The Future of the CFO
Learn how to develop the skills to lead in a continuously evolving AI-enabled finance organization.
The impact artificial intelligence (AI) is making on traditional business operations is increasing each year, which suggests that finance leaders must understand how to leverage its benefits to keep its organization steered for growth. This webcast discussed how CFOs can move their organizations forward into the age of AI by addressing gaps in digital literacy, strategic thinking, and storytelling and using those functions to drive enterprise value, growth, and performance.
Panelists discussed the following topics:
How is the traditional role of the CFO changing in an increasingly AI-driven world?
What new skills and perspectives can finance leaders adopt to lead a high-performing finance organization?
What can CFOs do today to build their skillsets in practice and focus on areas of development?
Moving Away from Transactional Work
To flourish in this new AI-enhanced era, CFOs must focus on five areas that, combined, will help serve as a roadmap toward future progress.
- Elevate to the Intelligent Cloud.
- Leverage data as a strategic asset.
- Scale intelligent finance.
- Flex the delivery model.
- Modernize the workforce.
The first three may be the most familiar to your average CFOs as they are the ones most often engaged in helping organizations move data to intelligent cloud systems or scale up intelligent finance processes. But what is often overlooked is how important it is to modernize the workforce accordingly. Teams throughout the organization need to have the skillsets, not just to perform within these new systems, but they must be advanced enough to think creatively and seek innovation solutions beyond the capabilities they may possess today.
KPMG survey data shows that far too many finance professionals today are spending time on transactional processing and other mundane tasks, all of which can be easily automated. When AI, data, and intelligent cloud systems are introduced, the world of Next Gen Finance looks much different. Transactional work becomes a slight percentage of work and instead, leaders can spend more time on things like strategic visioning, planning and execution.
KPMG survey data reflects this finding. In fact, over the next five years, 44% of worker skills will change and 69 million new jobs will be created, driven by the new technology. Yet, despite these forecasts, 83% of organizations say they still struggle to find enough talent with the skills they need.
Clearly, organizations still need to get in front of the coming AI evolution by reshaping the nature of work at their organizations. The business necessity is reflected by KPMG survey data as 93% of leaders agree that investments in GenAI have allowed their company to enhance its competitive position and long-term strategic performance.
CFOs and other finance professionals are in a unique position to lead their organizations through this transformation.
Meet the Modern CFO
The integration of AI into the workforce is less about replacing human labor but allowing teams to streamline operations so human workers can concentrate on high-value activities like strategic decision-making. The result is increased performance across the enterprise.
If finance leaders are indeed in a position to drive this change, their roles must evolve to blend entrepreneurial vision, expertise, storytelling, strategic insight, and challenge-driven innovation to meet today's dynamic business needs.
Entrepreneur
This financial leader understands new trends and how the market works, while bringing ideas to drive competitive advantage and create value. He or she leverages new ideas, adapts to change, and shapes the company’s future. The entrepreneur also fosters a culture of proactive risk management, making sure the focus is on boosting revenue and competitive positioning.
Among the ways the Entrepreneur uses AI is to reduce silos, scale capacity, develop new roles within the workforce such as data specialists and AI trainers, and produce productivity gains by removing mundane tasks from humans so they can focus on creativity, judgement, and connection building.
Expert
The Expert is a trusted advisor, providing specialized expertise and data to drive smart decision-making and generate positive business outcomes. They draw insights using quantitative and qualitative techniques. The Expert collaborates with peers outside the finance space to understand their goals and objectives to support them through insights.
Among the ways the Expert enables AI is to deliver advanced analytics, create predictive modeling to enable strategic planning, generate real-time reporting to aid decision-making, and identify unusual data patterns to support security and compliance.
Storyteller
The Storyteller translates, interprets, and communicates data in a meaningful way, leveraging technology and deep understanding of the business. He or she is skilled in using financial data to tell a story about operational performance, the profitability of certain products, and other ways to bring clarity and perspective to hard data.
Ways the Storyteller uses AI is to summarize reports, extract key information, detect and predict trends based on historical data, uncover patterns and insights, and develop customized narratives.
Strategist
The strategist spots and actively drives growth opportunities while balancing customer and commercial needs to create value for the business. In this role, the financial leader develops a story from data to showcase value, which helps the organization develop into new markets, acquire new products, or invest in new product lines.
This role uses AI to accelerate actional insights, develop predictive models to forecast coming market trends, monitor the competitive landscape, and automate customer data to unlock insights into consumer behavior.
Challenger
The Challenger pushes back against the status quo and develops different ways of doing things, navigates risks, and identifies opportunities for the organization. This role requires someone who is comfortable not only challenging the status quo but offering what they perceive as a better path forward.
The way the Challenger enables AI is to predict potential risks, suggest improvements to businesses processes, propose new solutions based on trends identified in the business data, and create risk and investment analysis.
How to Get Started
These four areas will help finance leaders embrace AI technology and leverage it to reshape and redefine their finance and accounting function. There are four ways to get started:
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Meet our team
