How CFOs can harness the transformative power of generative AI

GenAI is evolving rapidly and has the potential to enable CFOs to deliver valuable new strategic insights and predictive analysis to their organisations.

Almost every aspect of the finance function has benefited from technology advances in recent years. Automation has freed up time to move beyond financial reporting and engage in the provision of strategic business insights and forecasting for the entire business. Those advances include artificial intelligence (AI), natural language generation (NLG), and optical character recognition (OCR). Many large organisations have been using machine learning and related technologies to assist in areas like fraud and anomaly detection, transaction processing, business forecasting and customer management.

However, we are now on the cusp of a potentially transformative leap forward as a result of the advent of generative AI (GenAI). This new technology has the ability to democratise data science and analytics and put coding skills in the hands of just about everyone with the ability to interact with it.

It will no longer be necessary for a CFO or finance team member to be skilled in specific programming languages or database query skills. Once they can explain in plain language what they want the GenAI to do, the technology should do the rest. It may no longer even be necessary to put all the data into an Excel spreadsheet. AI will be able to take structured and unstructured data from within the organisation as well as from external sources to provide various outputs like trend analyses and forecasts, with numerous variations based on factors like seasonality or user-defined future events. Having done so, it can offer best, mid and worst-case scenarios to aid C-suite decision making.

This capability, which was formerly the sole preserve of skilled data analysts and programmers, is now in the hands of everyone with access to GenAI and who has received basic training on how to interact with it and is willing to experiment.

Need to develop understanding of data science

Certain skills are required no doubt, not least of them the ability to understand accounts and financial reporting standards. Beyond that, CFOs and finance teams will need to become familiar with data science, at least to a small extent. This will not necessarily present a major challenge as finance professionals have been using business intelligence systems for many years. However, they will have to develop a much deeper understanding of the topic if they are going to uncover the next layer of value which lies within the data at their disposal.

Having the tools to carry out the analysis on your behalf is just one half of the equation, knowing what you want to achieve through the analysis is the other. The importance of “prompting” and the ability to do this well will become a key skill in extracting the most from these tools.

At the moment, GenAI is viewed as a separate tool that operates independently of other software systems. That will remain so for certain general applications, but increasingly it will become an integral part of the software systems used every day in organisations.