The Best AI and Automation Tools You Need to Win as a Modern CFO

What are the future prospects of CFOs?

As a CFO, do you believe you have the ability to maneuver your company through the challenges ahead?

Have you thought about how you can use AI and automation to strengthen these capabilities?

In this article, we highlight the best AI and automation tools you need to succeed as a modern CFO.

Here’s what we cover:

AI and Automation: Breakthrough Technology for CFOs

Now more than ever, you are under more pressure to make a real and tangible impact on your business.

They must provide the essential context needed to make good strategic organizational decisions and collaborate with the entire organization.

And while you do that, you need to keep departments informed and ensure costs are contained as opportunities evolve.

To achieve this, understanding how to use business tech tools is crucial.

The good news is that many of today’s business technology tools have a revolutionary feature: AI.

AI and automation are game-changers for CFOs, enabling manual financial processes to be carried out without human intervention.

With AI-powered automation, tasks can be completed faster and with far greater accuracy, giving you more time (and better data) to do more valuable and impactful work.

A Deloitte report found that 76% of CFOs expect digital transformation and technologies to play a larger role in 2024, and 80% expect their companies to integrate more automation and digital technologies into their operations in the coming year .

The use of AI and automation in enterprise technology is becoming the norm not only because of its effectiveness, but also because of the wide range of processes to which it can be applied.

And this includes a number of use cases that CFOs in particular need to be aware of.

Automation of financial processes

Three-quarters of finance managers agree that manual tasks still take up too much time and effort from their finance teams.

AI and automation can help you change that.

Overall, using AI and automation allows you to focus on advising the business instead of focusing on crunching numbers.

You can automate routine tasks like data entry, reconciliation, and reporting so you and your team can focus on strategic planning and analysis.

These technologies can also make a big contribution to reducing errors. IBM reports that AI can help reduce financial reporting errors by up to 37%.

Automation can make financial processes faster and smoother for the data-driven and technology-savvy CFO, improving data quality and increasing the productivity of finance and accounting staff.

As a CFO, you can achieve many benefits by using these tools.

AI and automation can:

• Reduce the need for manual intervention in financial transactions and other accounting-related tasks such as general ledger entries and reconciliations
• Automatically populate fields with data from business management and ERP systems to complete filing templates
• Reduce the risk of human error and ensure consistency across repetitive tasks
• Increase and accelerate the execution of financial processes and tasks
• Make better use of resources by reducing manual processes like reporting.

Financial automation is already being used with great success by CFOs.

If you’re wondering where to start, in a recent survey by automation company Tipalti, CFOs outlined the areas where they believe the use of digital technology is most useful:

• Expenses (67%)
• Tax compliance (66%)
• Automated payments (62%)
• Managing corporate credit card spending (61%)
• Order management (58%).

“By automating areas such as expenses and payments, CFOs can relieve their teams of many manual tasks while minimizing their error rate – ultimately reducing the amount of time and effort that CFOs themselves have to spend on manual intervention and oversight,” says Paul Henderson, Chief Accounting Officer at Tipalti.

“CFOs can reallocate that time and effort to more strategic concerns, such as analyzing data and insights and applying them to decisions that drive shareholder value.”

AI-driven analytics

Using analytics does not mean using data for data’s sake. It means leveraging information from all areas of the company to be a true business partner to a CEO (and the entire leadership team).

In accounting, big data and analytics are particularly useful for risk management, fraud detection, and business analysis – identifying patterns that others would most likely miss.

To meet your company’s needs, you need to look for enterprise technology solutions that provide quick and easy access to real-time financial data while providing features that enable senior finance staff to use it for decision-making.

Solutions that leverage AI and automation to generate financial insights can have a transformative effect on your operations.

Automation makes it possible to create real-time financial reports based on massive amounts of data from across the organization with one click.

Faster reporting not only means more time for strategic tasks, but also faster closes.

Automation is far more suitable for collecting and processing large amounts of data.

And this offers you many advantages as a CFO who wants to produce accurate and attractive financial reports.

Using automation in your reporting can:

• Improve financesl Data by providing context and a clear story
• Aggregate data and analytics from different transactions using dimensional reports that enable the use of multiple codes to generate charts from composite data sets
• Provide real-time metrics that improve the quality of associated downstream data
• Reduce turnaround time for complete reporting
• Avoid gaps in financial data.

Not only do AI and automation provide more comprehensive and accurate analysis, they can also uncover insights that traditional analytics may miss.

Using advanced data analytics and predictive modeling, AI and machine learning (ML) can identify trends, anomalies, and insights that can help you make more informed decisions and manage risk more effectively.

Even finding the answers you’re looking for becomes easier with AI.

Using natural language processing (a technology used by chatbots), CFOs can quickly gain financial insights without manual effort, searching, and reporting.

By using an AI-powered bot, you can simply ask a question like “Show me 2021 financial reports” and get the data you need.

Ultimately, this technology allows you to better prepare for the future.

With AI, you can create data-driven forecasts that help you outperform key financial health indicators like cash flow.

Gaining insight into cash holdings – and analyzing how that cash is being used – is key to unlocking working capital. Predictive analytics also helps you with cash forecasting and improves your ability to invest working capital effectively.

Generative AI is already proving disruptive in all areas of business.

For CFOs, the use cases may not be as clear, but that doesn’t mean generative AI can’t be beneficial.

Essentially, it acts as a translator between people and massive amounts of unstructured data. This ability to extract actionable insights from massive amounts of data can be a real boon for CFOs.

We’ve already mentioned how chatbots that use natural language processing can help you get the information you need faster. But using tools that leverage generative AI can do much more to make you a more productive CFO.

These tools can provide easy access to instantly get real-time analytics, predictive budgeting, and financial forecasting, saving you time and reducing costs associated with manual processes.

AI-powered virtual assistants like Sage Copilot not only help you make data-driven decisions, but they can also help you stay on top of your workload with workflow automation, task management, and personalized to-do lists.

This technology can reduce the time spent on manual, mundane tasks from hours to seconds, giving you more time for high-value tasks.

Generative AI is already being used by countless finance departments due to its potential to save significant time and resources.

Many experts consider it to be the third wave of digitalization – and it is becoming increasingly important for financial functions.

Final Thoughts: AI and automation mean more time for strategy

As CFOs are increasingly expected to do more with less (and in challenging economic conditions), there is a growing understanding that the use of AI and automation will prove invaluable.

In fact, 83% of finance leaders recognize the importance of adopting AI and ML to the future success of their organization.

And while AI and automation bring numerous practical benefits to finance teams, the overarching benefit for CFOs is that they can spend more time on strategy.

By making so many financial tasks and processes easier, faster and more insightful, this groundbreaking technology allows you to focus on the bigger picture.

In short, AI and automation mean you can spend less time fighting fires and more time planning for the future and developing a direction that supports the long-term growth of your business.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in January 2018 and has been updated for relevance.