Speaker 1: Coming from a family of doctors, I often find myself trying to explain to them what I do for a living. During one such conversation with my niece, she came up with the perfect way to describe my role as a consultant. She said, consultants are like doctors for companies. Doctors help people improve their health by diagnosing and treating their medical issues, and consultants help organizations achieve success by finding solutions for their business challenges. Ultimately, both roles aim to improve the overall well-being of their respective clients. Let's say today's client is your finance organization. And it's time for a checkup. Welcome to AI Academy. My name is Monica Pruthi, and I'm the Global Finance Transformation Leader, or the finance company doctor, for IBM Consulting. During your initial screening, I assessed several pain points. Inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, and rapidly changing regulatory standards may be hurting your business. If we don't find a solution, your productivity and profitability will be negatively impacted. How can we address these issues and protect your organization's health? For an embattled finance function, AI optimization is the optimal treatment plan. Research shows that when organizations scale AI across the finance function, they tend to become top performers and achieve higher ROI. This should come as no surprise, as finance plays a vital role in the enterprise. It's the beating heart of your organization, allocating resources across the business to power your operations. AI technology helps to optimize the workflows and processes that drive the finance function through automation and content generation. Traditional AI automates routine, labor-intensive tasks such as data collection, document summarization, and pattern recognition. Traditional AI systems are designed to perform specific tasks based on deterministic algorithms set by your organization. For example, an AI-infused tool like Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, follows predefined scripts and workflows that represent the task process from start to finish. In doing so, the AI performs these simple, repetitive tasks at an exponentially faster rate, offering finance organizations an overwhelming competitive advantage. Or, you might use RPA to automate data collection for financial reports. RPA can capture and make sense of key information in an instant, allowing you to quickly gain new insights and make informed decisions. Traditional AI does routine tasks for you, so you don't have to. Generative AI, on the other hand, does complex tasks with you, so you can work more efficiently. GenAI helps you create content using deep learning models. These models analyze your existing data, learn its common patterns and structures, then use that information to generate something brand new. Using prompts, like specific queries or instructions, you can guide and refine your GenAI content as needed. Consider how much time you might spend creating a financial analysis in Excel. You have to gather and input data from multiple sources, build charts and pivot tables to visualize the results, then format it all into a stakeholder-ready presentation. That's roughly half a day's worth of work, minimum. You could spend 50% of your day sorting through spreadsheets, or you could spend 10% of your day prompting a GenAI model to help you create what you would need in a fraction of the time. Instead of spending hours on data entry and designs, let's say you decided to use GenAI. It quickly ingests and structures your financial data, provides you with relevant insights, and packages everything in a presentable, shareable format. How much time do you think it took to create your financial analysis using GenAI? Even if you spent a few hours coming up with different prompts and polishing your presentation to suit your preferences, you've still saved days of labor by augmenting your work with GenAI. And that's not the only value it brings to the table. GenAI is completely revolutionizing the role of finance across industries. It's accelerating the abilities of traditional AI and making the seemingly impossible possible. GenAI can rapidly detect anomalies, explain variances, generate scenarios, create reports, and manage accounts. For the first time ever, we're able to automate complex workflows, tasks, and processes at speed. AI technology is capable of so much more. And if you're searching for use cases to prove its value to your finance organization, the wealth of opportunities may seem like choice overload. So, where should you start? Where's the best place to focus your efforts? Of the four key finance workflows, Order to Cash, Financial Planning and Analysis, Record to Report, and Procure to Pay, Financial Planning and Analysis will see the biggest impact from AI technology. This domain is where you budget, forecast, and analyze your financial performance. Through a combination of traditional AI and GenAI capabilities, you can make faster, more accurate decisions. The faster you're able to make decisions, the faster you can create action plans that impact sales, marketing, and supply chains. Traditional AI can automate the data aggregation process, which is often tedious and labor-intensive. GenAI can provide cost-cutting recommendations, detect patterns and anomalies, and create dynamic scenarios and market performance comparisons. These capabilities allow you to explore simulated outcomes without impacting your business. To get the most out of your AI investments, it may be wise to start your journey with the Financial Planning and Analysis use case. Speaking of journeys, the further along you are in your AI journey, the more you gain from your investments. Organizations that have implemented AI report an 18% ROI. Those that have operationalized AI report a 24% ROI. And organizations that have optimized AI report a whopping 51% ROI. Despite its quantifiable benefits, finance organizations have been slow to integrate AI into their daily operations. Many CFOs are skeptical of AI technology. They're concerned about data security, risk, governance, biases, inaccuracies, and the potential for significant loss of shareholder value. The truth is, AI isn't perfect. But by implementing robust security protocols, establishing clear governance structures, and monitoring and adjusting AI models as needed, CFOs can mitigate the risks that come with incorporating new technology. Professionals across every industry are also skeptical, due to fears of being replaced by GenAI. On the contrary, the purpose of AI technology optimization is to help humans do their jobs more effectively. AI adopters attribute 40% of finance function workforce redeployment to GenAI. As a result, human workers are more empowered to learn new skills and focus on higher-value strategic tasks. Organizations looking to adopt AI need to heavily invest in training to equip their finance teams with knowledge about machine learning, data science, and agile techniques. The goal is not to turn finance professionals into technology experts. It's to help humans work in concert with technology. AI democratizes information and expertise. It's essentially a form of digital labor designed to ease the jobs of human workers. With training on how to properly use AI technology, finance professionals can use it for human-augmented value creation. To optimize GenAI and become an AI-first finance organization, you're going to need buy-in from your team, stakeholders, and business leaders. Presenting a use case like AI for financial planning and analysis is an effective step towards facilitating digital transformation. Finding the best use case depends on strategic alignment, the impact of AI, the opportunity to scale pervasively, and the team's readiness to transform. Before you begin your search, you'll want to ask a few questions. What are you trying to achieve with AI? Is it growth? Productivity? Control? Accuracy? Will the use case advance your strategic goals? Will AI have an impact that leads to better decisions? Will applying AI change decision-making? And finally, how will adopting a hybrid operating model, a human and digital workforce, impact your business? Most often, this is where organizations fail. Answering these questions will help you map out your strategic vision. And with that, you can pilot AI technology that aligns with your business needs. This is your chance to start using and understanding AI before you scale. Finance leaders ready to scale should build their traditional AI technology around key financial workflows, processes, and initiatives, then add GenAI to supercharge these new capabilities. Oftentimes, finance organizations can't keep up with the rapidly changing ambitions of a business that's always trying to stay competitive in the market. Think about cloud-based subscription organizations. Marketing and business functions are coming up with new services and adding new business models. It becomes a nightmare for finance to try consuming and parsing through data while keeping up with the changing revenue models and different fee structures, all of which impact revenue recognition. This is a good place to start using GenAI, something in the low-variability box like an agent or an assistant, to help ingest and summarize documents. GenAI can parse through this information, answer questions, generate insights, and explain the patterns that work and those that don't. Now you know how and where AI can benefit your organization. So, let's wrap up your visit with the finance company doctor. A healthy heart circulates blood throughout your body to supply you with oxygen and nutrients. In much the same way, a strong finance function distributes resources across your organization to fund key initiatives and improve strategic decision-making. AI technology optimizes the crucial workflows and processes at the strategic core of the finance function, which leads to faster, more successful outcomes for the rest of your business. Thank you for watching.