In this article, Thomas Sutter, Industry Director, Finance and Global Solutions at Oracle NetSuite, delves into how CFOs can harness AI to streamline financial processes, enhance strategic decision-making, and drive cross-departmental collaboration. By adopting AI solutions, CFOs can help transform finance into a hub of innovation, empowering teams to focus on core business goals while improving productivity and efficiency in an evolving technological landscape.
After years of exploring the potential of advanced technologies for business productivity and efficiency, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming established as an accessible tool for businesses of all sizes. With AI’s capacity to understand, interpret and generate new insights from data, finance teams in particular stand to benefit.
Through the integration of advanced technologies such as Machine Learning algorithms, data analytics and predictive modelling, AI can automate essential yet time-consuming tasks like reporting and invoice processing.
More significantly, it can provide deeper insights to enhance fraud detection, predict financial trends like cash flow and revenue, and support strategic planning. AI is a transformative technology that equips CFOs and their teams with the new capabilities needed to adapt and stay competitive in the current environment.
While implementing this technology might seem most suited to the CIO or CTO, the importance of the CFO’s role in this transition should not be overlooked.
The role of the CFO
CFOs are pivotal in the AI adoption process for finance teams. They are uniquely positioned to lead AI integration by investing in appropriate technologies, upskilling employees and fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation. In this way, they serve both as strategic leaders and innovation advocates.
Their comprehensive understanding of financial operations, combined with technical expertise and strategic vision, ensures that AI is implemented in alignment with organisational goals, compliance standards and risk management practices. This serves to further enhance the business partnering between finance and other departments.
Doing more with less
Organisations across all industries face the challenge of increasing efficiency with fewer resources. Whether building a product, selling a service or doing both, AI can help organisations run their businesses better and allow leaders to focus on what’s important.
Finance teams relying on manual processes, which are error-prone, disconnected and quickly become out of date, spend too much time editing spreadsheets, leaving too little for strategic decision-making to drive business growth. Embedded intelligence enables improved data-driven decision making with scenario modelling and built-in analytics. AI and automation can underpin a variety of financial workflows, from operational and financial planning, to forecasting, reporting, reconciliation and profitability analysis.
This allows finance teams to focus on the business’s priorities, whether that’s operational excellence or customer satisfaction, rather than administrative tasks and regulatory compliance burdens. AI takes care of a laborious but essential operational layer, automating routine processes to allow the team to direct its resources towards strategic initiatives.
Empowering CFOs with the right tools
It’s important to ensure that employees are equipped with the necessary competencies and expertise to successfully utilise AI and innovate within their businesses.
CFOs play a critical role in making this possible, especially as AI capabilities continue to advance. At its best, AI can act as a powerful skill multiplier for finance professionals. CFOs can unlock this potential by establishing a robust framework for training and skill development within their teams as well as the broader organisation. This includes investing in resources to upskill employees and providing opportunities for ongoing learning to keep teams in line with evolving AI capabilities.
Furthermore, CFOs should direct the integration of AI within their organisations by identifying the critical areas where it can add the most value. Aligning AI adoption and implementation with the organisation’s overall strategic goals allows for the development of a cohesive roadmap.
Driving cross-departmental collaboration
Beyond improving just one department in a business, an AI-savvy finance team creates a domino effect across the broader organisation. CFOs can reap significant benefits from cross-departmental AI adoption, and they are well placed to take a proactive role in driving this initiative throughout their organisation. Working closely with other internal leaders and stakeholders, CFOs can help establish a collaborative and data-sharing culture that maximises the benefits of AI.
For example, by sharing financial insights with marketing and sales teams, CFOs can help develop more effective strategies and improve overall business performance. The alignment of goals and data across the enterprise allows for a more comprehensive approach to AI adoption, resulting in better collaboration while at the same time fostering an innovative culture.
CFOs can adopt, rather than build AI
With these measures in place, finance departments can leverage the benefits of AI to innovate. Thankfully, unlocking the potential of AI does not require busy CFOs to oversee the development of AI solutions in-house either. Instead, they can focus on ensuring their organisations are enjoying the productivity gains by using an out-of-the-box AI solution.
The most useful and productive AI works in the flow of an organisation’s existing processes. Finding insights shouldn’t take a separate team of specialists; insights should be easily surfaced by leveraging AI within the applications, data and services a CFO and their team uses every day. Having AI ‘embedded’ in existing workflows ensures that CFOs don’t require a computer science degree to start using it. Instead, they can adopt out-of-the-box AI technologies that complement their existing software, rather than build from scratch.
Embracing an AI-enabled future
As advanced technologies continue to evolve, so will the role of the CFO. CFOs are ideally placed to lead their organisations towards adopting powerful technologies, like AI, and ensuring all employees can reap boosts to productivity and efficiency to ensure their business remains competitive.