In the last couple of years, the economic uncertainty increased regulation, and an ever-pressing need to cut costs and increase revenue has taken its toll on the Chief Financial Officer (CFO).
FREMONT, CA: With the innovation continuing to buffet the workplace, upending business models and rising customer demand indicates that CFO turnover is rising. But with many challenges comes a better opportunity for the CFO, whose role has started to transform as the outcome of such things. Their responsibilities have changed from number-crunching to getting and remaining ahead of the uncertainty and starting to look for the company’s future gaze.
Due to the issues, it is not simple for the CFO to excel in all four areas of their new role with the traditional means. That’s why to be effective and embrace their many faces, and the CFO should lean on technology to relieve them of mundane tasks and enable them to focus on those of strategic importance.
Leaning on Tech
The automation and cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are vital to allowing the CFO to suffice their multi-faceted role. In the past decade, it has been noticed that this helps the CFO to emerge as the right-hand person to the CEO, making way for them to undertake more responsibilities than before. However, there is a long way to go. The majority of the finance leaders even deploy AI in the finance function, despite it having a clear correlation with the revenue growth.
By using AI, transactional tasks that still Takes up so much of a CFO’s time can be automated. This helps them focus completely on innovating and predicting the business’s requirements, generating more value than ever.
Mitigating risk
AI technology is also the key to ensuring effective stewardship by the CFO, future-proofing the financial team. By making the back-office ‘touchless’ and automating the time-consuming manual tasks such as data entry, the CFO can focus on essential risk management. Indeed, with additional compliance regulations and increases in fraudulent activities, the requirement for a stringent risk management process is more important than ever.
Leveraging data through predictive analytics
With AI and machine learning, CFOs will have more data at their fingertips than before. But for a CFO to be fully effective, they must be able to pull the insights from this data in the best way possible. This means scrutinizing any potential spend with greater strategic detail, leveraging predictive analytics to generate more significant insights into the potential investments. This technology can also be utilized to measure the performance of their assets and turnover and to identify where investment is necessary.
