Chief financial officers (CFOs) face a myriad of challenges in their job role, however, these burdens can be lightened through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) according to Unit4, the enterprise cloud application service provider, as it releases findings from an IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Unit4.
The InfoBrief, titled The Path to AI Everywhere: Exploring the Human Challenges, details challenges CFOs are facing. These include: achieving decision velocity (26 per cent), managing compliance and risk (24 per cent), coping with too many meetings and monthly reporting (22 per cent). While some organisations believe AI can resolve these problems by replacing humans, the InfoBrief suggest an alternative.
IDC conclude that a human-centric AI approach is the best way to address CFO challenges and ensure long-term success for a company as a whole. Specifically, it notes that business leaders must engage employees, including CFOs, in AI strategy and development as the technology is not without its potential drawbacks.
IDC reports most AI plans stalled in 2024, urging CFOs to treat adoption as a strategic change management process to drive new business and improve operational models. Equally, IDC warns against over-reliance on AI in finance, as it could lead to a lack of nuance and human interaction, as well as compliance oversight.
Tom Seal, senior research director, European Enterprise Applications, IDC
“The identification of use cases and, indeed, their prioritisation is critical to the successful deployment of AI,” said Tom Seal, senior research director, European Enterprise Applications, IDC. “Beyond this, however, is the successful identification and deployment of super use cases. These are the ones that will drive efficiencies, provide accurate insight, and generally empower the finance function to be more accurate and more impactful on the business.”
Embracing AI
The CFO should focus on areas where AI can help deliver significant business outcomes, enhance resilience, and boost organisational adaptability. The goals should not only include improved efficiency, but better risk management in shifting market conditions and greater adaptability to such volatility.
Embracing AI will provide finance teams with support such as “red flag” prompts that must be prioritised, as well as automating decisions using real-time insights, accelerating scenario planning, and reducing payment friction through automated invoicing and approvals.
Michael Lengenfelder, global solutions architect FP&A, Unit4
Crucially, the CFO must establish solid foundations for AI adoption by understanding the underlying processes in different workflows and building a real-time unified view of data across the organisation to reduce errors and avoid bias. These steps are key to building confidence in the decisions taken autonomously by AI agents.
“At Unit4, we’ve always believed the future of finance lies in becoming the storytellers of business performance,” added Michael Lengenfelder, global solutions architect FP&A, Unit4. “The arrival of AI will help to accelerate this transition to a more strategic role, as CFOs guide their colleagues in interpreting and understanding the impact of financial information on business forecasts and results.
“Yes, roles will evolve, but finance professionals will be critical to the successful adoption of AI ensuring it is transparent, compliant and delivering value to organisations.”
What should finance look like with AI tools?
IDC depicts a future where AI Agents are acting autonomously working alongside humans, which could lead to greater decentralisation of the finance function.
For this model to succeed, the CFO must lead closer collaboration with senior executives, as AI agents empower them to make decisions independently based on real-time insights and analytics. Senior executives can only have confidence in these decisions, if the CFO leads development of AI-enabled work to ensure integration between functional areas in the finance team and implements compliance policies that maintain the integrity of data used by AI tools.
“AI could help decentralise the finance function, allowing control to be spread across the organisation rather than relying on a centralised team,” said Robert Brown, financial director, Medvivo Group Ltd. “The danger here is that the centralised function still has a purpose [in terms] of responsibility and accountability. Perhaps a better way to think about it is what finance should be and look like, and then work back from there using AI tools to enable it.”
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