It's Not Too Late for CFOs

to Get Into the Artificial

Intelligence Game
I n 2018, McKinsey reported that CFOs
who didn't adopt digital innovations like
artificial intelligence (AI) were in danger
of falling behind their counterparts in
IT and marketing. When the COVID-19
pandemic hit two years later, the Office
of the CFO was even further forced to
prioritize digital to stay afloat.
By one estimate from McKinsey, just
the first nine months of the pandemic
pushed digital adoption ahead by
approximately seven years — further
widening the gap between progressive
and outdated organizations. And as the
economic recovery continues, business
operations slowly return to normal, and
new economic headwinds build, the
digital surge shows no signs of slowing
down. Consistent with McKinsey’s 2018
forecast, Boston Consulting Group found
that “digitally mature” organizations
reported nearly double the revenue
growth of digitally immature companies.
Today, more CFOs who once dragged
their feet are now confident in the
transformational benefits of digital
capabilities like automation and AI.
What does this all mean? Now is the
time for CFOs at organizations of all
sizes to lean on AI to plan, budget, and
forecast with greater accuracy, speed,
and confidence.

“This is about decision velocity.

Machines can make decisions 100 times
per second. We’re lucky to make one
per second. We’re even luckier if we can
get out of management committee in
four weeks. It takes us so long to make
decisions. If you can’t get to that level of
AI, you’re going to fall behind.”
– Ray Wang, Principal Analyst and Founder at Constellation Research

It’s Not Too Late for CFOs to Get In the Artificial Intelligence Game 2
 Four Ways AI is Transforming
the Office of the CFO
With the help of AI, finance teams are able to spend less time on spreadsheets
and manual effort and more time on strategy. As the technology crunches
the growing volumes of data, soft skills like critical thinking, problem solving,
and communication are becoming more crucial to the success of finance and
accounting teams.

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AI scales AI lets your AI eliminates AI provides
tactical people focus human error real-time,
tasks and on high value and data bias prescriptive
operations activities insights

It’s Not Too Late for CFOs to Get In the Artificial Intelligence Game 3
1. AI scales tactical tasks and across the organization, strengthening
relationships with the business, and making
operations Without AI, employees
informed decisions that drive growth.
are burdened with hours of monotonous
tasks like reporting and reconciliation.
The next generation of finance
The good news is that AI is designed
professionals embrace and expect AI-
to handle routine & manual tasks with
enabled technology to be readily available
ease, and without errors. A company can
at their firms. They don’t expect to spend
reduce overhead costs and gain back
days toiling in spreadsheets and combing
thousands of working hours.
through emails. Those in the Gen Z and
Millennial cohorts see AI as a tool that will
But what happens to humans when AI is
enable them to make more meaningful
in the mix? Research from the Wharton
contributions at work. As Oracle reports,
School of the University of Pennsylvania
“91 percent of Gen Z employees say
suggests that, since investments in AI
they would trust AI to manage their
can contribute to higher profitability,
organization’s finances.” The report goes on
companies can then hire more
to say, “the majority of Gen Z (79 percent)
employees.
and Millennials (83 percent) even say
they’d trust a robot over their company’s
“Any employment loss in our data we
own finance team.”
found came from the non-adopting
firms,” said Lynn Wu, professor of
operations, information and decisions at
Wharton, and co-author of the underlying
study. “These firms became less
“
In 2021, KATA, a global equity
productive, relative to the adopters. They
management platform, had
lost their competitive advantage and, as
been doubling in size every year.
a result, they had to lay off workers.”
This was great for business, but
led to increasingly long financial
2. AI lets your people focus on reconciliation times. In just
high value activities Automating six weeks, KATA implemented
lower-cognitive and repetitive tasks Planful, gained real-time profit
reduces the risk of burnout and improves and loss and reconciliation data
the employee experience. Finance and in the cloud, and immediately
accounting professionals can instead reduced the cycle times of its
spend more time on the high-value monthly close.
work they are meant to do—using
their creativity to raise the financial IQ

It’s Not Too Late for CFOs to Get In the Artificial Intelligence Game 4
3. AI eliminates human error & in data and the deadlines to report are
getting tighter as well. With so much
data bias Humans have an ability to
economic change happening so quickly,
use creativity and irrationality to make
business leaders also expect multiple
innovative decisions. But, unlike humans,
scenarios, budgets, and forecasts weekly
AI never makes a typo, flubs a calculation,
or daily. Companies can choose to either
or takes time off. When finance and
hire more people or rely on technology to
accounting teams rely on monotonous
get the job done.
human effort and ill-designed software,
errors are bound to happen. But mistakes
made in the Office of the CFO can have
disastrous consequences.
“If you don’t have the modern
Consider how the State of Pennsylvania tools, the burdens you’ve
overpaid a school district by half-a- faced in the past are only
million dollars because the spreadsheet going to increase. Finance
data supplied by the district inflated and accounting professionals
enrollment numbers. When the clerical will continue to work late
error was eventually caught, the district into the night. Your employee
pledged to retrain their staff and assign a satisfaction and retention
supervisor to oversee future reporting. As will suffer, and your business
data collection expands and a business leaders just won’t have the
scales, this type of strategy is simply financial insights they need to
unsustainable. make better decisions at the
speed they now expect.”
AI can automatically detect issues like
budget padding and human error at the –Planful CEO Grant Halloran
most granular levels. These abnormalities
can be flagged and reviewed by an
employee to ensure accuracy. Over time With cloud-based financial data, multiple
with machine learning, AI can identify scenarios can be generated much faster
patterns and alert those inputting the than with manual spreadsheets. Armed
data to catch potential issues before with solid intelligence, the CFO and
they happen. leadership team can look ahead, modify
operations, and reconfigure the business
4. AI provides real-time & model in response to fluctuating market
prescriptive insights Finance conditions.
departments of all sizes are drowning

It’s Not Too Late for CFOs to Get In the Artificial Intelligence Game 5
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It’s Not Too Late for CFOs to Get In the Artificial Intelligence Game 6
 4 Best Practices to Manage
the Transition from Legacy
Systems to AI
For many CFOs, the thought of outsourcing critical financial data analysis to a
computer is a nonstarter. As AI enables more companies to increase efficiency and
profits, however, the pressure to adopt will soon reach a tipping point. For those at
the early stages of AI adoption, here are a few tips to help you get started.

1 2 3 4
Move your Validate Take the Hold
data to the against prior crawl, walk information
cloud forecasts and run sessions
approach to with your
AI solutions workforce

It’s Not Too Late for CFOs to Get In the Artificial Intelligence Game 7
1 . Move your data to the cloud
If data is the fuel that empowers the AI
engines, it’s crucial to have a reliable and
consistent supply. Ray Wang, CEO of
Constellation Research, considers this
to be step one in AI transformation. “You
definitely want to start building those AI
capabilities by getting your data house
into order, by making sure that you get
into the cloud. By making sure you start
asking the right business questions and
start looking at where automation and AI
can give you an exponential advantage,”
said Ray .
Here are four steps to take at this phase:
1. Align with IT to ensure that your
infrastructure is up-to-date to handle
data flows.
2. Consider deploying a finance-owned
technology that gives you control over
the solution and its usage.
3. Assess what functions within finance
and accounting can be automated, like
accounts payable, accounts receivable,
and payroll.
4. Identify where AI is already in action
in other parts of the business and learn
from those teams.
2. Validate against prior
forecasts Expensive AI pilot projects
require rounds of internal buy-in and can
It’s Not Too Late for CFOs to Get In the Artificial Intelligence Game
take months to provide significant results.
You’re better off running a short-term
analysis and letting the data speak for itself.
For example, you can take a previous
forecast that was completed manually and
compare the results with the AI-enhanced
report. You’ll immediately see where the
algorithm picked up on the same red flags
as the previous employee-only report, and
maybe found some the humans didn’t.
With these results, you can instill
confidence in yourself and your team that
the technology works, and then begin to
build out the internal process for data
collection.
3. Take the crawl, walk and
run approach to AI solutions
Overhauling a legacy system is time-
consuming, costly, and prone to failure. AI-
enhanced FP&A should be built so finance
and accounting teams can work with user-
friendly features like visual dashboards.
Choose a technology solution with intuitive
features that won’t overwhelm your end
users and will provide accessible reporting
out of the box.
Like most of the technology that
supports our daily lives — from GPS
navigation to online banking — AI should
work seamlessly and in the background
empowering finance and accounting teams
to better serve the business, employees,
and stakeholders.
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4. Hold information sessions
with your workforce

As mentioned earlier, the introduction of

AI into the business may be perceived as
a threat by some finance and accounting
professionals. CFOs can get ahead of
any negative impressions by inviting
the business to understand how, when,
why and who will be leveraging these
solutions.

To accomplish this, consider holding a

series of information sessions where you
can educate employees on how AI will
help reduce the amount of monotonous
tasks and create more time for high-
value work. Frame it as enhancing their
roles and giving them more time to do
the more rewarding work they’ve been
educated to do.

Information sessions also open a

dialogue with your employees where the
most cumbersome processes can be
discussed and prioritized for automation.
This feedback loop can provide insight
on which projects AI can tackle first from
the people who are closest to the existing
procedures.

It’s Not Too Late for CFOs to Get In the Artificial Intelligence Game 9
 The New Frontier of Finance
AI, data science, and machine learning more accuracy, and have more time to
will continue to enhance finance collaborate on growth.
and accounting teams around the
globe. According to a 2022 survey by Unleash your potential with
NewVantage Partners, 92 percent of AI-enhanced FP&A
large companies are already realizing
returns on AI investments, up from 48 Finance and accounting professionals
percent in 2017. In other words, if you’re don’t need to hold an advanced degree
not already reaping the benefits of AI, in computer engineering to harness
you’re already way, way behind. the potential of AI — nor do they need
“I think we’re at the beginning of a new to belong to enormous enterprises to
business cycle and we really should take afford the solutions.
advantage of that if you’re starting at this
cycle, make sure you think about where With user-friendly software like Planful
analytics, automation and AI play a role,” Predict at your fingertips, it’s finally
said Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation possible for the finance function to
Research Inc., at Planful Perform. ramp up AI-enhanced financial planning
and analysis in a matter of weeks.
While installing AI solutions and
processes, it’s important to keep an eye
on the future state. The most significant
changes will begin after your business
counterparts begin to accelerate
their adoption of AI to automate their
processes. The newly increased capacity
opens up countless opportunities for
growth, higher quality work, and more
satisfied employees and customers, but
gives the business more time to work on
strategy. The business will then pressure
the Office of the CFO to work faster, with

It’s Not Too Late for CFOs to Get In the Artificial Intelligence Game 10
 Ready to get started?

Contact Planful to schedule a demo of Planful Predict today.

sales@planful.com +1-650-249-7100

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