size tomorrow, you said I need twice as many finance people, you can't find them and you're gonna have to use AI to do that.

What part, do you see AI being able to handle all those needs for those junior finance people coming in or do you see it handling like a lot of the bulk work for people so they can get to the kind of higher level functioning? Like how do you see it being used as a force multiplier since we don't have access to an infinite number of qualified finance and accounting people going forward.

Robert Dika:
Yeah, definitely more of the second part. I think at the current iteration of AI, and I just love the fact that there's so much competition. I love the fact that there several AI companies in the United States. I loved reading about the Chinese competitor that came out a few weeks ago. Now it's my understanding that there's a second AI tool coming from China. I'm sure that something's going to come from the Europeans soon. So I love the fact because competition makes everybody stronger and healthier.

So I think at this stage of AI, it's gonna be very helpful for the clerical type duties. Like for example, three way match and accounts payable, matching the purchase order to the invoice to the bill of lading. And that's gonna evolve rapidly. I think a lot of accruals, a lot of month-end journal entries, a lot of reconciliations, probably in a matter of months, at the most, a year from now, we'll be able to get done by AI tools, either embedded in an ERP system or just as some kind of a third-party review process.

Obviously, the buck stops with the CFO and the controller. So we still need to review all the work product from AI, just like we need to review the work product from our accounting associates and senior accountants and from our financial analysts. But it will free up some of the routine, let's call it boring aspects of the accountant's job responsibilities, and let them use their creativity and their ability to think outside the box and their ability to look around and be open to new ideas so that they can not just add value from that perspective but also make the company more money so that we can continue to generously increase pay rates and bonuses and benefits across the board for whoever's left wanting to have an accounting, a career in accounting.

Edward Roske:
Yes, until the AI kills us all. But to your point, we should extend that as long as we possibly can. Thank you for providing us food and tasty Dubai chocolate along the way.

In terms of where companies start with AI, I think a lot are beginning with, let's go find those boring tasks. Let's go find those things that everybody hates doing because that means they're probably the most repetitive. It's probably not what they got their degree in. You know, we all kind of graduate thinking we're going to change the world and we find out we're trying to find why there's a pound ref error inside of Excel as part of our career. Let it go solve all of that.

Once we do that, do you see AI unlocking any capabilities like giving us access to things that we couldn't do now? It might be just as simple as people can finally get to items 11 through 100 on their to do list. Or do you see AI helping in agriculture? Do you see AI coming up with a role in business where we're able to do things we otherwise couldn't.

Robert Dika:
Absolutely. Not just on the finance and accounting side, but also on the operations side. If you drive through the Central Valley of California, you're increasingly going to be seeing more roboticized sprayers and crop dusters and drones because it's hard to find people to do those jobs. I believe that in a few years, most of the agricultural harvesting will be done by robots. Because it's such a massive industry that there's simply not enough people to do those jobs.

And even though those positions are highly paid, people just don't want to be in the 120 degree California, you know, in dusty environments with limited, you know, restroom options and limited dining and lunch options, it's a tough environment for people to work in.

So I think AI is absolutely gonna take over a lot of those jobs from people that are currently maybe not loving it with the added side effect of saving a lot of money and making California continue to be the low cost supplier of the highest quality agricultural products in the world. Because people always hear California, it's impossible to do business and there's regulation and there's a high cost of labor and insurance companies are fleeing. But guess what? As I mentioned earlier, people in the agriculture industry are incredibly resilient and incredibly innovative and they work very, very closely with their financial institutions and the California universities to continuously make things more efficient. And those efficiencies result in California agriculture still being incredibly competitive with low cost countries that you would never in a million years think we could compete with.

Edward Roske:
Well, and you're in this really interesting place in California because you not only are leaders in agriculture and providing food for the world. I mean, in terms of exporting, it obviously is not just in the United States. It's going beyond as well. You're not only at that hub of agriculture. You also are at the hub in the world of AI. So I love the idea that we can have AI based robots off doing farming. I never thought I would say those words together, but here we are. So I like to your point, if we can somehow marry those, you the traditional side of agriculture that is constantly having to innovate to survive. And then AI that says, us the questions you want to ask or the problems you want us to solve, but we can aim at it and do it. Hopefully that comes together at Primex and beyond.

Robert Dika:
It is, It is. And the best part is a lot of these companies that are integrating innovation, and AI and robotics, our family-owned businesses, our entrepreneurs that got a little bit of seed capital here, a little bit of seed capital there, maybe took out some credit card debt and what have you, and they are coming up with absolutely amazing technology, oftentimes in California, that is keeping the whole state wealthy and healthy and an export powerhouse, you know, the fifth largest economy in the world.

Rapid Fire Questions

Edward Roske:
I think that is awesome. So thank you for your part in it. We're gonna do a quick speed round. So short questions, whatever pops into your mind first. And it can be something completely random. Most underrated financial skill.

Robert Dika:
Communication.

Edward Roske:
Okay, I love that answer, by the way. There are a whole lot of finance people that kind of think their job stops when they hand someone an income statement. Please spend 15 seconds or 30 elaborating, like why is communication so important nowadays in finance?

Robert Dika:
So automation and AI and ERPs and robots, it's a double-edged sword. It takes a lot of the routine rote duties off of people's plates, but they increase complexity. And it's increasingly becoming important that the people that are responsible and accountable for managing those tools are able to take the deliverables and the information that's generated from the automation and be able to tell a story on what the results are.

And there's a stereotype of finance people and accountants being, like the old joke goes, what's the sign of an extroverted accountant? They don't look at their own toes, they look at your toes. So being able to take the information that's increasingly becoming synthesized and summarized, taking that information and relaying it in a way that is understandable for people outside of the accounting and finance department, I think is a critical, critical skill for people to develop, work on and become good at.

Edward Roske:
So I think I know what your answer to the next one is, but biggest misconception about agribusiness?

Robert Dika:
That it's conservative and backward looking and that farmers are not innovators and that they're stuck in the past. I read once, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but when Frank Baum was writing The Wizard of Oz. It's really all an allegory for everything that was going on in the late 1800s, all the way down to the Yellow Brick Road and the Emerald City. But one of the parts of the allegory was that the scarecrow was meant to represent the American farmer. And everybody felt that the American farmer had no brains. And in reality, he was the smartest person out there. Always driving ahead and helping push and helping support, but coming up with amazing solutions on their own. So, yes, it's sadly still a misconception and in reality agribusiness is not just feeding us all, they're innovating us all.

Edward Roske:
Key lesson from your time at KPMG that still resonates with you today.

Robert Dika:
Listen to what your boss is and what your clients have to say.

Edward Roske:
Excellent. If you could mandate one universal accounting policy, you are accounting president for a day and you're going to mandate one universal accounting policy across every company in the world, what would it be?

Robert Dika:
The principle of conservatism. Because every time that accountants forget the principle of conservatism, it's not just that the companies like Enron and Whole Slew globally that go under, it's the hundreds and thousands of employees that get affected by it, that in many cases lose their life savings. And a lot of these employees have families and children. It disrupts the vendors, it disrupts the customers, and it's the accountant's role to be the gatekeepers and be the person in the room that says, even though this may be according to GAAP or this may be legal or there's no law that's preventing us from doing this, the accountant always has to think in terms of what is best, not just for the company, but for the employees, for the industry as a whole, and the global economy.

Edward Roske:
Awesome. One more question. We need more accountants. We need more finance people in the world. This is your chance. They're getting ready to go into college. What's your inspiring advice for why they should consider accounting or finance?

Robert Dika:
Well, job security for one. There's not too many unemployed accountants. I think the industry is belatedly recognizing that you have to pay accountants the same pay level as the banking industry does, as finance, that you can't get away with working your employees 108 billable hours per week and expect them to, you know, make 30, 40% less than their peers that are just as intelligent, just as hardworking and just as educated as they are.

So it is a global service. I think as AI becomes increasingly present, it's gonna be important for there to be people that are educated, trained, properly supervised, that vet the information that comes from the AI because the second we become overly reliant on any technology, things can blow up very quickly. And again, going back to my principle of conservatism, a lot of innocent people may be harmed significantly by letting things get out of hand.

Conclusion

Edward Roske:
Robert, it has been fascinating hearing about your journey from auditing at KPMG to now leading the financial reins at Primex. And I'm thrilled to see you driving ahead that AI future for the agribusiness, for the Primex side, for the whole world. I'm glad that you're taking that bull by the horns and pushing it ahead. Before we wrap up, any final thoughts you'd like to share with our listeners?

Robert Dika:
Really appreciate your time today. Really appreciate the opportunity. You know, it's important that even though we're a small little niche in the global marketplace, I hope that the work that you're doing and your team that this will motivate the next generation of accounting and finance professionals to choose a career, a very important career in taking care of our financial community, taking care of our investors, taking care of our colleagues and other departments so that we can continue to grow as economically and keep the American economy healthy and wealthy and ready for the next generation. And for the aspirational amongst you, if you have little kids, give them a piece of paper, give them a pencil, let them make grids and put numbers in it. Someday you can be the CFO of a major company. And for the really, really aspirational, I will remind everybody that the number one role that tends to rise up into CEO is the role of CFO.

Edward Roske:
Thank you again, Robert, for joining us on Asking Good Questions. Thank you to our official sponsor, Capris AI, for supporting this episode. And to our listeners, we appreciate you tuning in. Until next time, keep asking good questions.