For business leaders that need to fill crucial talent gaps, implementing new technologies isn’t a new trick — but it is one that requires a careful balancing act.
On top of weighing the cost, leaders need to carefully consider the current needs and skills of their teams, as well as how to train or upskill their staff to effectively utilize the new tools.
As the executive responsible for managing risks, costs and value creation, the CFO plays an essential role in meeting this challenge, said Terrance Wampler, group general manager, office of the CFO for finance and HR software platform at Workday. Finance chiefs provide a critical, outcome-focused perspective on new technologies, looking in terms of return on investment, CFO Dive previously reported.
“As a CFO, I'm looking at technologies that may help me with productivity, I'm looking at technologies that may help me with insight,” Wampler said in an interview. “And I'm looking at technologies that helped me manage risk, usually with control.”
Getting the right technology fit
While taking point on their business’ technology initiatives heaps more responsibility onto an already full plate for CFOs, “at the end of the day, the CFO has responsibility for the risk and controls of all those processes,” Wampler said. “And so this is an opportunity for them to actually take a lead and voice their opinions.”
To find the right technology fit for the needs of their business, however, finance chiefs will need to work closely with other members of the C-suite, most notably the CIO. CFOs need to have a good understanding of the technology, data and people they have available before making a decision on new solutions or initiatives, and “you will definitely have to partner with the CIO on this to figure out where you start,” Wampler said.
As such, there’s a growing ability among CFOs and their finance teams “to really move more into a partnership position with the CIO, and to elevate themselves into a more strategic role as not only an adviser to the business around how the business operates…but also to actually help shape the future of how the company leverages technology,” he said.
Fostering such a partnership could give CFOs a clear look at how they could potentially slot emerging technologies into their existing finance teams and processes at a time when finance chiefs continue to grapple with talent shortages across the sector.
While many finance chiefs plan to hold their staffing levels steady, competition to attract and retain skilled talent such as controllers still remains fierce as experienced staff departs and the number of incoming accounting graduates shrinks, CFO Dive reported.
“The finance leaders of today are recognizing that they're going to need tools and things to replace what people have been doing, and they're going to need to empower the people they do have to be able to do more,” Wampler said.
Directing effective experimentation
It’s also important for finance leaders to make sure they have a voice when it comes to technology implementation, even if some of them may be hanging back from new solutions, because their employees are not.
“We're seeing finance departments use those tools in creative ways at a bootstrap, groundswell level,” Wampler said. “And then that makes its way up to the controller [or] CFO who then says, ‘Well, we better understand this technology, we better harness it, because it represents a risk for me.’”
Though generative AI adoption has been slow-going among business — just one in five CFOs saying they had implemented GenAI, according to a recent McKinsey survey — employees and individuals are busy playing around with the new tools, because “they have the access, and they're trying to make their own job easier and more efficient,” Wampler said.
However, that can open up businesses to potential risks, such as the inclusion of confidential information in public AI models: “Nobody wants you taking your internal financial analysis and putting it into ChatGPT” or a similar tool, Wampler said.
Taking a lead role now in how to experiment with and implement such solutions among one’s team is essential for CFOs, especially as adoption of these tools is set to expand in finance. The growing role of AI or automation in finance is likely going to change how CFOs look for and source future talent, as well as shift the focus of many university or college accounting programs to have a much more technical influence, Wampler said.
“There will be a lot of training on how to understand analysis of data, how to manage that in association with risk and how to be an advisor,” he said.
