Companies are experimenting everywhere with artificial intelligence tools, but painting with a wide AI brush won’t grant businesses the kind of competitive advantage they want. Instead, companies need to be sure they’re putting AI to use in the right areas, which requires careful, open communication between key parts of the company such as finance and information technology, said Pam McIntrye, senior vice president and corporate controller for financial software provider OneStream.

“The more that we implement systems and AI, the closer IT and finance — and to be frank, the closer IT and the rest of the organization’s operations need to be tied,” McIntyre said in an interview together with Mark Angle, OneStream’s chief cloud operations officer.

Cracking open the data black box  

OneStream is no stranger to AI — founded in 2012, the company provides corporate performance management solutions and has steadily leveraged the technology across its offerings as it takes steps to establish its place in the fast-growing CPM industry. The company, funded by private equity firms including  KKR, D1 Capital Partners, and IGSB, has continued to report strong growth, noting a 21% increase in customers year-over-year to reach 1,400 for its most recent quarter, according to a January press release.

The rapid advancement of tools like generative AI has advanced IT and finance’s collaboration in new ways; when McIntyre joined the Birmingham, Michigan-based company four years ago, the two areas were still relatively siloed, she said.

That’s changed as finance has taken on a more strategic role inside of the business, which requires them to have a clear line of sight across the organization — to drive strategy, finance needs to be able to unveil the “source of truth” for the data they’re receiving, she said.

Successfully leveraging AI, for example, means finance needs “the right controls, auditability,” in place in order to fully understand where the information is originating from, McIntrye said. “We’ve invested a ton of time with IT to understand those things.”

On IT’s end, having that clear data architecture in place can help to free up the time that both the technology and finance teams need to act as strategic leaders, Angle said.

“The more that you can provide automation and [don’t need to] have people manually doing things, the more you're going to be able to get back to business,” he said.

Hitting the right collaboration balance

The breakneck evolution of generative AI and similar technologies has shone a bright spotlight not only on data’s flow but its quality, security and trustworthiness, only increasing the need for IT and finance to ensure they’re working on the same strategic page. McIntrye has a team dedicated to working with Angle’s team to track key customer data, for example. The two also have dedicated times set aside to touch base, along with other key executives, to ensure everyone is kept up to date about the status of current projects.

“If we're working on a project that is related to how we use AI internally, we can understand the structure, the security, the people and really have the auditability of all of the transactions and know who needs to be involved at what point in time,” McIntrye said.

That can help leaders prepare for a future where AI is steadily more integrated into routine, previously manual processes; while GenAI comes with a bevy of its own security and accuracy challenges, there could be a situation a decade or so from now “where it actually helps, ironically,” Angle said.

“If you think about the numbers for finance, they're only as good as the input,” he said. “And somebody ultimately is inputting or gathering those numbers into the system...there's a potential there for an AI to check those numbers as they're coming in and say, are we sure that that's the right number, or let me verify these three different systems to make sure that we've got the right numbers here.”

It's important, therefore, for businesses to evaluate their strategic goals both from a financial and a technology standpoint, especially as the two departments knit closer —  college graduates filtering both into technology and finance will need to be able to know how to utilize AI tools, Angle said.

Both technology and finance should also still retain their own seat at the table. Angle said. Though companies may have historically had technology reporting in to finance, if a new entity ran under that model, “I would really question what their priority with technology is,” he said.

“I think if you put technology under the office of finance, you limit their ability to have that seat at the table, and to drive the potential efficiencies or competitive advantages within the rest of the operations within a company,” Angle said.