As the business world transforms, so too does the role and impact of finance teams.
This, as the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is already, and increasingly, elevating the impact of CFOs within their organizations.
By automating legacy workflows and surfacing critical cross-departmental information that goes beyond just closing the books at the end of the week or month, targeted finance-specific AI tools and solutions are supporting internal finance and accounting teams as they navigate a choppy macroclimate, helping leaders chart a data-driven path forward for sustainable growth that takes a holistic, real-time view of the business.
Non-strategic finance, largely made up of historic processes like manual data entry and payment issuance, has long been a cost center for organizations. Now, a new generation of generative AI tools that move beyond siloed automation solutions promise to help CFOs do more with less by freeing up their team members from less rewarding work, augmenting their analytics strengths instead in a way that ladders-up to key business goals.
Read more: Automation Does the Work Accountants No Longer Want To
Existing finance roles in companies are “evolving,” James Ritter, CFO at ABBYY, told PYMNTS in a recent conversation, as the integration of modern tools simultaneously enhances skillsets and changes how employees both engage with information and then activate that information to make decisions for the business.
“[AI is] changing the way that people look at the operational relationship between systems and people,” Ritter said. “[Businesses] don’t necessarily need someone to do specific data entry type tasks as much anymore, but you do need individuals that are able to provide additional critical analysis.”
Back-office functions tend to scale as companies grow, so automating them to reduce costs and redundancies can pay dividends as businesses look to optimize cash flow amid ongoing recession fears.
More generally, freeing up employees from onerous, repetitive tasks can help revitalize company culture.
“There can be certain things in accounting that are pretty traditional, and there’s a lot of good reasons for that … but these new tools open up an opportunity where the same amount of resources and people can do a lot more higher-value activity, which helps their career growth and helps them feel more engaged and happier in the job,” Leon Weiss, CFO at cloud-based software company XOi told PYMNTS in a recent discussion.
As reported by PYMNTS, generative AI has the potential to automate up to 25% of jobs in the U.S. alone.
See also: Why Accounts Payable Should Be Done by Machines, not People
Companies looking for healthy growth are increasingly finding it by operationalizing their businesses to make sure they’re as efficient as possible — a task that the CFO is usually responsible for spearheading.
“If you’re not taking a look at back-office operations and finding ways to digitize and automate those systems and processes with cost-effective solutions that free up employees for more important and strategic initiatives, you are going to fall behind,” Ritter said.
Research in the 2023 report, “Digital Payments: Changing Economy Sparks New Priorities for Systems Spending,” a PYMNTS and Corcentric collaboration, found that more than 7 in every 10 finance leaders (73%) say their digital investments have, and continue to, pay off — underscoring the importance of not just choosing the right tool for the right task, but of taking a holistic view of organizational growth engines and how to best support and activate them with emergent solutions.
Modern generative AI solutions are helping underpin this integrated approach to business growth planning by providing finance teams with real-time operational data, simultaneously giving them back the time they need to activate it by taking care of more generalized finance tasks, like bookkeeping and non-tax audits — and often improving the accuracy and productivity of those workflows.
Critical to effective and efficient cross-pollination across departments is leveraging data for strategic guardrails and growth points. Already, OpenAI’s latest AI chatbot, ChatGPT-4, is capable of extracting insights from financial reports, promising to streamline internal engagements and enhance cross-departmental cohesion.
Still, AI tools are not without their risks. Critical for finance leaders considering integrating AI solutions into their operational toolbox is understanding the provenance and lineage of the data sources contributing to the AI solution’s output.
Extraneous data collected from unknown sources can produce unreliable results, and there exists a risk that the furor of attention and hype around generative AI could lead to developers of tools to launch their products without taking the necessary care in order to capitalize on the moment.
That said, while the diligence required before onboarding an AI solution is nothing out of the ordinary — the business impact an effective finance solution trained on robust, valid data sets can have may be nothing short of extraordinary.
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