•According to PwC partner on experience centre and emerging technology Femi Osinubi, the Chief Financial Officers' (CFOs) future will move from doing among other tasks transactions processing to focus on insights and actions.
•Companies are also expected to predict how the business would look like probably In the next six months, with the disruption enabled through the integration of advanced technologies AI, mixed reality, blockchain and the cloud.
Finance executives adopt to technological changes arising from artificial intelligence to drive their organisation's performance, according to senior PricewaterhouseCoopers executive
He said new they should ride on technology to evolve from traditional tasks like balance sheet management to strategic leader.
According to PwC partner on experience centre and emerging technology Femi Osinubi, the Chief Financial Officers' (CFOs) future will move from doing among other tasks transactions processing to focus on insights and actions.
He said many financial leaders will now be tasked with balancing the traditional job requirements of accurate and timely financial reporting with setting the strategic technology direction of the company and driving corporate performance through the use of technology.
Osinubi said this has been driven by the explosion of big data and analytics that has created a huge pool of previously unavailable resources which business leaders will use to make decisions to grow business.
“Technology will take over things that are autonomous. About 65 per cent of the finance function will be on insights and action that need to leverage on data scientists, Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmers, machines doing a lot of processing, providing commentaries, dashboard that is needed and responding to queries for business faster than before,” Osinubi said.
“So there won't be need to prepare the reports as that would be self-service. Every function in the organisation that needs report from finance will get that real-time because you provided the platforms.”
Osinubi was speaking during a CFO- targeted roundtable meeting by Microsoft in partnership with Harvard Business Review.
He said finance executives are in a position to help their companies attain profitability, growth and productivity by addressing technology as a business priority.
But even on the adoption, accessibility of big data still pose a darker side for companies in terms of security and capability of systems.
“Like with all industries that exist today, challenges are inevitable and constantly present bottlenecks for full potential output," Microsoft Finance Lead for Enterprise Business for Geoffrey Mathare said.
Mathare said any company that will be quick to adopt this has a higher advantage at a time when traditional goals of finding new sources of revenue and reducing costs remain constant.
However, he maintains that the change calls for skills upscale rather than letting human resources go.