Finance Director, Analytics & Insights
Finance, built on the
data systems behind it.
A finance leader who builds the analytics and AI systems finance runs on, with hands-on engineering depth most finance executives do not have, on top of nearly two decades of commercial-finance results.
CBRE · Greater Milwaukee, Wisconsin
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Who he is
Drew Sawa leads the Analytics & Insights practice as a Finance Director at CBRE, and leads AI Enablement for the Finance Intelligence group. He owns the analytics products and performance engineering the global finance organization runs on, inside a governed Microsoft Fabric, Azure, and Power BI platform, and ships production AI: Claude skills, agentic systems, and event-driven automation. Across 19+ years at CBRE and Johnson Controls he has built the decision-support behind more than $650M of enterprise value (cost transformation, working-capital release, and margin improvement). The rare combination is genuine analytics-engineering depth paired with finance fluency, a profile most finance leaders cannot match technically and most analytics leaders cannot match on finance.
What he's looking for next
Open to senior leadership in AI enablement, analytics, data, finance, insight, and transformation, where finance fluency and hands-on engineering both matter and the mandate is to build and lead a function, not just manage it.
- Level
- Senior Director, Head, VP, or C-suite
- Focus
- AI enablement, analytics, finance, insight, and transformation leadership
- Industry
- Open; strongest in large, complex enterprises
- Location
- Greater Milwaukee or fully remote
- Status
- Open to the right opportunity; US citizen, no sponsorship
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.