Video: Finance Automation and the Self-Driving Finance Back Office

powering-the-self-driving-finance-back-office-1200Every time I sit down to interview someone, I'm astonished at the unexpected answers I get.

A while back, we invited a number of CFOs, entrepreneurs, and finance visionaries to comment on the day-to-day challenges they face in the world of corporate accounting and finance. 

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The goal was to hear their unique perspectives on staying audit-ready, gathering data for reporting, and improving their finance business processes. Of course, we also asked them about artificial intelligence and automation in the back office. It's kind of our thing.

As R “Ray” Wang of Constellation Research put it, “the number one question we get from every CFO is, “When can I get to a self-driving autonomous enterprise?”

Tyler Sloat, CFO of Freshworks pointed out that “the CEO, the board, and the executive staff are truly expecting guidance.  If we supplement people's roles with a technology that removes the rudimentary tasks and allows them to focus on, 'How do we become more efficient as an organization?' That's going to be an area that I would buy that technology any day.”

Amit Sharan of LiveRamp posed the age-old question “how do you make repeatable, non-value add tasks go away?”

John Fernandez of ForgeRock believes that “you have to be thinking about using AI because your company won't scale, your G&A costs won't scale if you're not leveraging AI to handle so much of the workload that you would normally in the past have hired contractors to do at peak times, or outsourced.”

Ray Wang went further by stating that “early adopters of this technology are going to have a massive advantage. It's about how you train these systems, how you create new models. You'll be the pioneers. Really thinking about what the future finance looks like, what gets automated. When you think about when humans make decisions, how you become more strategic and how we get to, ultimately, a world of situational awareness.”

According to Aditya Singh of Neotribe Ventures, “this stuff would have been impossible even three or four years ago. AI, deep learning, machine learning, label data, clean data, consistent data, all that enables the creation of the 200 forms of automation that the team at Auditoria is building today.”

At the end, Ray Wang brings it home, “the future is really about getting to precision decisions. And precision decisions happens when you actually automate your transactions, you deploy artificial intelligence, and you can create an autonomous enterprise. That's where we're headed in the next 10 years.”

For more interviews of CFOs, entrepreneurs, and finance visionaries, make sure to visit the CFO Corner at Auditoria.AI.