Technology & Innovation

The AI advantage: How CFOs can harness AI to power growth

Learn how to harness AI effectively in your finance team—starting with practical steps you can take today.

There is no escaping it—AI is transforming the finance function.

CFOs who use AI tools daily have a stronger impact on the growth of their companies. That’s according to Sage’s latest research into the CFO of the future and the evolving finance function.

And the benefits do not stop there. Companies led by AI-savvy CFOs see higher performance. Of those CFOs using AI daily, 22% enjoyed strong revenue growth in the last year, compared with just 13% of those who did not.

It’s clear that AI has the power to transform the finance department, but it’s not a silver bullet. In this article, we explore the huge potential that technology and AI offer CFOs and examine some of the ways they can overcome the challenges they face.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

AI is supercharging finance tasks

CFOs are putting their faith in AI to solve some of their biggest problems. The top benefits they believe the technology can bring them are increased efficiency (38%), time savings (37%), reduced costs (33%), improved data analysis (30%), and more accurate work (30%).

One such company reaping the benefits of AI is market-intelligence platform AlphaSense. It’s built around AI, and its AI-based platform synthesizes investor intelligence, such as company filings, transcripts, and news, enabling professionals to save significant amounts of time. The company’s AI-first culture extends to the finance department, which also uses the technology extensively.

“We’ve implemented predictive models to analyze churn, understand customer retention, and refine acquisition strategies,” explains CFO Joe Hill. “Using AI helps us understand who’s happy, why customers leave, and how to respond. It allows us to be forward-looking and not bogged down by manual processes.”

Metro Finance in Australia also says AI is at the center of its finance department’s high performance.

“We have a robot that is dedicated to the finance team,” explains CFO Mark Donovan. “It does a lot of data transformation, and then using that data, it posts journals into our ERP system on a regular basis. It means we can enable our staff to do more value-added activities, such as engaging with people and understanding different drivers across the business.

“AI is doing this mundane, routine sort of tasks that are ripe to be automated by a robot. There’s a lot of efficiency gains we’ve managed to achieve here.”

Elsewhere in the business, Metro Finance implements AI-driven dashboards that help Donovan stay close to what’s happening in real time.

“For example, in our lending business, we have 3 or 4 different product classes, so we can see which ones are performing well,” he explains. “And we can make strategic decisions and changes as a result of that quite quickly, whether that be increasing interest rates or decreasing rates, whatever that might be, at the particular time. It also helps us focus on different customer groups as well, so we can make fairly rapid decisions based on real-time data.”

But AI is not without its limitations

The role of the CFO is expanding significantly, but they still take ultimate responsibility for their organization’s numbers—financial reporting, budgeting, and forecasting are among their top priorities.

Therefore, trusted, accurate data is imperative. But it still remains essential for humans to be in the loop for compliance and quality purposes.

A good example of this is within financial services organizations, where compliance is absolutely essential. “Even a 5% error rate is the end of the world,” says Haversine Funding’s CFO Jeff Whaley. “You just can’t tolerate it.

“AI has 2 real purposes for CFOs. One is to be the data digger that gets to the data more efficiently than data miners and other tools have in the past. And the second is about how AI can help with analytics.”

He adds that human colleagues can provide nuance in their analysis and share if there are elements of it they feel uncertain about and would like to be reviewed. This, he says, is lost with AI to some extent.

“AI is trained to be very decisive. It’s going to appear very confident in its conclusions regardless of the soundness of the data.”

AlphaSense’s CFO Hill agrees that these limitations occur but says his company gets around this risk by building a trusted AI environment.

“When I think about AI, yes, it’s a huge opportunity, but it’s not without challenges,” he says. “Data integrity and quality are hurdles. AI is only as good as the input. What I like about using AI at AlphaSense is that it’s built on a closed, trusted content set. It gives me confidence in the output. It’s grounded in verified data. That trust element is crucial.”

How to make a start at integrating AI into your finance department

There is no doubt that AI has the potential, when managed appropriately, to support and enhance the finance department. Making a start might seem daunting, but Caroline Xu, Sage’s executive vice president, commercial finance, explains that it doesn’t need to be.

“The best advice I have for CFOs is to start small,” she says. “It’s not about the big bang that’s going to change the way finance operates overnight; it’s more about driving that continuous innovation mindset and looking for the incremental improvements that can be made over time.

“A good way to start is by looking at one existing process and assessing it using an impact-versus-effort matrix to see where you can maximize the potential of AI. Then, see what can be done to reduce the manual elements of the process.

“Innovation doesn’t have to be perfectly designed before it gets deployed. Experiment and make bold decisions, and then use the results to help inform how you can refine the automation over time.”

Explore more insights from our research and discover how high-performance finance leaders are accelerating progress here.