While businesses have rapidly adopted new technologies to improve their customer-facing products and services, back-of-house functions — such as finance — have lagged behind the digitization curve.  

However, with finance teams under growing pressure to deliver more strategic insights faster, today’s finance chiefs are taking a second look at how they can bring new technologies such as artificial intelligence into spaces like their order-to-cash processes.

With finance asked to improve its efficiency, optimize their processes and improve key metrics such as sales outstanding and customer defaults, CFOs recognize “they're not going to get there by telling people to work harder or throwing more people at it,” Sunil Rajasekar, CEO of accounting software provider Billtrust, said in an interview. “They recognize with the pressures of today, they have to digitize.”

Accelerating finance transformation  

Digital transformation has crept up the priority list for executives in recent years as they confront outdated, costly solutions — businesses’ O2C processes, for example, can be a complicated mix of old and new solutions, sucking both money and time from companies. The O2C process comprises the whole of a businesses’ ordering process, beginning with a customer order and spanning all the way through to accounts receivable, according to a report by IBM.

In a recent survey conducted by market intelligence firm IDC and commissioned by Billtrust, 83% of respondents said digital transformation of their order-to-cash processes is critical for their businesses to survive. CFOs were more likely than others to highlight a need for transformation, with 43% strongly agreeing O2C innovation was critical compared to 34% of overall respondents, the study of 617 IT, business and project executives found.

As CFOs grapple with a shortage of skilled finance talent and other headwinds, GenAI can represent a key opportunity for innovation inside the O2C and other processes that are reliant on outdated tools. Using GenAI, CFOs can better and more transparently aggregate key data like which customers are paying on time, improving efficiency, Rajasekar said.

Rajasekar has served as the Lawrenceville, New Jersey-based Billtrust’s CEO since December 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before joining the AR automation provider, his past experience includes tenures at Mindbody, eBay and Lithium Technologies.

“Given the pressures that (finance leaders have) been getting… I would say adopting AI and GenAI is going to happen faster this time around, as opposed to some of the other technologies and their adoption in finance earlier,” he said of finance’s present approach to digital transformation. In fact, CFOs are more optimistic about GenAI’s potential, with 44% agreeing GenAI digital assistants such as ChatGPT will make their job easier, compared to 35% on average, according to the Billtrust survey.

Answering the cost question

Even as optimism about AI’s potential grows, finance chiefs are still keeping their eye on the money. Sixty-eight percent of respondents pointed to costs as a worry when it comes to updating their order-to-cash process, Billtrust found.

This comes as businesses are still navigating a murky economic environment. Though recent months have seen signs of some pressures easing such as inflation falling to a three-year low last month and the Federal Reserve’s half-point rate cut Wednesday, ongoing headwinds are still prompting companies to carefully consider where and on what they spend.

This is only putting more pressure on finance leaders. A majority of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that the economic downturn has elevated the finance chief’s importance in their organization, according to the Billtrust survey.

Ongoing economic pressures are “translating into an environment where companies are watching their cash flow a lot more closely,” Rajasekar said. “They're watching credit defaults a lot more closely. They're watching their expenses a lot more closely, and that does put a lot more focus on the CFO and the financing, because they are expected to help the company navigate these waters.”

As CFOs become strategic advisers, they are taking more responsibility when it comes to the organizations’ investment decisions — leading the discussions surrounding where the company should be spending and where it should be pulling back, Rajasekar said.

The potential of GenAI has caused many finance leaders to place the technology into the “spend” column, however, with adoption of the technology increasing among CFOs, CFO Dive previously reported. Bringing AI into the finance function can also accelerate its evolution into a strategic leader for businesses, Rajasekar said.

“You can uplevel all of finance's focus to where finance doesn't have to be the back office team, where all they're doing is making sure the numbers tie up and the emails are getting sent,” he said. “Now they can be a business partner.”