While programmers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists are scrambling to discover the latest and most promising artificial intelligence applications, CFOs are already reaping the biggest and fastest benefits from AI in everyday areas: the company’s back office.
According to several recent studies, AI has streamlined and reduced costs across all tasks, shortened monthly deadlines, accelerated resolution of customer inquiries, and reduced data entry, invoice processing and onboarding times.
“It’s all back-office work, and that’s where the real efficiency comes from” Beau HartmanThe co-founder and chief technology officer of Nomi Health made the remarks at the recent Money20/20 fintech conference in Las Vegas.
“you The reality is that you can either make it faster, or make it more transparent, or make it more automated,” Hartman said during the panel, adding that “there aren’t many people pushing a lot of the AI work to the front.”
For example, researchers say accountants who implement generative artificial intelligence can upgrade the level of detail in financial reports by 12%, shift 8.5% of time from mundane back-office processing to higher-value tasks, and reduce the time needed to complete monthly financial statements by 7.5 days.
Using generative AI, accountants can can Spend more time on analytical work“Quality assurance and customer communication are important,” researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and Stanford Business School said in a study published in August.
The benefits of AI are also measurable, providing CTOs and CFOs with data that helps validate spend across AI environments and build executive consensus behind new spend, littered with unproven promises of great value.
Shawnna DelHierro, chief information officer at SoundHound AI, said during a panel discussion that back-office applications of AI are “where you can get cost savings and tangible results that are easy to document.”
“They are metrics-based, reproducible and scalable,” she said.
“When talking internally and really trying to demonstrate the value of their technology, automation, and transformation, organizations are achieving easy wins by creating scorecards and clearly articulating the value of back-office automation,” she said.
“Once you start working on more obscure use cases, it becomes a little more like soft sales,” Delhiero said.
That said, companies are selling AI software to promising markets. A recent survey by SoundHound found that in the financial services industry, 71% of executives believe investing in AI is essential to staying competitive, Delhiero said.
The show of enthusiasm for AI clashes with an MIT study that found that 95% of organizations see no benefit from the technology, despite investments of $30 billion to $40 billion.
According to an MIT study, “only 5% of integrated AI pilots unlock multi-million dollar value, but the vast majority stall without measurable P&L impact.”
DelHierro said the MIT study is an inevitable conversation starter.
“I don’t think I’ve gone one day in the last five weeks where someone has said, ‘So, what do you think about the MIT report?’” DelHierro said, noting that SoundHound research and her own industry observations show AI has a high success rate.
Hartman frequently speaks out about similar MIT findings.
“Every time I turn around, someone shoves paper in my face,” Hartman said.
“I say, ‘That’s an interesting perspective, isn’t it?'” he said.
