Artificial Intelligence- Fueling up Finance

Artificial Intelligence is here and evolving at exponential rates. It’s gone much beyond robotics and automation, to being able to develop financial models and predict outcomes. Yet, there are several limitations with AI, and they would stay until it evolves to a stage it learns and regenerates everything that is changing around it, without intervention. Even then, one big component that might remain missing is its “amygdala”. We are yet to discover AI that can feel and respond as humans would , or be able to make judgements based on broad set of factors other than pure patterns and data.

Till, AI evolves to a state, that it becomes a mini you or me, that can learn, feel and respond, AI is a great companion and complementary for finance professionals. It’s time for finance professionals to up their game in tech learning, partner up with techies, and stay abreast with new apps and solutions coming in every day- and apply their practical knowledge to find integrated solutions that can make their jobs more fulfilling and enhance value to their organizations.

 Here are some interesting ways, in which finance can bring AI into their organizations to enhance controls

Enhanced Security and Internal Controls: Integrate AI into camera surveillance to avoid human misses setting up alarm mechanisms incase of compliance breech, power disruption, manual interventions and so on.

Red flag reports for internal controls and enhanced control on financial transactions: Integrate AI into payment masters to raise alerts of common payee against different activities e.g. An employee receiving payment against a marketing activity, or payee name mismatch between payment master and bank statement etc.

Value Loss Alerts integrated into ERPs/ Financial Planning Modules: Our repositories of data are sitting silently today. Finance Managers and leaders are dependent on manual or standard financial reports each time they want to look at SKU rationalization, look at ageing inventory, product mix deteriorates, a new product is training behind plan. The delays often cost businesses millions. AI built into these modules can effectively alert, suggest alternatives or prevent unsupervised overwrites making governance and value protections much easier for CFOs.

Yes, implementing all the above will require

-          Careful planning and inputting into system teams and experts

-          Influencing business partners towards its usage

-          Constant enhancement and upgrades

-          More effective communication and business partnering to ensure teams can embrace potentially leaner/ smarter value focused ways of working

-          Honing our own analytical skills

-          Stepping out from pure analysis and accounting into understanding how systems work and how programming, logic and finance gets integrated

-          Being a pro at predictive analysis only to ensure it can be integrated into AI for your organization

And the above are new age skills which finance professionals anyway need to embrace to stay relevant and contributive.

I am eagerly waiting to see how much of AI we can integrate into our Internal Controls and at Finance COE Pernod Ricard India Vipin Aggarwal Gaurav Agarwal Vijay Agarwal Mayur Agarwal Pradeep V Nair Akhilesh Tripathy Vikash Agarwal Preeti Sureka