Revealing AI's Potential: the Role of the CFO
In the fast-paced landscape of modern business, finance processes that remain primarily manual create operational inefficiencies, lack foresight into financial trends, can contain errors, and prevent agility.
However, there is good news: by embracing technology, automation, and digitization, organizations can revolutionize their financial management. These advancements empower businesses to streamline processes, enhance accuracy, and make more informed decisions.
For CFOs and finance professionals, staying ahead of the curve is essential. Ask yourself the following questions:
If you find yourself answering 'no' to any of these questions, consider it an opportunity for growth rather than a setback. Embracing innovation isn't just about staying relevant – it's about propelling your organization forward. By updating your approach and engaging in digital transformation, you will position yourself and your company for success in today's digital age.
AI-driven solutions contain a great amount of promise for financial roles: AI algorithms can analyze diverse sources of information, such as market inflation data, news, social media, trends, financial results from large companies, and analysis of public data from governments around the world.
AI tools can also simulate various economic scenarios and how these scenarios can impact the company in terms of revenue, cash flow, and profit. By simulating economic scenarios, companies can draw up more effective contingency plans that more closely reflect potential market ups and downs.
Another key use for CFOs is as part of expense and travel management solutions. Those who use AI can study how employees spend money, find ways to save, and ensure that everyone follows company spending rules. CFOs can use these insights to spend money smarter, get better deals with vendors, and make everything more cost-effective.
But not everything is magic. Human participation is essential to making these tools more useful and reliable, and the CFO can play an important role in this regard moving forward.
Individual users can sometimes have misgivings about an AI model's predictions. Having an expert who can create and then explain the models so that users know why the model makes certain predictions can make users more likely to trust the model’s advice.
Having human knowledge and expertise when initially designing the model can mean that the results are also more easily understood.
That being said, responsible adoption of AI requires addressing ethical risks, regulations, and talent requirements. In this way, CFOs can be seen as leaders when managing this digital progress.
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Next to creating responsible and reliable AI, the CFO must have relevant use cases. These can be divided into four categories, each with increasing complexities but potentially also more value upside: efficiency, effectiveness, expansion, and transformation use cases.
To conclude, it's essential for CFOs to remain informed about emerging technologies to set the Finance organization up for the future and drive value for the entire company. As such, SAP and Taulia have released CFO Perspectives: Unlocking Insights Through Conversation – CFO’s Beyond Figures – Steering Businesses into the Future.?
In this e-book, you will find answers to the following questions:
Download and read the newest edition of CFO Perspectives here
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