by Rohit Gupta, Forbes Councils Member
Rohit Gupta is the CEO and co-founder of Auditoria.AI, a pioneer in AI-driven automation solutions for corporate finance teams.
Corporate finance has always been fast-paced and competitive—and the pace is only picking up.
Businesses no longer view staying ahead of the curve as a luxury but as a necessity. In fact, given the competition, the ability to be at the top of the game is a bare minimum expectation for retaining your clients.
To remain on the cutting edge, many enterprises have begun to explore and deploy generative AI solutions (GenAI) within their finance departments—tools whose intuitive power and growth potential offer unprecedented opportunities for finance professionals to build on their foundational experience and take their organizations to new heights. Powered by large language models, these tools have already demonstrated immense capabilities in other industries, spurring corporate finance leaders to acknowledge them as a major development that will impact their own space.
Like any new technology, GenAI must not be deployed haphazardly. To make full use of its abilities, companies must take a highly strategic approach. Building a foundation of AI knowledge within your organization—through online courses, workshops and certifications—can ensure confidence not only among your teams but among the client base that relies on you.
Are your business processes data-intensive? Are you looking to improve how the finance function partners with its business counterparts? Do you want to transform your enterprise with an AI-first mindset? If so, this article could be the first step in your journey toward industry leadership.
Identifying Good Use Cases
The first thing to understand as you develop your strategic approach to GenAI is that AI is not a one-size-fits-all solution. There will be use cases for which it’s ideal and use cases for which it simply doesn’t suit your needs. As such, you need to identify those specific use cases in which GenAI solutions could provide transformative power for your organization.
According to Gartner, some of the top finance trends and priorities for CFOs this year include “leading transformation efforts” and “evaluating or improving the finance function’s strategy and design.”
Per Gartner, “controllers are increasingly focused on the use of technology to automate processes as a strategy to improve the speed, efficiency and accuracy of the close. Accordingly, they rate controllership strategy and org design, and the use of technology to optimize accounting and transactional finance processes, much higher than CFOs do.”
GenAI tools tend to work best for document-intensive, repetitive, rule-based processes. Just to list a few examples: invoice processing, data reconciliation, financial reporting and fraud detection—all of these are prime candidates for GenAI solutions because of how data-intensive they are.
As you consider using GenAI in these areas, ask yourself: How much time does your finance team spend handling these tasks manually? Over a year, how many times does your finance team come to you to mention that something might be delayed because they need to tend to one of these issues?
By automating these time-consuming tasks, corporate finance enterprises can free their teams up for more impactful projects, all of which can increase the value and influence of the finance department within an organization.
Think of it this way: Your organization is a car, and GenAI makes engine tuning and transmission faster than ever before. As a result, you’re always on the road, getting closer to your ideal destination.
Overcoming Reservations And Concerns—The Power Of Clear Communication
So much of the discourse around AI solutions has focused on the concern that this technology will replace professionals or misuse important data. In finance departments especially, that latter concern quickly arises when you announce that your business will be integrating AI tools into the finance department’s tech stack.
To dispel these anxieties, it’s important to communicate upfront how these tools will be used and where the misconceptions in their purpose lie.
First and foremost, GenAI is not a replacement for finance professionals, but rather an augmentation. Your finance teams know your business better than any tool could. By introducing GenAI tools into your stack, you’re simply looking to help make their jobs easier, to ensure they can achieve the initiatives that are most exciting to them and the entire enterprise.
Secondly, GenAI has already been leveraged by numerous finance departments to great effect. The developers of these enterprise-grade solutions have worked to ensure they are both secure and compliant. To quote BCG, “Finance teams are already using AI in audit and control environments, such as to identify anomalies that might be indicators of fraud or noncompliance. The next wave of generative AI could go further by predicting and explaining anomalies.” That is to say, AI is actually a boon to security and the detection of data issues that might impact your customers—not a threat to it.
Allaying any fears about security, whether it’s around a job or the data, will make your finance department more likely to embrace GenAI with confidence and enthusiasm.
Preparing For The Next Decade
The 2020s have already seen rapid advancements in the power of GenAI. I predict more and more organizations will adopt such tools to the point of them becoming a standard. Just as cloud technology has become a mainstay across industries, so will GenAI. As such, corporate finance professionals must both be aware and well-versed in GenAI.
Learning how this fast-progressing technology works is not a one-time lesson: It’s a lifelong commitment.
Your career is one where precision and efficiency are not just expected, they’re nonnegotiable. By investing in a deep understanding of GenAI, developing a strategic approach, identifying relevant use cases and addressing your reservations, you can supercharge your career, striding with conviction and dependability into the future—and help advance your organization in the process.
