AI is not intelligent; it’s powerful but it’s a
tool, albeit very effective and very efficient in mining data and finding patterns and doing repetitive tasks
says Christensen: ““There’s no real evidence or proof of there being real intelligence. The best people who work in AI don’t call it AI because it’s nowhere near intelligent enough and no evidence that it ever will be. “AI is not intelligent; it’s powerful but it’s a tool, albeit very
effective and very efficient in mining data and finding patterns and doing repetitive tasks.” PwC UK believes there will be three waves of how AI will
impact business. First, there is where we are today with machine learning assisting us in narrow and specific use cases. Second, there will be augmented intelligence – the very best of man and machine working together as we saw in our boardroom example. Finally, there will be the autonomous AI intelligence, which has the potential to far outstrip human intelligence – or indeed, make mankind redundant. Three waves of how we think AI will impact business. “A lot of the narrative goes, unhelpfully, to this fully autonomous machine intelligence,” says McCargow. Machine learning already handles boring, repetitive tasks with
huge amounts of data, which is why it is perfect for finance departments. Christensen compares today’s machine learning or Robotic
Process Automation (RPA) to hiring 5,000 smart, cheap interns doing very basic, repetitive tasks. RPA is already a relatively mature technology as a precursor to AI. This could be reconciling invoices in the back office, for example. It demonstrates clear efficiencies to free up staff for more high-value work.
24 DIRECTOR OF FINANCE
DOFONLINE.COM
Previse uses AI to enable large firms to pay suppliers as soon as
an invoice comes in, analysing data in order of how likely a buyer would be to pay an invoice. Says Christensen: “If you think about the invoice approval
process, you might have 500 people sitting in Bangalore manually approving invoices blind. What AI can do is give you a risk score, so that you can see that 90 per cent of your clients pay invoices on time – freeing up staff to deal with the 10 per cent whose invoices are problematic.” The next step will be a voice interface, with an FD asking a Siri-style computer to help them with accounts. Boards want ever more detail and context in reporting, and they want it faster and more frequently. This will be commonplace within a decade, liberating FDs to take a much more strategic role within companies based on evidence. And, unlike its human counterpart, an AI finance worker won’t obfuscate, dissemble or try to cover its own back.
FUTURE SKILLS o, how should today’s finance directors prepare for their new role as they pivot from looking backwards to helping steer their company forwards?
S
Seventy-two per cent of respondents to the EY survey said that AI skills will be vital going forward. This means CFOs will need to develop a different skillset that prioritises interpretation over mathematical acumen. McCargow says: “Being comfortable with working with big data is going to be a prerequisite, opening up the possibility of blending
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