Ina surveyconducted by Gartner, 300 CFOs were asked about the investments they would make in artificial intelligence. The context related to the COVID-19 pandemic was taken into account in the questions asked to financial executives.
The importance for companies to invest in artificial intelligence
In May 2020, nearly 300 CFOs responded to Gartner’s survey around investing in AI. Clement Christensen, director in Gartner’s Finance practice, said of the use of AI in finance:
“There’s nothing wrong with using AI to modernise the finance function. It’s very important work. However, the most impressive rewards of AI will go to CFOs who think more broadly about how technology can fundamentally change the way their business operates.”
90% of those surveyed said they plan to invest “more or less the same amount” in AI even after the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Gartner, the top priority for companies is improving their data architecture to support future AI goals. This obviously involves recruiting specialized scientists or partnering with specialized institutions.
Clement Christensen states:
“Most CFOs are aware that to achieve their functional digitisation goals, they need to run more experimental and less familiar digital technology projects. Despite this, they follow use-case driven approaches to AI projects that tend to have a bias towards modernizing and improving familiar processes to achieve easily quantified ROI gains.”
Applications of artificial intelligence in finance
In finance, machine learning can be leveraged to deduce which customers are prone to late payments so that reminders can be sent to them earlier or more regularly to keep them in good standing, or simply to automatically chase recurring non-paying customers. Using this kind of method could have a return on investment in that it drastically improves a company’s economy. Gartner calls this process a “modernization option”.
Admittedly, artificial intelligence, for this particular case, is not used to achieve anything innovative since most companies have a finance department that looks for who has paid or not. But thanks to AI, these tasks are more efficient and can even be automated, leaving employees, less redundant tasks to perform.
Another use, which Gartner calls a “transformation option”, could be for late payments at the time of sale. The AI would identify these in such a way that prospects are prioritized based on which ones are likely to pay more quickly. Again, the company’s finances are improved as payments are prioritized.
Clement Christensen refers to both options in his comments:
“The transformation option doesn’t have an immediately measurable return on investment like the modernization option, but the end gain is potentially much greater .It only takes a small mindset shift in how CFOs think about AI deployment to make the difference between a project that modernizes a business and one that transforms it, which is where the biggest competitive advantages lie.”
Gartner’s experts advise CFOs to invest in the problems to be solved rather than the processes to be modernized, because they are already in place in some way in the company, even if it is less efficient to achieve than with AI.
The involvement of financial experts seems to become increasingly important and to be one of the keys to a better implementation of the strategies of an institution or company, whether in the field of artificial intelligence or in other sectors such as human resources. Gartner has been increasing surveys that involve CFOs in answering questions related to telecommuting or on-premise technology spending.
Translated from Gartner réalise une enquête sur l’utilisation de l’intelligence artificielle dans le secteur financier
