Andrew “Drew” Sawa
Engineering the future of finance with AI.
Drew Sawa is a finance and AI enablement leader who designs and deploys governed analytics, automation, and agentic AI solutions for global finance organizations. He combines nearly two decades of commercial finance experience with the hands-on engineering expertise to turn complex business needs into production-ready systems.
Finance Director, Analytics & Insights · CBRE · Greater Milwaukee, Wisconsin
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Who he is
Drew Sawa is a finance, analytics, and AI enablement leader who brings emerging technology into practical, governed use. As Finance Director at CBRE, he leads the Analytics & Insights practice and AI Enablement for the Finance Intelligence group. His responsibilities span strategy through deployment, including enterprise analytics products, performance engineering, agentic AI systems, and event-driven automation.
Across more than 19 years at CBRE and Johnson Controls, Drew has built decision-support systems for enterprise initiatives representing more than $650 million in cost transformation, working-capital release, and margin improvement. His distinctive strength is connecting deep finance expertise with hands-on engineering, turning complex financial challenges into scalable systems that leaders can trust and use.
What he's looking for next
Drew is interested in senior leadership opportunities where he can build and lead an AI-enabled finance, analytics, or transformation capability. The right role will draw on both his commercial finance judgment and hands-on engineering depth, giving him the mandate to turn emerging technology into governed, scalable solutions that improve financial operations and executive decision-making.
Drew leads through clarity, technical credibility, and influence. His direct people-management experience has been within lean teams, while his broader leadership impact has come from aligning executives, finance professionals, engineers, and business stakeholders around shared platforms and operating standards. He creates leverage by building systems, establishing governance, and enabling people across functions and geographies to perform at a higher level.
He is best suited to a large, complex organization that values a hands-on builder capable of establishing a new function, earning enterprise adoption, and leading through influence as well as formal authority.
- Level
- Senior Director, Head of Function, Vice President, or aligned C-suite leadership
- Primary focus
- AI enablement, finance intelligence, analytics, data, and enterprise transformation
- Leadership model
- Platform leadership, cross-functional influence, capability building, and enterprise enablement
- Preferred environment
- Large, complex organizations; open to industry
- Location
- Greater Milwaukee or fully remote
- Status
- Open to the right opportunity; U.S. citizen with no sponsorship required
What he does
Where finance meets data
Analytics Products & Performance Engineering
Owning the analytics products, and the engineering under them, that a global finance org runs on.
Applied & Agentic AI in Finance
Leading AI enablement and shipping production AI inside a Fortune 500 finance function.
Commercial Finance & FP&A
Owning the planning, forecasting, close components, and valuation behind global functions.
Pricing Strategy & Value Creation
Designing pricing structures and the analytics behind measurable enterprise value.
Data Governance, Integration & Systems
Building the systems and integration that keep enterprise finance data true.
Selected work
Things he has built
All-Segment Client Profitability Product
Built end-to-end a 13-dataflow Power BI product spanning every CBRE segment, replacing a manual finance process; owned it from build through UAT to sign-off.
42M-Row Dataflow, 2h23m to under 5 min
Re-engineered a 42-million-row General Ledger dataflow via query-folding and warehouse materialization, roughly a 28x speedup.
Pricing Tool: -9% to +9% Margin Swing
Built a pricing optimization tool and drove sales-force adoption, swinging account margin 18 points and deploying across all global businesses.
$101M Savings Tracker
Built and solely owned the global tracker for $101M in tracked savings, reconciled to the externally-modeled scope subset.
64,000+ FTE Headcount ETL
Built and owns the multi-source pipeline producing the published, business-used headcount data; flagged 50 anomalies via monthly global reconciliation.
AI Enablement & Production Claude Skills
Leads AI Enablement for the finance function; ships production-grade Claude skills, multi-agent systems, and MCP integrations under an AI-governance framework.
Get in touch
Let's talk
Recruiters and hiring managers welcome. The fastest way to reach Drew is email or LinkedIn.