AI has become a top strategic focus for executive teams as they approach the upcoming year, with businesses examining exactly where and how the technology will provide the best benefit.

Just picking a tool out of a lineup of vendors is only the first step, however: From a legal and a finance standpoint, “you need to be able to say, ‘how did you do this and have it be auditable’, which is not always [something] that you can [say with] AI,” said Amie Durr, chief product officer at lease optimization provider Visual Lease.  

When it comes to how finance chiefs are thinking about finding and implementing new AI tools, “they're going to need to be looking for ones that have some good bit of traceability, auditability,” Durr said in an interview.

Finding an AI champion

AI, particularly generative AI, has remained a top priority for business leaders as they finalize their strategies for the upcoming year.

“It’s an interesting time, because it's a technology that's driving decisions which isn't typical,” Durr said.

Durr has served as CPO for the Baltimore, Maryland provider for nearly two years, according to her LinkedIn profile. Prior to Visual Lease, she held top executive and product roles throughout a 10-year career at email optimization company SparkPost.

Ensuring the AI tools coming into the business have that transparency and auditability makes it essential for finance chiefs to have a “close hand” in such discussions, Durr said. Finance chiefs also need to work closely with other key members of the C-suite, such as the technology and IT teams, to ensure they’re creating an effective strategy.

“One of the biggest challenges that we see for customers and in the market is it’s not typical for the office of CFO to be like, ‘hey, talk to me about IT, and talk to me about technology, and what does that really mean, and how do I implement that?’” she said. “And so they’re having to partner with other departments in the organization that maybe they haven't had to in the past.”

Taking a measured, step-by-step approach that includes feedback from the broader business can also help leadership better implement an effective AI strategy. While CEOs, CFOs and other members of the C-suite may be leading the company, executive leaders can’t simply push broad changes from the top down — they need to get buy-in from their employees, Durr said. 

Leaders shouldn’t be focused on “doing things all at once, but really getting buy in from those people who are going to be the ones that are impacted,” Durr said. “We're trying to see if this can help in this specific and discrete area and actually make an impact to that.”

It’s important to identify, “who’s leading this inside of our organization, like who's sort of our AI champion, and the subject matter expert that we're going to make sure is the person we go to whenever we're trying to use it in a new way, or bring in a new tool,” she said.

Making space for AI in finance

CFOs are stepping further into conversations such as technology implementation as they have come to play a greater role in business’s strategic planning over the past few years.

In the face of ongoing economic headwinds, more finance chiefs are also paying close attention to long-term scenario planning, which includes the impact of new technologies: A July survey by McKinsey found scenario planning and long-term resource allocation were top priorities cited by CFOs, for example.

An increasing number of finance chiefs are overseeing areas like legal and business operations, as well as driving the discussion around new technologies, Durr said.

“CFOs are having a much bigger hand in, ‘how do these things work?’” Durr said regarding how finance chiefs are approaching AI and new technology initiatives. “Because at the end of the day, it's all about risk to the business.”

Managing that risk requires a careful balancing act from CFOs, however. This is especially the case when it comes to implementing riskier new technologies inside of their own processes in finance. This is especially the case as “finance is not one of those areas where you can sort of trial things out or allow for risk,” Durr said. While finance chiefs believe GenAI can help create value in the finance function, most of them also admitted they have not yet digitized their processes at scale, McKinsey found.

“Given that the office of finance has to maintain such a strict set of controls, their data has to be as close to perfect as possible. There's almost no other department in an organization that is audited and has the same level of oversight,” she said.