To ensure they’re maximizing the return on investment from emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence, CFOs need to be participants, not observers, said Deirdre Ryan, Ernst & Young Global Finance Transformation Leader.
“It's very different to get your hands dirty than it is to look at a PowerPoint or read an article” about AI, Ryan said in an interview.
Hands-on experience
Today’s CFOs play a critical role when it comes to effectively creating an AI strategy for the businesses. As the executive in charge of capital allocation, finance chiefs are the ones who bear the responsibility for ensuring that if the business makes “this investment in new product development with AI, are we going to see the return?” Ryan said. Ryan joined the company last year after a 24-year career at fellow Big Four firm Deloitte and runs EY’s global and Americas financial consulting practice, according to her LinkedIn profile.
“They have to be able to validate whether the bright, shiny object is real,” she said. “So even if they're not implementing [AI] within their own organization, they have to be able to advise their colleagues and their CXOs, around that capital allocation process.”
Investment in AI has continued to expand over the past year and a recent study by EY predicts this trend won’t slow down, with the number of organizations investing $10 million or more in AI set to double in 2025, CFO Dive reported. However, the survey also warned that many businesses lack the infrastructure needed to effectively utilize AI, pointing to a looming challenge for CFOs: turning their AI spending into recognizable gains.
In order to do that, CFOs need to get a clear, personal understanding of what AI can actually do, Ryan said. CFOs that want to bring AI into their finance functions should start slow, with a small proof of concept, Ryan advised.
“Have your teams understand the capabilities, and then you can move beyond an initial wave of experimentation with a broader project, but you first have to sort of get your hands dirty and get people comfortable with the tools and technologies,” she said.
EY, alongside its fellow Big Four firms, has invested heavily in AI technologies, pouring $1.4 billion in the technology last year, CFO Dive reported. Following the investment, EY rolled out its EY.ai platform which focused on improving the AI skills and understanding of its own employees.
Skating to the puck
It’s important for CFOs to think strategically about where they want to integrate AI and the skills they need to cultivate among their employees and finance talent — and how that will influence those functions long-term.
Integrating AI into the FP&A function could help to ease key pain points, for example, with the technology seamlessly aggregating massive quantities of data that employees might have had to sift through manually in the past. With that responsibility lifted, however, “what does that mean for finance?” Ryan said.
“You can't have a traditional mindset, [of looking] at an end-to-end process and [saying], ‘I'm going to improve this process by tweaking this or fixing that,” she said. “You really have to reimagine, how am I going to do that in this new world? And so there's a creativity that's required.”
Figuring out how technology will impact the future of the finance function is just one factor CFOs need to focus on, however. As automation seeps further into finance, finance chiefs will see their own roles continue to veer towards driving strategy and generating value, versus their more traditional, numbers-focused role.
As companies lean on their finance chiefs more and more to drive strategy and transformation — and to keep the books balanced — “finance professionals today…really have to reimagine the future, irrespective of data and technology,” Ryan said.
“What I say to CFOs is, look — and yes, I am shamelessly plagiarizing from [Wayne] Gretzky — but you have to know where the puck is,” she said.
