Adapting to the Future: The Role of AI in Reshaping the Modern CFO's Finance Organization

The Role of AI in Reshaping the Modern CFO's Finance Organization

The role of AI continues to reshape the modern CFO's finance organization. With the continued emergence of embedded artificial intelligence capabilities in enabling financial technologies – Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and purpose built niche process enablement products should have most CFOs rethinking their organization design and delivery model strategies. 

It’s no secret that CFOs have to deliver a portfolio of services to their organization – serving both internal management and external investors, while also being responsible for providing strong business leadership, as well as the being the backbone for the integrity and compliance of core business processes.  Typically, we see CFOs with ownership over financial planning, the monthly accounting close, tax and treasury, but more often than not, they also own core transactional processes, such as procurement operations, accounts payable, expense management, customer invoicing, cash application and collections, fixed asset accounting, as well as payroll. 

In each of these functional areas, we see varying applications and strategies for integrating AI into the finance organization delivery model.  That integration, can lead to an array of outcomes depending on the business objectives and strong CFOs understand that setting the objective needs to occur prior to the implementation of any AI solution.  The common ready, fire, aim syndrome when an emerging technology comes along should be avoided.  Rather, follow these basic steps when considering how AI can and should impact your finance and accounting function:

1. Understand technology capabilities – I recommend doing this through practical use cases, which most technology vendors have readily available.  For example, if your organization is manually receiving and keying 100’s or 1,000’s of invoices each day, it’s likely time to introduce Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) technology into your accounts payable function. 

2. Determine your delivery model objectives – many people associate AI with only achieving efficiency objectives, processing an increased number of transactions with fewer resources.  While this is a great objective and is certainly impacting the use of business process outsource providers and in-house shared service centers (a topic for another day), it’s far from the only objective that can be achieved.  Consider the world of predictive forecasting, the ability to combine both internal data, with external information sources and leverage AI to create predictive models that link to real-world outcomes – then provide recommendations on tactical actions to either achieve or deter impact.  Some great use cases here. 

3. Develop a specialized implementation team – whether in-house or using an external expert, having a team that can take a business objective, identify the right enabling AI capability and then develop the processes, people and data to support that objective is imperative.  This capability is a way of thinking – it requires the ability to understand an objective, have a knowledge bank of information, and then the creativity to match the objective to an operating model design.   This is typically something your business as usual delivery teams are not equipped to handle – organizations will need them to be the functional experts, but reliance on them to also execute the adoption, whether due to capability or capacity, is a frequent regret of many finance leaders. 

4. Shift organizational roles and evaluate talent – the adoption of AI to handle the gamut of business process automation through advanced analytics requires a shift of your internal delivery teams.  Teams need to understand that, after thorough testing, their roles are no longer to “check the AI,” but to trust the AI and leverage it to expand what they can offer the organization.  We see the need for facilitation skills, analytical capabilities and business partnering continuing to emerge as the desired traits in finance and accounting teams – the shift from scorekeeper to business partner is undoubtedly accelerated by AI adoption.  Through this process, CFOs should reflect on the current skillsets of their teams, and focus training or consider the timing of a talent refresh.

   
   

Conclusion

There isn’t a doubt in my mind that strong operationally minded CFOs are already leveraging the capabilities that embedded AI technologies offer to their finance and accounting organizations.  Successful adoption requires obtaining a modest level of use-case based knowledge, contemplation of how AI could and should benefit your organization, and then putting together the right team and operating model to achieve those objectives.

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