I


magine you are in a boardroom of the future. Your CEO asks for projected EBITDA for your next financial year compared with this year’s figures. You touch your mobile-phone earpiece and ask your artificial-intelligence assistant to bring up the figures.


Her disembodied voice informs you and other board members. Then you ask her what are the reasons behind the expected shortfall. A few directors squirm, having missed their targets. This scenario is not farfetched. Already 92 per cent of British


companies plan to implement AI by 2020, according to research by Adobe. Nearly two thirds (61 per cent) of finance departments based in


Britain already use aspects of automation, compared to only 53 per cent in the US. But if AI can consolidate spreadsheets faster and with greater


accuracy than a human being – and given that, as finance director, you approved all the spend on the AI system in the first place – isn’t this a case of turkeys voting for Christmas? What role for the finance


The role of the CFO


will be to hold technologists to account and to protect the business


director if an AI can crunch numbers


faster and more


accurately than a human? Forty-eight per cent of British people believe AI will have negative effects on society, according to law firm Bristows. A widely-referenced study


from Oxford University suggests that 35 per cent of UK jobs are


at risk of being replaced by automation in the next 20 years. And finance professionals are among the most susceptible. It’s not just technophobic greybeards who are worried either – two thirds of British millennial finance professionals feel threatened by automation, according to a Metapraxis survey. Simon Bittlestone, CEO of Metapraxis, says: “For years, it has been known that finance employees feel threatened by the impact that new technologies will have on their day-to-day role and job security. It is no surprise that even digitally native millennials feel the same.”


SETTING YOU FREE he good news is that AI experts agree that far from making CFOs redundant, artificial intelligence is going to liberate finance directors.


T Rather than spending hours poring over spreadsheets,


reconciling invoices and expenses, AI will unshackle finance directors to become strategists based on actionable data, anticipating problems and making course corrections. Paul Christensen, chief executive of AI finance start-up Previse,


says: “AI is a wonderful and powerful tool that will enable FDs to do their jobs much more quickly and efficiently and focus on the high-value strategic stuff.” According to the EY Financial Accounting and Advisory Services


(FAAS) fiſth annual survey, 44 per cent of CFOs believe AI will be the most important technology in five years’ time. Peter Wollmert, EY Global and EY EMEIA FAAS leader, says:


“Automation will help finance teams to drive new levels of operational agility and given them freedom to focus on generating insights, while AI will harness underlying patterns in that data with machine learning helping to predict scenarios and improve results.”


22 DIRECTOR OF FINANCE DOFONLINE.COM


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36