good morning,
There has been much debate about the use of artificial intelligence and the future of work. Will it replace workers? Will bots take over human creativity? How will AI be incorporated into finance functions? These are just some of the problems organizations face.
We asked Sayan Chakraborty, co-president of Workday (sponsor of CFO Daily) and head of the product and technology organization, for his take on the balance between technology and human capabilities.
“Workday’s approach to AI and machine learning (ML) is to enhance people, not replace them,” says Chakraborty. “Our approach intelligently applies automation and provides supporting information and recommendations to enable humans to effectively leverage AI while still giving humans control over all decisions. He continued, “By bringing technology and people together, companies can strengthen their competitive advantage, become more responsive to their customers, deliver greater economic and social value, and reduce the burden of individual work. I believe it can create more meaning and purpose.”
According to Chakraborty, Workday, a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, has been building AI and ML to serve its customers for nearly a decade. He holds a seat on the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which advises the White House on AI-related policy issues (and, as far as I’ve emphasized, Chakraborty has a lot to say about the NAIAC’s efforts. However, he said that generative AI is “a growing part of the policy debate, both in the US and in Europe, which are adopting risk-based approaches to AI governance.” continue.” shared.
The future of technology in finance
Terrance Wampler, Chakraborty’s Workday colleague and group general manager in Workday’s CFO office, thinks more about the implications of AI for finance. “If you can automate the transaction process, you reduce risk because there is less manual intervention,” he says. Finance chiefs are also looking for technology to help accelerate data-driven decision-making and recommendations to the company, as well as play a role in training people with new skills, he says.
The consulting firm Gartner recently made three predictions about financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and controller functions and technology usage.
– By 2025, 70% of organizations will use data lineage-enabled technologies such as graph analytics, ML, AI, and blockchain as a key component of semantic modeling.
– By 2027, 90% of financial descriptive and diagnostic analytics will be fully automated.
– By 2028, 50% of organizations will replace time-consuming bottom-up forecasting approaches with AI
Workday thinks and implements AI and ML differently than other enterprise software companies, Wampler said. I asked him for an explanation. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a type of software that companies use to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting and procurement. He says the difference between his ERP for Finance and HR at Workday is that AI and ML are built into the platform. So it’s not just ERP that uses AI and ML programs. This is actually the building block of AI and ML. And having ML at the foundation of the system means it can adapt more quickly when new ML applications are added. For example, with Workday Financial Management, high-volume transactions can be automated faster, he says.
ML gets better the more you use it, and according to Workday, it has over 60 million users, equivalent to about 442 billion transactions per year. Therefore, ML improves at a faster rate. The platform can also use AI predictively. Let’s say the FP&A team has a budget for the year. Using ML, they proactively identify reasons to hit that budget, he says. Workday also works with a single cloud-based database for both HR and finance. All information he has in one place. According to Wampler, the company has been using large-scale language models, the technology that enabled generative AI, for quite some time. Workday will continue to explore use cases where generative AI can add value, he said.
As finance technology continues to evolve over the next decade, it’s definitely interesting to have a front row seat.
Cheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
What’s to come: next luck Announced in partnership with Workday (CFO Daily Sponsor), the new CFO Virtual Event “Addressing the Talent Gap with Advanced Technologies” will take place on April 12th from 11am-12pm EST. luckand I will be joined by Katie Rooney, CFO of Alight Solutions.and Andrew McAfeeHe is co-founder and co-director of MIT’s Digital Economy Initiative and principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Click here for more information and registration.
big deal
Accenture’s report, Race to the Cloud: Reaching the Long-Needed Value Inflection Point, found that cloud initiatives have skyrocketed over the past two years, with more than 86% of companies is reporting. initiative. To assess how companies are approaching the cloud today, Accenture asked them to describe the current state of their cloud efforts. 68% believe their move to the cloud is not yet complete. Nearly one-third (32%) of respondents consider their migration to the cloud complete, and are satisfied with their ability to meet their current business goals. However, 41% admit their move to the cloud is ongoing and continues to evolve to meet changing business needs. The findings are based on a global survey of 800 of his businesses and his IT leaders across a variety of industries.
deeper
Deloitte’s new report, Employee Wellbeing Is Essential, examines three factors that have a significant impact on wellbeing in today’s work environment. How the organization and work are designed. How we work at the organizational level. Deloitte calls these “determinants of job well-being.”
Leader board
Ann Gugino Gugino will resign from his position at Papa John’s International, Inc. effective March 22. Papa John’s has temporarily appointed Chris Collins as Chief Finance and Accounting Officer.
Narayan Menon Appointed CFO of Matillion, a data productivity cloud company. Menon has over 25 years of experience in finance and operations. Most recently, Menon served as CFO of Vimeo Inc. where he helped raise multiple funding rounds and take the company public in 2021. He has also held senior management positions at Prezi, Intuit and Microsoft. Menon has also served on the advisory board for the Big Data Program at Rutgers University.
heard
“This was an extraordinary bank.”
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell spoke of Silicon Valley banks during a press conference after the Fed decided to raise interest rates by 0.25%, Yahoo Finance reported. and high investment in long-duration bonds. “These are not weaknesses that are pervasive across the banking system,” he said.
