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For business leaders who need to fill critical talent gaps, implementing new technology is not a new trick—but it is one that requires a careful balancing act.
In addition to weighing the costs, leaders must carefully consider the current needs and skills of their teams and consider how they can train or upskill their employees to use the new tools effectively.
As a leader responsible for managing risk, cost and value creation, the CFO plays an essential role in addressing this challenge, said Terrance Wampler, group general manager, Office of the CFO for the finance and HR software platform at Workday. CFOs provide a critical, outcome-oriented perspective on new technologies and look at them from a return on investment perspective, as CFO Dive previously reported.
“As a CFO, I look for technologies that can increase my productivity, I look for technologies that can give me insight,” Wampler said in an interview. “And I look for technologies that can help me manage risk, usually through control.”
Finding the right technology
While taking ownership of their companies’ technology initiatives means CFOs have to add even more responsibility to their already crowded desks, “but ultimately they are also responsible for the risks and controls of all of these processes,” Wampler said. “And so this is an opportunity for them to actually take the lead and have their say.”
But to find the right technology for their company’s needs, CFOs need to work closely with other members of the executive team, especially the CIO. CFOs need to have a good understanding of the technology, data and people available to them before making a decision about new solutions or initiatives, and “you absolutely need to work with the CIO here to figure out where you’re starting,” Wampler said.
As a result, CFOs and their finance teams are increasingly able to “enter into a partnership relationship with the CIO and take on a more strategic role, not just as an advisor to the company on business issues, but also to actually help shape the future of how the company uses technology,” he said.
By fostering such a partnership, CFOs could gain a clear understanding of how they can potentially integrate new technologies into their existing finance teams and processes – at a time when CFOs continue to struggle with a shortage of skilled talent across the sector.
While many CFOs plan to keep their headcount steady, competition for skilled professionals like controllers remains fierce as experienced employees leave the company and the number of new accounting graduates declines, CFO Dive reported.
“Today’s financial leaders are realizing that they need tools and things to replace the work that people have been doing, and that they need to empower the people they have so they can do more,” Wampler said.
Conducting effective experiments
Finance leaders also need to make sure they have a voice in technology implementation, even if some of them are hesitant about new solutions because their employees are not ready.
“We’re seeing finance departments use these tools in creative ways at a grassroots level,” Wampler said. “And then that gets to the controller (or) CFO, who then says, ‘Well, we should understand this technology better and use it better because it’s a risk to me.'”
Although adoption of generative AI in companies has been slow—according to a recent McKinsey survey, only one in five CFOs reported having implemented GenAI—employees and individuals are eager to play around with the new tools because “they have access to them and are trying to make their own work easier and more efficient,” Wampler said.
However, this can pose potential risks for companies, such as the inclusion of confidential information in public AI models: “Nobody wants you to take your internal financial analysis and enter it into ChatGPT” or a similar tool, Wampler said.
It’s imperative for CFOs to take a leadership role in experimenting with and implementing such solutions on their team now, especially as the use of these tools in finance will increase. The growing role of AI or automation in finance will likely change the way CFOs search for and recruit future talent, shifting the focus of many university or college accounting programs to a much stronger technical emphasis, Wampler said.
“There will be a lot of training material on how to understand data analytics, how to handle it in the context of risk and how to act as an advisor,” he said.
