4 Reasons Why CFOs Must Adopt Artificial Intelligence

In today’s fast-paced world, CFOs must be open to empowering their finance team with AI-based technologies for increasing efficiency and improving the finance department's processes cost-effectively.

Instead of still focusing on generating reports about the past via outdated and manual means, CFOs can now follow the latest trends by analyzing both the current and future growth of a business to yield maximum profits.

According to the statistics from the 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey of PwC, more than half the percentage (55%) of finance leaders have reported that a lack of relevant skills is causing their inability to be innovative in broadening finance transformation strategy. 

There are some significant benefits that CFOs can derive from applying various skills in their work routine. One such skill is the integration of AI-Based technology to work smarter and save money. Here are a few benefits of AI technologies for the CFOs:

1. Establishing Objectives for Outcomes and Benefits

The exploration and integration of advanced AI technologies into businesses will not only help in generating better outcomes and benefits but will also assist organizations in tackling more complex problems while trying to be more effective in handling business operations properly.  

2. Good Data Governing Structure for CFOs

AI-based technologies allow businesses to pull clean and accurate data from the right sources and give the right people permission to them. That’s not all - they also help CFOs adopt insights from data by simply offering them unique methods to visualize and analyze it.

Furthermore, it has also equipped them with the best tools across their entire respective organizations and wasted no time identifying what they need and what they can do away with in improving their business functions.  

3. Efficient Team Collaboration and Management

Better team collaboration is bound to happen when umans are only left responsible for solving problems creatively and making innovative decisions. Therefore, AI is adopted to facilitate productive meetings and provide contextually relevant information to fasten and improve decision-making to generate efficient business outputs.   

4. Streamlining Projects and Increasing ROI

When streamlining projects, AI makes an organization more efficient by employing a better working method to simplify workflow and improve business operations. As if that’s not enough, the adoption of AI into business in the sense of improving governance and compliance can also help organizations reduce risk and increase ROI. According to the 2016 Analysis by McKinsey & Co, advanced AI can provide $1.7 trillion in annual value to the retail industry compared to the $909 billion in the annual value of traditional AI and Analytics. 

Lastly, CFOs can find AI-based technology helpful in preparing the workforce by providing employees with training and skills so they can give high-value results in an automated financial function. In addition to this, they can use it to explain to traditionally risk-averse finance employees why they need to integrate AI-based technology into their operations to improve business and save cost in the long run. 

A Few Examples

CFOs with the right insights and expertise are capable of bringing AI to their respective businesses because they are mostly at the helm of companies’ data. Some examples in which CFOs can integrate AI into businesses are given below:

With the help of AI, CFOs can effectively forecast and manage debts: Missing funds can reduce profits by a large margin. To correct this, CFOs can easily predict the potential income an organization can get from each customer. They can also forecast whether a business has all it takes to pay its bills by the intensive analyses of B2B customer data (credit rating, product purchase, industry type, and salesperson). All of the above-mentioned in this section can only be achieved if the organization has the right tools. 

This is why a company like Clearfind, with their reliable software intelligence platform that makes use of a dataset of over 50,000 software products, has been helping organizations cut out wasteful software spend and save time by analyzing for them the right tools they need and the ones they don’t need, helping companies take total control of their software efficiency and spend.   

AI-based technologies can be used to detect Embezzlement and Expense Fraud: It becomes easier to detect suspicious expense claims by simply analyzing and interpreting expense data with the help of AI technologies. AI makes it more convenient and better to examine the spending patterns and behaviors of every employee in their respective roles. CFOs can even predict where expense frauds are coming from before they happen by adopting machine learning technology in identifying and forecasting the obvious behaviors of employees that can exaggerate claims.

Meanwhile, some software intelligence platforms have extended their system capabilities beyond just these functions only. For example, Tableau has a team of skilled professionals that allows every employee to see the important patterns and correlations in the organization’s data without the need to mine data technically. 

AI-based technologies are very efficient in detecting money laundering: You can teach computers how to suspect suspicious behaviors and detect fraudulent activities that can lead to money laundering after you might have consulted the services of software intelligence platforms such as Alteryx to streamline the process of data cleaning and blending (with coding-optional) to free up space for data analysts so that they can have more time in analyzing data vigorously.

The combination of Artificial intelligence with Robotic Process Automation is sufficient in taking the drudgery out of finance: Robotic process automation is helping to speed up business transactions. AI-based companies such as Qlik are helping organizations - suggesting the directions and parameters for analysis and conducting routine data analysis independently irrespective of the financial action the organization is about to take. 

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence and other relevant technologies can help CFOs make better decisions faster while improving business functions and saving money. With this fact in place, companies not utilizing artificial intelligence will be left behind, while the companies that do will forge ahead.