When it comes to adopting new technologies, Auditoria.AI CEO Rohit Gupta wouldn’t expect the finance professionals to be the type to be first in line when Apple releases a new phone.
“By definition, they’re paid to be a little more conservative, careful and thoughtful in terms of how they view new technology,” Gupta told CFO Dive in an April 16 interview. “They’re fast followers as opposed to being on the leading edge — that’s generally sales and marketing.”
Gupta has had a chance to get to know finance teams’ likes and dislikes. In 2019 he founded his Santa Clara, California-based finops platform that enables finance teams to automate many tasks and processes in accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger and vendor management.
Last month the company announced two new updates to its ERP-centric automation platform that it touts as an AI application for the office of the CFO: a domain-specific small language model update, advanced human-in-the-loop technologies, and other options for large language model usage. Altogether, they’re designed to automate some of the routine tasks that the finance team’s back office functions wrestle with.
For example, if a company hears from one of its thousands of suppliers that it has not received a payment, resolving the problem without automation can be time consuming, he said.
Normally, before answering, someone in accounts payable needs to validate that it is a legitimate supplier, identify the invoices and their status, and whether they have been entered or approved and determine where the process stands in the business system, he said.
“On the basis of the data they receive, it might take one to three days before AP might get back to the supplier with this information,” he said.
With Auditoria.AI software, the system is trained in natural language concepts of accounting and procurement, enabling them to read and send emails, open attachments, find the data the supplier was looking for on the payment information and compose a response. “So now the supplier is getting almost instantaneous feedback,” he said.
With the human-in-the-loop technology, the company seeks to meet their clients where they are in terms of the AI and tech readiness. Gupta understands the concerns of the finance professionals about AI, noting that they can’t allow inaccurate or false data to go back to the customer.
Customers choosing the human-in-the loop option use the AI to do all the tasks, but the communication does not go out the door without being checked by a human at the company.
“We almost kind of look at it as the stepping stone to full autonomous…once they gain confidence and the trust that the AI is performing according to expectations then they will essentially turn on the full autonomous,” he said.
Gupta isn’t alone in noticing the cautiousness on the part of CFOs toward AI. According to a recent survey by Big Four accounting firm Deloitte, many companies are playing it safe when it comes to AI spending as they wrestle with a host of risks and challenges associated with GenAI and weigh potential investments, CFO Dive previously reported.
