CTO of Avalara, a cloud-based compliance solutions provider that helps businesses of all sizes get tax compliance right.
The meteoric rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted many CFOs and finance leaders to look closely at how AI can improve finance processes. In fact, our survey found that 92% of CFOs agree that AI tools will help businesses find efficiency, drive productivity and increase profitability.
From preparing initial drafts of financial reports to identifying fraud, the limited experiments being done with AI in finance have already shown tremendous promise. Still, despite many finance leaders eager to adopt AI, many also find themselves unsure of where to start. That’s where strong alignment and partnership with engineering can make a difference.
We found that only 21% of CFOs plan to work with their in-house technology teams to adopt AI, while 56% plan to work with a mix of internal teams and external vendors. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that will work for every company, more often than not, a strong alignment with your internal technology and engineering teams can help ensure that CFOs are making the best AI investments for their business.
How do you start creating that alignment if it doesn’t exist today?
Creating CFO-CTO Alignment
It should go without saying that any new technology adoption should be well-thought-out. However, with emerging technologies like AI that are changing almost daily, the decision to adopt should be made using any and all data, insights and tactical knowledge available to a CFO. Fortunately, the CTO and their engineering teams should have all of the data and insights needed to make an informed decision.
While CFOs and CTOs may appear to operate very differently from the outside, the truth is that there is much more in common between the two than one may think. Both CFOs and CTOs are oftentimes global and future-oriented leaders, making decisions based on the current and long-term success of their companies.
Through forecasting and financial modeling, CFOs are constantly thinking about the future and what needs to be done today to make that future a reality. CTOs take a similar approach, just through a technology lens. As technology continues to change at a rapid rate, the technological decisions made today will impact the business’ ability to stay competitive and serve customers in the future.
Beyond common ground around strategic thinking, CFOs and CTOs can create alignment by speaking the same language. Finance and technology professionals are both notorious for having what is seen by many outside of their professions as their own languages. However, one area that these languages can easily overlap for alignment is around metrics and key performance indicators.
When it comes to AI, CFOs can bring forward metrics around the needs of the business, and CTOs can provide metrics around how the technology can impact the business—a perfect overlap for success metrics.
Streamlining AI Adoption Through Tech Partnership
The decision to adopt AI for any portion of a business has far-reaching implications for the entire fabric of a company’s enterprise application architecture. Every decision that is made to implement a new technology directly correlates to the design, coding, processes and data of a company—all of which have lasting impacts on the bottom line.
Technology teams have deep knowledge of a company’s technology infrastructure, which means they can not only best identify the AI applications that work best within the infrastructure, but they are also best poised to drive efficiency and cost-savings. The adoption of any technology, especially transformative applications like AI, can have significant ramifications in the long term because of factors like support and maintenance that only technology teams can fully quantify.
CFOs can also glean insights from the experiences CTOs and technology teams have already had with AI. More often than not, technology and engineering teams have adopted AI before finance teams, so they’ve had numerous opportunities to test and learn different AI algorithms and applications. These experiences often lead to centers of excellence within engineering that provide learnings and frameworks around AI that can inform AI adoption across a company.
For example, at Avalara, we leverage an intelligent document platform, which details the steps needed to create AI models and implementations, and it’s used by engineering teams that are not using AI today to easily learn how to implement AI into their projects. Finance and other nontechnical teams could use a similar approach.
At the end of the day, the value of AI for finance will only grow. The ability to streamline manual processes and derive better insights quickly can redefine how finance teams operate and enable them to provide more value to their businesses. Before any value through AI can be realized, however, partnership with technology teams will be a requirement.
How are your technology teams working with finance teams to bring AI into finance teams and processes?
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
