AI – a useful tool for finance professionals, or a hindrance?

Finance is a vital part of any organisation because it touches every part of the business. It impacts how the business grows, including the solutions a company chooses to invest in; the cybersecurity strategy it adopts; all while ensuring risk and compliance are managed effectively.

This makes the finance team one of the busiest in the company. It takes time for finance professionals to manage the stream of data required to scale the business, while being diligent and not making mistakes that will damage the reputation of the organisation.

There are solutions – such as AI – that can be used to augment the finance department's work. But as with any tech tool, there are implementation challenges to navigate, ranging from internal sentiment towards the technology, to risk.

Businesses must mitigate barriers to adoption when it comes to AI, ensuring any solutions are supporting the way financial professionals work as opposed to creating inefficiencies across the flow of work.

With great power comes great responsibility

It’s no secret that keeping a business financially viable while providing department leads with the autonomy they want or need to spend money in their team is no mean feat. Balancing these two factors requires having clear processes in place that will ensure every decision maker has access to the right information at the right time.

However, often finance departments rely heavily on manual processes to complete their work, from credit and collections to risk and compliance. This means professionals can spend the bulk of their time running through data analysis instead of focusing on value-add work and building relationships both internally with employees and externally with customers.

While it seems like there’s an easy fix in onboarding a solution that can help manage this data, as we know, finance is one of the most stringently regulated departments and so there are a huge number of sensitivities around data the finance team holds. Professionals must therefore make sure they are employing a data protection-first approach with any solutions they implement into the team.

The finance department has a responsibility to make sure it is bringing on tools and solutions that offer security and credibility. AI is still a developing technology, and it is vital for the finance team to work in tandem with the wider business – including cybersecurity – to make sure the organisation is evolving in accordance with regulation and governance.

Understanding the AI advantage

Having the right innovation mindset in place before implementing any form of new technology ensures a company is scaling effectively from the onset. There is where having an ‘empathetic innovation’ mentality can mean the difference between a technology’s success or failure.

Empathetic innovation refers to the idea that creating new technology products and services starts with identifying a pressing problem faced by customers or employees, understanding it deeply and then building from there. In theory, AI is meant to solve a human problem and help people by augmenting their natural skills, and evolving with people’s experiences in mind will enable a robust technology strategy.

When it comes to finance, as we’ve discussed, professionals need help with managing the wealth of information they are responsible for. AI can speed up the processing of data which can often be difficult for a human to understand as quickly.

The technology can support tasks that have defined rules, such as applications for credit, and play a role in supply chain and procurement where forecasting can be used to predict future demand. AI also can offer enhanced risk management by spotting unusual data and comparing it to older data to identify fraudulent activity.

There are always going to be challenges to navigate, but the benefits of adopting AI in finance are multitudinal. By understanding from workers themselves how AI can help them have the biggest impact possible in their specific roles, leaders can map out the path towards it. They can demystify AI for employees, and ensure they know what it means for them so there’s a shared vision for the future.

Humans will always be needed for certain tasks and manual reviews, but AI has the potential to evolve the role of a finance professional into a more high-functioning one. It can create the foundation for a sustainable, high-performing organisation – if leaders remember to empathise with people’s experiences and implement solutions that will work with employees, rather than against them.