In the evolving landscape of finance operations, many CFOs and finance teams find themselves in a transitional stage where they are navigating multiple software platforms, both new and legacy, that are not well integrated. This can lead to huge inefficiencies, workloads, and administrative costs. The emergence of generative and specialised artificial intelligence (AI), as well as new regulatory requirements around ESG reporting, are adding to this complexity.
However, there are tools available that can give finance teams a deeper level of intelligence into daily operations and make their job easier.
Australian professional services firm RSM Australia is one organisation that is successfully using AI-powered automation to achieve significant efficiency gains and cost savings across its operations. In the first year of automation, RSM Australia saved AUD$350,000 through efficiency gains, which rose to $4.2 million in the following year. In 2024, RSM Australia is on target to achieve $6 million in cost savings through its third year of automation.
There are five ways that AI-powered automation can help CFOs and their teams realise greater efficiencies and make finance operations easier.
1. User friendly interface
Incorporating and training staff on new technology can be complicated, especially if they are not tech-savvy. New AI-powered automation tools have a user-friendly interface and simple drag and drop applications so that no coding or technical skills are required.
For finance teams, it makes it quick and easy to onboard new staff and to complete time-consuming tasks such as data entry or data transfer. This gives employees back more bandwidth for analytical and strategic activities.
2. Integration across platforms
One of the biggest challenges finance teams face is navigating between various software platforms. AI-powered automation simplifies this, ensuring fluid data movement and consistency across systems, from Microsoft Excel to many popular enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, including SAP Fiori, Oracle NetSuite, and more.
For example, AI-powered tools can instantly extract invoice details received via email and populate them in an Excel spreadsheet or platforms like NetSuite. They can also seamlessly copy data from Excel and input it into ERP systems such as SAP Fiori, creating comprehensive customer profiles without manual data entry.
3. Mastering unstructured data
In today's business environment, finance teams must consolidate and analyse unstructured data from multiple disparate sources such as emails, informal transaction records, or customer requests. Most of this data lacks a consistent layout or structure. This is where AI-powered automation comes to the fore in distilling data no matter the source, interpreting it, and correctly transferring it across systems to where it belongs. It can even transfer paper documents into online records and apps in one click. This saves finance teams a huge amount of time and administrative costs and significantly reduces the risk of human error.
4. Removes the risk of misinterpretation
With its advanced cognitive capabilities, AI-powered automation can complete tasks such as classification, summarisation, content reasoning, and contextual interpretation. Simplistically, it can understand the meaning of a word and categorise it appropriately. If a document mentions "violet" but the input form only offers a "purple" option, the technology recognises the similarity between the two colours and categorises it accordingly. This helps to remove the risk of a human misinterpreting data and accidentally categorising it incorrectly, which can result in administrative time spent searching for information that has been recorded in the wrong category.
5. Ongoing enhancements through self-learning
The more finance teams use AI-powered automation, the more it understands their unique requirements and evolves to serve them better with each interaction. This adaptability ensures that the technology becomes more aligned with the organisation's unique workflow, making tasks even smoother and more efficient over time.
All of these capabilities make it much easier for finance teams to create and manage entire workflows, for example, from booking travel for employees to generating their complete travel expense reports. At the same time, it can automatically detect fraudulent transactions.
As technology advances and finance operations with it, AI-powered automation will increasingly play a crucial role in enhancing workflows to make it much easier for finance teams to deliver benefits directly to the organisation's bottom line.
