AI for CFOs - 3 essential steps to get it right

Every 20 years or so, a new technology brings about a significant leap in productivity. As artificial intelligence (AI) begins to deliver a real and massive impact, every organization must investigate, test, and deploy AI capabilities.

CFOs with a data-driven and technology-friendly team and culture will find the leap to AI manageable. For those still pushing through digital transformation, it's time to turbocharge those efforts and catch up with competitors that are further along on their AI journeys.

Working smarter, not less

Goldman Sachs Research estimates that AI will drive a 1.5% increase in global productivity growth. However, Box CEO Aaron Levie quipped that most organizations won’t use the productivity gains to roll out four-day work weeks. Instead, teams will put that extra time into doing more, doing it smarter, and solving new challenges. AI is a collaborator that helps people do more of the things that matter most.

Fifty years ago, when personal computers and spreadsheets started appearing in offices, finance and accounting teams were overjoyed at the thought of eliminating hours per day entering numbers into adding machines. But they then didn't take Fridays off. Instead, computational technology gave them more time to think about growth, expansion, and surviving downturns.

In today's AI hype cycle, Levie is on target when he says "most of the demand for AI right now is actually solving new problems that the company wasn't getting around to."

Why CFOs are shifting into high gear on AI

In a 2024 survey from American Express, The Futureproof CFO: Building Resilience & Growth, just 34% of CFOs say they are "under pressure to adopt AI technologies." Even for a traditionally conservative bunch, that feels out of step with what's at stake.

I talk with CFOs of large and scaling companies nearly every day. Most see the value of AI and have already invested in AI-driven solutions for sales, customer service, marketing, and other domains. The aim is to bring in these AI collaborators so the human workers can do more thinking.

For the Office of the CFO, teams have been what I would call 'AI curious' for the past few years. They're proponents of technology but understandably take it slow when it comes to valuable and private financial data. However, finance and accounting teams are buckling under the pressure of higher expectations and increasing demands. Using a new technology to alleviate that pressure makes perfect sense.

Most CFOs have long-ago demoted spreadsheets to ad hoc use cases in favor of purpose-built financial performance management solutions. These modern tools have streamlined, accelerated, and automated much of the day-to-day tasks for accounting and finance professionals so they can spend more time on cognitive work instead of slow, tedious data entry and report formatting.

CFOs viewed that technology (financial performance management) as a solution to a challenge (spreadsheets are slow and error-prone). AI is now the solution as the need for business growth outpaces the CFO’s ability to keep up.

What CFOs expect of AI

In a survey of Planful customers, we asked directly what finance and accounting teams expect from AI. Not one respondent expected it to give them Fridays off. They want AI's help and collaboration with things like adapting to rapid and frequent business changes, supporting growth without increasing costs, and helping people work more efficiently on more rewarding efforts.

CFOs have three crucial imperatives:

1. Grow the business.
2. Focus teams on the strategic, cognitive work that matters for #1.
3. Increase productivity to accomplish #1 and #2 by collaborating with AI to work smarter.

There is much work that finance and accounting teams don’t have the time to do today because they are burdened with tedious grunt work. So, they rarely get to do fun, meaningful, and impactful work, dragging company growth and leading to worker churn and recruiting difficulties.

These three imperatives are driving CFOs to invest in AI that makes their teams more productive, efficient, and effective so they can find new ways to grow the business without staffing up. They are looking for ways to do the work that matters with greater speed and accuracy.

Spreadsheets and software boosted productivity for the Office of the CFO by taking tedious computation out of human hands. Cloud computing, APIs, automation, and other technologies took more work off our plates. Now, AI is taking on comprehension so teams can do more while increasing productivity, accuracy, and speed.

Comprehension is where the value of AI lies. Imagine the impact this has on a daily or weekly summary of financial results. Without AI, it might take a financial analyst a few hours to review the numbers, identify anomalies and outliers, pull out the important bits, and write a relevant summary that connects with current corporate and executive team priorities. An AI collaborator can do that in a few seconds. Then, the analyst can simply review the numbers to understand them and move on. This saves hours because the starting point isn’t a blank spreadsheet; it’s an AI-generated financial summary that's nearly complete.

3 AI prerequisites for CFOs

If you consider your move to AI as a journey, also consider that you can't leap to AI overnight. Here are three things to think about as you seek out AI solutions:

1. Your AI journey must begin with data. AI needs clean, organized, accessible, and accurate data to understand the nuance, seasonality, and significance of your unique business data. Accurate and complete data also increases confidence and trust in the AI outputs. Getting tools and systems in place now to act as a central source of trusted financial data must happen before you can even think about deploying AI in finance and accounting.
2. The Office of the CFO must be tech-forward. Like chat and to-do lists made their way into the corporate world with tools like Slack and Notion, people are already using AI at home to fix photos, engage with customer support, and search for information. They'll soon expect that power at work, or they'll look for work elsewhere. Finance and accounting teams are no different. If you want to attract and retain the best talent, they'll expect AI-powered tools.
3. AI models used by CFOs must be trained on financial data. Generative AI solutions trained on social media, news, and other generic 'consumer' information won't give you sound financial insights. Content marketing teams are happy with off-the-shelf AI models trained on public internet data and with $25 monthly subscriptions. Finance won't be. Add in privacy, security, compliance, governance, and other concerns unique to financial data and your choice of AI vendor becomes critical.

You can't benefit from AI if you're not using AI

Think of AI today as taking on all of the 'dumb' work we're burdened with every day. That's the low-value data manipulation, error finding, troubleshooting, and mundane work AI can do better, faster, cheaper, and more accurately than humans ever can.

Soon, generative AI's cognitive capabilities will take on even more of the thinking to write financial summaries, make hyper-accurate financial forecasts, spot errors hiding in billions of rows of data, build thousands of what-if scenarios and highlight the most likely, and more. By handling complex analyses in seconds, AI empowers teams to focus on higher-value strategic initiatives, make faster data-driven decisions, and uncover new opportunities for growth.

Your competitors are likely already on their AI journeys. It's time to move beyond exploring AI and start deploying AI in the Office of the CFO.

And, while AI won’t give you Fridays off, it will make Mondays less painful.