Operationalizing AI: Navigating the AI Opportunity in the Office of the CFO
Stefan Vehr is a member of Summit’s Peak Performance Group and works with management teams and CFOs across the Summit Partners portfolio to help them effectively scale their teams, processes and technology, and build a more effective and strategic Office of the CFO.
The AI revolution is impacting all organizational functions, and the Office of the CFO is no exception. In recent years, we’ve witnessed the rise of advanced systems for financial planning, business intelligence, capitalization tables, robotic process automation (RPA), and optical character recognition (OCR) technologies in accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) automation. AI is set to transform finance functions even further. Across industries and businesses of all sizes and within the Summit Partners portfolio, CFOs are asking “What steps can I take now to leverage AI in finance and accounting?” In this latest installment of Summit’s Operationalizing AI series, we’ll take a look at some of the ways we’re seeing finance teams use AI today and our recommendations on getting started within your own organization.
Specific AI Use Cases in the Office of the CFO
Automating Reporting and Routine Tasks
CFOs are well-familiar with the labor-intensive and increasingly complex processes of financial reporting and ensuring regulatory compliance. Generative AI can automate these processes, producing detailed reports from multiple sources in a fraction of the time. We have begun to see, too, how AI can help boost productivity in financial modeling, data matching, and complex formula creation in tools such as Excel. I like to tell CFOs that any repetitive task your team handles today may be a candidate for AI-driven efficiency improvements. This should be top-of-mind for finance leaders seeking opportunities for continuous improvement.
Harnessing Big Data for Strategic Insights
Additional automation can free time and provide space for CFOs and finance teams to tackle more strategic projects. Here, too, you can apply generative AI to help quickly analyze vast amounts of historical data to distill insights and recognize patterns, presenting many opportunities to enhance financial planning and forecasting. Finance leaders can use AI to identify root causes of budget variances, detect reporting anomalies or run scenarios to understand the impact of macroeconomic or industry-driven changes.
Enhancing Communication and Collaboration
Importantly, generative AI can improve and streamline communication and collaboration within the finance team and across departments. We are beginning to see the early results of these efforts across the Summit portfolio. Finance professionals often need to communicate the message beyond numbers. To help, we encourage teams to consider leveraging AI chatbots to assist in crafting emails, writing accounting memos, drafting job descriptions, drafting management discussion and analysis sections of financial reports, creating training documents, and quickly learning new topics.
While AI offers numerous benefits, it’s important to remember that it is not a replacement for human involvement. Generative AI tools can and do produce inaccurate results, so any outputs should be thoroughly reviewed and edited, particularly in the areas of financial reporting and compliance, where accuracy is paramount.
So, where should you begin?
Equip Your Team with the Right Tools
While it can be challenging to determine exactly which vendors or AI tools will work best for your business, equipping your teams with solutions like Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, or Google Gemini can be a great place to start. In many cases, you may have already taken this step. I like to remind the CFOs with whom I work to be mindful of security and data privacy risks, and of ensuring compliance with your organization’s IT policies. In most cases, we recommend opting for vendors with enterprise-grade licenses and robust security measures. Conducting a risk assessment with a third-party vendor to determine the best large language model (LLM) for your organization can be beneficial.
Cultivate a Digital Mindset
I am confident that AI will eventually transform the way most functions will operate moving forward, so developing a digital mindset and staying current with evolving technologies is crucial. Experiment with chatbots and explore any new AI capabilities that are introduced within your existing tech stack. Encourage your team members to learn about these new features and participate in product demos with both existing and new vendors to stay informed. As technology continues to be further integrated into every function, it will be important to take ownership of these tools and leverage them for optimal efficiency.
Align with Your Organization’s AI Strategy
An organization’s AI strategy should be driven from the top, with the CEO and executive team, and heavily influenced by the CTO and/or CIO. Within this framework, finance teams can and should advocate for AI technology and pilot its use within the Office of the CFO. CFOs should scrutinize AI funding decisions as they would any other initiative, evaluating factors such as productivity gains, revenue impacts, and risk tolerance for inaccuracies.
Growth Timeline
The impact of generative AI on organizations, particularly the Office of the CFO, is still unfolding. My colleagues often repeat this refrain: “While AI is unlikely to replace humans, it is likely that humans using AI will replace humans who are not using AI technologies”(1). With new use cases emerging daily, we recommend including AI as a consideration as you budget for the year ahead. By next year, organizations not leveraging AI systems and tools – in the Office of the CFO and in other functional areas – may find themselves at a disadvantage. However, as with any investment, a thorough analysis is necessary to ensure a positive return on your AI investment, a task that naturally falls within the Office of the CFO.
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1. Source: Harvard Business Review, August 2023
The content herein reflects the views of Summit Partners and is intended for executives and operators considering partnering with Summit Partners. Published on Septemeber 30, 2024.
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