She joined CrowdStrike when it was pre-revenue and played a key role in strategic finance from Series A-1 to its initial public offering (IPO) in 2019. The company quickly grew to more than $4 billion in annual recurring revenue. She also helped navigate the aftermath of the company’s global IT outage last year. 

“If I think back to high school, I loved watching my bank account, and I had my spreadsheets and my budget,” Buchanan said, reflecting on her path to CFO. After getting a job out of high school and putting herself through college, she landed a position at a CPA firm where she realized accounting was “always part of my DNA.”

Buchanan is set to help lead Dataminr, a real-time AI platform, down the path to an IPO. The platform analyzes more than one million public data sources—including text, images, and video—to detect and inform users of emerging events, risks, and threats. The company—which counts NATO and OpenAI among its prominent and wide-ranging client pool—raised $100 million in funding from Fortress in April and $85 million in new funding in March, following a $475 million round in 2021 that valued Dataminr at $4.1 billion.

Buchanan’s decision to join Dataminr was cemented after meeting founder and CEO Ted Bailey and experiencing the company’s mission-driven culture. “I really wanted to replicate that same feeling and excitement I felt many years ago with CrowdStrike, and I really feel as though I found that with Dataminr,” she said.

Her immediate focus is initially on building out new routes to market, targeting new customer personas, and driving product innovation. And then with the eye on going public, she’s working to strength Dataminr’s systems, processes, and functions to prepare for a potential IPO.

“It’s about making sure we can check all the boxes from a public reporting standpoint,” she explained, drawing on her experience guiding CrowdStrike from pre-revenue to a multibillion-dollar public company.

Lessons from the IPO Journey

Going public is “one of the most amazing experiences” an organization can have. However, the work isn’t done. “Oftentimes, the hardest part is after the IPO—getting to that predictability and public reporting cadence, being able to continuously tell the story you want to tell the public market,” she explained. Post-IPO, Buchanan stresses the importance of not sacrificing long-term success for short-term gains and ensuring that internal processes and external messaging are aligned.

As Dataminr expands internationally, Buchanan sees robust risk management and compliance as top priorities. She emphasizes the importance of identifying risks—including financial, cybersecurity, and supply chain—in areas where Dataminr’s real-time intelligence platform provides early warnings.

Bailey said in a statement that Buchanan has deep financial acumen, operational rigor, and high-growth experience, all “skills that will be instrumental.”

Mentorship and giving back

Buchanan’s preparation for the CFO seat began at CrowdStrike. She names Gregg Marston, the original CFO and cofounder of CrowdStrike, and current CFO Burt Podbere as her mentors. She believes in paying it forward.

To that end, she recently joined the board of ASAPP, an AI company focused on transforming customer service. Outside of work, Buchanan is committed to supporting foster children and families in need. “I was in foster care from a very young age and, fortunately, adopted by my aunt and uncle and was raised within my family,” she said.

Along with philanthropy, Buchanan enjoys running and spending time with her husband and children.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Chad Spooner was appointed CFO of MiniMed, in advance of its intended separation into a standalone, public company, health care technology company, Medtronic plc (NYSE: MDT), announced on Tuesday. Effective July 14, Spooner will be responsible for overseeing the finance function for Medtronic Diabetes and supporting initiatives as it prepares to become fully independent. Most recently, Spooner served as CFO at BIC, a global consumer goods provider. He started his career at General Electric, where he spent a decade in management positions of increasing responsibility in corporate audit and financial planning, as well as in a senior finance role in GE Energy. 

Alex Vari was promoted to EVP and CFO of MainStreet Bank. MainStreet Bancshares, Inc. (Nasdaq: MNSB & MNSBP) is the holding company for MainStreet Bank. Vari was most recently the chief accounting officer, and before that, VP of accounting and finance manager. Most recently, he also led the process for developing and implementing the Company’s Sarbanes-Oxley internal control framework.

Big Deal

Workday, Inc.’s newly released Contract Intelligence Index Report highlights a widespread issue: many companies lack clarity about who is responsible for managing contracts. The research finds that 76% of employees surveyed don’t fully understand who oversees contracts.

This confusion often stems from uncertainty over whether the vendor relationship manager, legal team, or procurement department is ultimately in charge. According to Workday, when contract ownership is unclear, companies risk losing the full value of their agreements.

A key finding of the report is that a lack of insight into customer renewals, upsell, and cross-sell opportunities can hurt revenue growth. Half of all legal (50%) and enterprise employee (49%) respondents say they have lost money due to unintended auto-renewals—with sales and marketing departments hit hardest (60%).

The report also found that contracts are primarily stored across shared drives (70% for legal, 50% for non-legal) and CRM systems (62% for legal, 53% for non-legal), as well as on individual desktops, in email accounts, and even as paper records.

“With the rise of AI agents, we can finally turn contracts into living, intelligent assets,” said Jerry Ting, VP, head of agentic AI and Evisort at Workday.

The survey, commissioned by Workday and conducted by Provoke Insights, included 1,250 U.S.-based legal and non-legal enterprise employees from organizations across North America, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Europe.

Going deeper

“Amazon’s tariff-clouded, seller-confused, AI-researched, weirdest Prime Day ever” is a new Fortune report by Jason Del Rey. 

From the report: “The 2025 Prime Day version is a four-day long event that kicks off on Tuesday July 8, up from two days in 2024, and—as the name would still suggest—a single day affair during the inaugural 2015 event.

Like many businesses these days, independent Amazon sellers, who account for around 60% of Amazon sales, are contending with the dilemma of how to handle the ongoing U.S.-induced tariff chaos, and how it should or shouldn’t impact their Prime Day strategies.

In conversations with Fortune, sellers have relayed two main strategies.”

Overheard

“What I see is a business environment defined not by one crisis or even by periodic crises, but by what PwC is calling permacrisis. Trade wars, generative AI disruption, political polarization, supply chain shocks, rising geopolitical risk: it’s a hurricane in every direction.”

—Anne Chow, former CEO of AT&T Business, writes in a Fortune opinion piece, warning leaders not to neglect frontline employees while dealing with “permacrisis”—an extended period of instability and insecurity.

She joined CrowdStrike when it was pre-revenue and played a key role in strategic finance from Series A-1 to its initial public offering (IPO) in 2019. The company quickly grew to more than $4 billion in annual recurring revenue. She also helped navigate the aftermath of the company’s global IT outage last year. 

“If I think back to high school, I loved watching my bank account, and I had my spreadsheets and my budget,” Buchanan said, reflecting on her path to CFO. After getting a job out of high school and putting herself through college, she landed a position at a CPA firm where she realized accounting was “always part of my DNA.”

Buchanan is set to help lead Dataminr, a real-time AI platform, down the path to an IPO. The platform analyzes more than one million public data sources—including text, images, and video—to detect and inform users of emerging events, risks, and threats. The company—which counts NATO and OpenAI among its prominent and wide-ranging client pool—raised $100 million in funding from Fortress in April and $85 million in new funding in March, following a $475 million round in 2021 that valued Dataminr at $4.1 billion.

Buchanan’s decision to join Dataminr was cemented after meeting founder and CEO Ted Bailey and experiencing the company’s mission-driven culture. “I really wanted to replicate that same feeling and excitement I felt many years ago with CrowdStrike, and I really feel as though I found that with Dataminr,” she said.

Her immediate focus is initially on building out new routes to market, targeting new customer personas, and driving product innovation. And then with the eye on going public, she’s working to strength Dataminr’s systems, processes, and functions to prepare for a potential IPO.

“It’s about making sure we can check all the boxes from a public reporting standpoint,” she explained, drawing on her experience guiding CrowdStrike from pre-revenue to a multibillion-dollar public company.

Lessons from the IPO Journey

Going public is “one of the most amazing experiences” an organization can have. However, the work isn’t done. “Oftentimes, the hardest part is after the IPO—getting to that predictability and public reporting cadence, being able to continuously tell the story you want to tell the public market,” she explained. Post-IPO, Buchanan stresses the importance of not sacrificing long-term success for short-term gains and ensuring that internal processes and external messaging are aligned.

As Dataminr expands internationally, Buchanan sees robust risk management and compliance as top priorities. She emphasizes the importance of identifying risks—including financial, cybersecurity, and supply chain—in areas where Dataminr’s real-time intelligence platform provides early warnings.

Bailey said in a statement that Buchanan has deep financial acumen, operational rigor, and high-growth experience, all “skills that will be instrumental.”

Mentorship and giving back

Buchanan’s preparation for the CFO seat began at CrowdStrike. She names Gregg Marston, the original CFO and cofounder of CrowdStrike, and current CFO Burt Podbere as her mentors. She believes in paying it forward.

To that end, she recently joined the board of ASAPP, an AI company focused on transforming customer service. Outside of work, Buchanan is committed to supporting foster children and families in need. “I was in foster care from a very young age and, fortunately, adopted by my aunt and uncle and was raised within my family,” she said.

Along with philanthropy, Buchanan enjoys running and spending time with her husband and children.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Chad Spooner was appointed CFO of MiniMed, in advance of its intended separation into a standalone, public company, health care technology company, Medtronic plc (NYSE: MDT), announced on Tuesday. Effective July 14, Spooner will be responsible for overseeing the finance function for Medtronic Diabetes and supporting initiatives as it prepares to become fully independent. Most recently, Spooner served as CFO at BIC, a global consumer goods provider. He started his career at General Electric, where he spent a decade in management positions of increasing responsibility in corporate audit and financial planning, as well as in a senior finance role in GE Energy. 

Alex Vari was promoted to EVP and CFO of MainStreet Bank. MainStreet Bancshares, Inc. (Nasdaq: MNSB & MNSBP) is the holding company for MainStreet Bank. Vari was most recently the chief accounting officer, and before that, VP of accounting and finance manager. Most recently, he also led the process for developing and implementing the Company’s Sarbanes-Oxley internal control framework.

Big Deal

Workday, Inc.’s newly released Contract Intelligence Index Report highlights a widespread issue: many companies lack clarity about who is responsible for managing contracts. The research finds that 76% of employees surveyed don’t fully understand who oversees contracts.

This confusion often stems from uncertainty over whether the vendor relationship manager, legal team, or procurement department is ultimately in charge. According to Workday, when contract ownership is unclear, companies risk losing the full value of their agreements.

A key finding of the report is that a lack of insight into customer renewals, upsell, and cross-sell opportunities can hurt revenue growth. Half of all legal (50%) and enterprise employee (49%) respondents say they have lost money due to unintended auto-renewals—with sales and marketing departments hit hardest (60%).

The report also found that contracts are primarily stored across shared drives (70% for legal, 50% for non-legal) and CRM systems (62% for legal, 53% for non-legal), as well as on individual desktops, in email accounts, and even as paper records.

“With the rise of AI agents, we can finally turn contracts into living, intelligent assets,” said Jerry Ting, VP, head of agentic AI and Evisort at Workday.

The survey, commissioned by Workday and conducted by Provoke Insights, included 1,250 U.S.-based legal and non-legal enterprise employees from organizations across North America, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Europe.

Going deeper

“Amazon’s tariff-clouded, seller-confused, AI-researched, weirdest Prime Day ever” is a new Fortune report by Jason Del Rey. 

From the report: “The 2025 Prime Day version is a four-day long event that kicks off on Tuesday July 8, up from two days in 2024, and—as the name would still suggest—a single day affair during the inaugural 2015 event.

Like many businesses these days, independent Amazon sellers, who account for around 60% of Amazon sales, are contending with the dilemma of how to handle the ongoing U.S.-induced tariff chaos, and how it should or shouldn’t impact their Prime Day strategies.

In conversations with Fortune, sellers have relayed two main strategies.”

Overheard

“What I see is a business environment defined not by one crisis or even by periodic crises, but by what PwC is calling permacrisis. Trade wars, generative AI disruption, political polarization, supply chain shocks, rising geopolitical risk: it’s a hurricane in every direction.”

—Anne Chow, former CEO of AT&T Business, writes in a Fortune opinion piece, warning leaders not to neglect frontline employees while dealing with “permacrisis”—an extended period of instability and insecurity.

IBM has announced a new line of data center chips and servers, introduced on Tuesday, designed to enhance power efficiency and streamline artificial intelligence integration within business operations. This marks the initial significant update to IBM’s “Power” chip line since 2020.

These new Power11 chips are specifically engineered for data centers, historically competing with offerings from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. IBM’s Power systems, similar to Nvidia’s AI servers, constitute an integrated package of both hardware chips and proprietary software. Tom McPherson, general manager of Power systems at IBM, stated that this integrated approach facilitated a focus on system reliability and security. The Power11 systems will be commercially available starting July 25.

The Power11 systems are designed for continuous operation, eliminating the need for planned downtime associated with software updates. Unplanned downtime for these systems averages slightly over 30 seconds annually. IBM also detailed that these systems are equipped to detect and respond to ransomware attacks within one minute, a mechanism to counter data encryption attempts by malicious actors seeking ransom. Further integration is planned for the fourth quarter of this year, as IBM intends to combine the Power11 with Spyre, its AI chip introduced in 2023.

McPherson clarified IBM’s strategic positioning regarding artificial intelligence, indicating that the company does not aim to directly compete with Nvidia in the domain of AI system creation and training. Instead, IBM’s focus is on simplifying AI deployment for inference. Inference, in this context, refers to the practical application of an AI system to accelerate various business tasks. “We can integrate AI capabilities seamlessly into this for inference acceleration and help their business process improvements,” McPherson affirmed in a recent interview. He added, regarding the Power11’s capabilities, “It’s not going to have all the horsepower for training or anything, but it’s going to have really good inferencing capabilities that are simple to integrate.”

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