Reimagining Work: The AI opportunity for Finance

More than a decade ago, I was a freshly minted MBA intern in the FP&A division of a multinational company. On my very first day, a senior colleague gave me a piece of advice that seemed trivial at the time: “We live life in Excel pivots.”

At the time, I didn’t realize just how much that phrase would define my early career in finance.

My days were spent buried in spreadsheets—reconciling numbers, building pivot tables, and trying to make sense of scattered data. It was tedious, but it felt necessary, as if this was simply the way things worked. Fast forward to today, and while technology has advanced significantly, finance teams are still spending over 50% of their time in Excel.

Despite the promises of automation, a critical issue persists: the last mile of task completion—the final stretch where disconnected systems and manual interventions slow everything down. In this AI-driven era, why are we still stuck here?

This brings us to an AI moment in finance, a pivotal point where technology, specifically AI, is stepping in to close these gaps and transform how finance teams operate.

The Persistent Pain Point of Disconnected Systems

The core of the problem isn’t that finance teams resist change or cling to outdated methods. The reality is that most automation tools and systems in place today only solve part of the problem. They might automate specific tasks like data entry or report generation, but the workflows are still fragmented across multiple systems that don’t talk to each other.

Take a typical finance team managing end-of-month reconciliation. Data might be pulled from an ERP system, an expense management tool, and various Excel files. However, it’s still up to human hands to manually check for discrepancies and ensure everything lines up. This fragmentation adds time, complexity, and room for error, leaving finance professionals tied to manual, repetitive tasks.

The Lack of Cognition and Reasoning Across Systems

Today’s finance automation tools, often built with RPA-like technology, fall short because they lack true cognitive abilities. They can follow predefined instructions to automate repetitive tasks, but they can’t handle the fuzziness and unpredictability of real-world data. Even when AI is involved, it’s typically confined to a single tool, limiting its ability to act across multiple systems.

Traditionally, organizations have tried to solve this problem by building massive data lakes, consolidating information into one platform. But we all know how those projects turn out: high costs, endless complexity, and little business impact.

A Better Way: AI That Comes to Your Data

There’s a better approach. Instead of bringing all your data to AI, why not let AI come to your data, wherever it is, and get the task done? This is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for. AI has reached the point where it can go directly to data sources, interpret them in context, and execute tasks or generate insights—without requiring complex data migrations.

This eliminates the need for bulky, centralized systems. Instead, AI works across systems, harmonizing data and automating tasks seamlessly.

Meet Emma: Your AI Coworker for Finance

This is exactly why we built Emma, our AI coworker for finance. Emma doesn’t just automate tasks in isolation; she’s designed to understand and integrate data from multiple sources, analyze it, and execute tasks from start to finish. Whether it’s reconciling accounts, generating financial reports, or identifying discrepancies, Emma bridges the gaps between your tools and systems, eliminating the manual work that has burdened finance teams for years.

For finance teams, this means working with an Excel that understands and executes tasks instantly—no more endless hours spent manually reconciling data. It’s about freeing up time for strategic thinking, planning, and driving real business outcomes.

This AI moment in finance isn’t just about getting tasks done faster—it’s about breaking free from the mundane, so you can focus on what truly matters: thinking big, driving growth, and maybe even leaving work on time.

So, are you ready to say goodbye to the pivot table grind and let Emma handle the heavy lifting? The future of finance just got a whole lot smarter—Are you in??