Spend management innovation yields equity value

Generative artificial intelligence has spread throughout the U.S. workplace and across a broad range of professions since its debut less than two years ago, with 28% of workers now using the technology on the job, according to a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Twenty-four percent of workers use generative AI at least once each week and one out of every nine turn to it daily, researchers said in what they call the first survey gauging the extent of the technology’s use in the U.S. workplace and home.

“Generative AI adoption is most common in management, business and computer occupations, with usage rates exceeding 40%,” according to the researchers, including an economic policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “Still, one in five ‘blue collar’ workers and one in five workers without a college degree use generative AI regularly on the job as well.”

Measuring gains in U.S. productivity from generative AI has so far proven challenging. The researchers make what they call a “highly speculative” estimate that the technology assists from 0.5% to 3.5% of total work hours, suggesting that it may boost productivity between 0.125 percentage point to 0.875 percentage point.

Gauging the productivity boost is difficult in part because the technology has mushroomed so rapidly since the release of Chat GPT in November 2022.

After two years, generative AI has achieved a 39.5% adoption rate, nearly double the 20% rate for the internet after two years and 20% for personal computers after three years, the researchers said in the NBER report.

By March 2024 the technology’s most common “tools had been accessed more than 3 billion times by hundreds of millions of users each month,” the researchers said, citing a prior study.

Among 10 tasks raised by the researchers, AI is considered most helpful in writing, interpreting and administrative support. Yet all the tasks — including coding and interpreting and summarizing text or data — hit usage rates of at least 25%, they said.

“My view is that AI, and generative AI in particular, is likely to become a general-purpose technology — one that spreads throughout the economy, sparks downstream innovation and continues to improve over time,” Fed Governor Lisa Cook said in a speech Monday.

“As firms deploy these technologies and workers discover ways to make use of them, such developments can create the conditions for greater productivity and thus higher wage growth consistent with stable prices,” she said.

Flagging a potential for gender inequality, the researchers said men are 9 percentage points more likely to use generative AI at work and 7 percentage points more likely to use it at home.

“In contrast, PC adoption at work was more common for women, possibly because of the transition between typewriters and word processors and the high female share of secretaries and other administrative occupations,” the researchers said.

Enterprise software company Workday is rolling out a new virtual assistant for finance and human resource workflows as it seeks to offer users a “reimagined artificial intelligence-powered experience,” according to a recent announcement.

The new tool, known as Workday Assistant, is part of the company’s broader “Illuminate” framework for transforming corporate finance and HR functions, Terrance Wampler, group general manager for the office of the CFO at Workday, said in an interview.

“We think it’s game changing,” Wampler said.

The new virtual assistant is designed to help users complete complex finance and HR processes by addressing their questions using “natural-language” responses and in real-time, according to a Sept. 17 press release.

“It could be an employee trying to do an expense report, or someone working on a supplier invoice,” Wampler said. The tool is “very similar” in concept to popular AI companions like Microsoft’s Copilot, he said.

Workday Assistant is currently being used by early-adopter customers and will be generally available in early 2025, the release said.

Wampler said the company’s pricing strategy for the tool will depend on how much value that it’s providing to the customer.

“We’re not so much charging for the AI component” itself, he said. “What we’re charging for is the capabilities that it delivers. If we fully transform a business process, there’s likely going to be an additional” cost.

The announcement comes as enterprises are seeing an explosion of AI-enabled software tools targeted at a wide range of business functions, including the office of the CFO.

Microsoft has made it a top priority to layer AI across its many offerings. Last year, the software giant announced that it was incorporating a new set of generative AI capabilities into its enterprise resource planning platform known as Dynamics 365. Early this year, it unveiled Copilot for Finance, a virtual assistant for finance teams, after introducing similar AI companions for professionals in sales and customers service.

“By infusing AI across every layer of our tech stack, we are winning new customers and helping drive new benefits and productivity gains,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during a January earnings call.

Workday announced its new virtual assistant and other AI offerings last month during its annual Workday Rising conference for customers and partners.

The AI push is about “more than just doing things faster,” Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach said during a keynote speech for the event, which was held in Las Vegas, Nevada. “It’s about doing things completely different. Imagine Workday Illuminate and our new AI solutions completely and autonomously adapting, learning and changing your business process.”

He said the effort is intended to “assist and augment humans, not to replace them.”

Besides Workday Assistant, the company also introduced four new “AI agents,” including a tool known as Optimize, which is designed to streamline business processes by identifying “bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and deviations from best practices.” For example, Optimize can automatically flag and fix issues in the employee onboarding process, the company said in a separate release.

The AI agents that were unveiled “are the first of many to come from Workday as the company seeks to radically simplify business processes for end users and elevate humans at work,” the release said.

Workday made its debut on the Fortune 500 list this year, allowing it to rank among the largest U.S. companies by revenue. It generated a total of $2.1 billion in revenue during the second quarter, an increase of 16.7% compared with the year-earlier period.

When it comes to B2B accounts payable and accounts receivable processes, AR is often viewed as the laggard in the finance automation race. 

“It’s sad to say but I’ve been in this industry for almost 30 years and almost 40% of collections that our suppliers who are customers have to manage are still in paper form,” Alberto Casas, head of product for U.S. Bank Global Treasury Management, said in a recent interview. 

Along with the slow shift away from paper checks in business-to-business payments, vendors also have little control over the technologies and processes that their buyers use to pay invoices. They are largely dependent on their buyers’ level of sophistication and tech structure, which creates a very different and more challenging proposition than payments, he said. On the payments side, businesses are effectively in control, deciding who to pay, how to pay, and when to pay, Casas said.  

But in a new partnership with Billtrust, the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based bank is looking to help businesses, largely vendors, speed the AR process through automation and digitization. It is positioning the new platform as a way for CFOs and treasurers to improve their working capital positions by accelerating the collections process. 

“The difference between that paper process which could take 60 days to collect and the digital process which could take 40 days, on a $20 million order, is significant,” Casas said.

U.S. Bank is now rolling out an end-to-end accounts receivable platform called Advanced Receivables that aims to modernize and automate invoicing, payments, cash applications and collections. After first launching a pilot program to a “handful” of companies earlier this year, the bank is targeting B2B suppliers in such industries as tech, transportation and home building, he said.      

Through the partnership, the bank is looking to leverage the experience and offerings of Billtrust, a B2B AR automation and integrated payments provider. The New Jersey-based company already has connections to over 200 AP platforms that U.S. Bank’s new platform can tap into, he said. 

“Money doesn’t always travel with information and there’s a complex reconciliation required,” Casas said, noting that Billtrust warehouses data and can automatically apply the funds in the supplier’s AR systems. “No matter what format the information comes in, whether it’s an email, fax or paper invoice, we’re able to simplify that and reduce the friction and manual intervention that is required.”   

The new system follows several years after the bank offered AP Optimizer, which allowed companies to automate invoice receipts and payment disbursements, and the bank also previously offered some AR services. The offerings won’t automatically be provided to commercial customers who use its digital portal SinglePoint and customers will be charged fees for the service. 

And if the bank gets an RFP for collection services, it will seize on the opportunity and bid on the entire process, he said. “We’re the financial institution, we have the bank account, we see all the funds coming into the account,” Casas said. “You put those two pieces together and you’ve got a powerful proposition.”

Israeli tech startup Monto, which is focused on easing companies’ shift to digital business-to-business payments, has raised $9 million in seed funding, the company said Tuesday.

The startup, which also announced the opening of a U.S. office in New York, provides an artificial intelligence-enabled platform designed to resolve pain points experienced by vendors as they manage more and more digital payments from customers and are forced in many cases to work with various types of accounts payable portals, according to a press release.

“In this new B2B world, suppliers must integrate with each customer's payment software, each with its own complex logins and workflows, creating endless chaos for payment collection teams that can severely impact cash flow and working capital,” the release said.

The total value of global B2B payments will grow 40% by 2028, from $89 trillion in 2024, driven in large part by increased digital payments adoption, which is expected to enable cheaper and more secure cross-border trade, Juniper Research reported in February.

Digital payments are becoming more the norm, while traditional payment methods such as checks are becoming less common, according to a 2022 report by the Association for Financial Professionals.

“With the increasing shift towards digital payments, organizations are facing some headwinds,” the report said. “Those barriers are varied but included among them are customer and supplier acceptance of digital transactions, scarcity of IT resources and a lack of integration between systems.”

The trend is forcing many vendors to work with dozens, and in some cases hundreds, of different payment portals, each one with a different set of requirements, according to Maya Cohen, Monto’s CEO and co-founder.

“This can be frustrating, because you have multiple payment portals that you have to manage in order to collect revenues,” Cohen said in an interview.

Monto’s platform allows vendors to “seamlessly” get paid through any customer AP portal, according to the Tuesday release. In addition, AI capabilities incorporated into the platform enable it to learn each customer’s invoicing requirements “to ensure a seamless payment flow for the supplier to significantly reduce manual workload, mitigate the risk of late payments and improve cash flow management,” the release said.

The startup, which was founded in 2021, has already helped suppliers get paid close to $1 billion through thousands of “smart” connections to different buyers in more than 300 portals, according to the announcement.

The company said it will use its funding to support its U.S. expansion and beef up its technology. The founding round was led by Foster City, California-based venture capital firm Scale Venture Partners.

When it comes to adopting new technologies, Auditoria.AI CEO Rohit Gupta wouldn’t expect the finance professionals to be the type to be first in line when Apple releases a new phone. 

“By definition, they’re paid to be a little more conservative, careful and thoughtful in terms of how they view new technology,” Gupta told CFO Dive in an April 16 interview. “They’re fast followers as opposed to being on the leading edge — that’s generally sales and marketing.” 

Gupta has had a chance to get to know finance teams’ likes and dislikes. In 2019 he founded his Santa Clara, California-based finops platform that enables finance teams to automate many tasks and processes in accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger and vendor management. 

Last month the company announced two new updates to its ERP-centric automation platform that it touts as an AI application for the office of the CFO: a domain-specific small language model update, advanced human-in-the-loop technologies, and other options for large language model usage. Altogether, they’re designed to automate some of the routine tasks that the finance team’s back office functions wrestle with. 

For example, if a company hears from one of its thousands of suppliers that it has not received a payment, resolving the problem without automation can be time consuming, he said. 

Normally, before answering, someone in accounts payable needs to validate that it is a legitimate supplier, identify the invoices and their status, and whether they have been entered or approved and determine where the process stands in the business system, he said.

“On the basis of the data they receive, it might take one to three days before AP might get back to the supplier with this information,” he said. 

With Auditoria.AI software, the system is trained in natural language concepts of accounting and procurement, enabling them to read and send emails, open attachments, find the data the supplier was looking for on the payment information and compose a response. “So now the supplier is getting almost instantaneous feedback,” he said. 

With the human-in-the-loop technology, the company seeks to meet their clients where they are in terms of the AI and tech readiness. Gupta understands the concerns of the finance professionals about AI, noting that they can’t allow inaccurate or false data to go back to the customer.

Customers choosing the human-in-the loop option use the AI to do all the tasks, but the communication does not go out the door without being checked by a human at the company. 

“We almost kind of look at it as the stepping stone to full autonomous…once they gain confidence and the trust that the AI is performing according to expectations then they will essentially turn on the full autonomous,” he said. 

Gupta isn’t alone in noticing the cautiousness on the part of CFOs toward AI. According to a recent survey by Big Four accounting firm Deloitte, many companies are playing it safe when it comes to AI spending as they wrestle with a host of risks and challenges associated with GenAI and weigh potential investments, CFO Dive previously reported. 

Regulators, investors and company leaders are increasingly demanding more from finance departments, leaving controllers scrambling to find creative ways to staff their teams. 

These new reporting and data asks require skilled accountants at a time when accounting and finance talent are hard to come by, Brenna Albert, global controller at medical supply company Medline, and Gregg D’Eon, corporate controller at the fantasy sports betting company DraftKings, said on a panel hosted by the Controllers Council last week.

Both conceded their industries — medical devices and gaming — are highly regulated already, but they’ve observed that these pressures seem to be increasing with time. 

New regulatory demands have been “the biggest challenge I’ve seen over the last few years,” D’Eon said. It represents “an entire workstream” in order to “make sure regulators understand us and our technology and they get some comfort over the information and reporting.” 

Albert, meanwhile, noted that rising expectations from regulators comes alongside increased scrutiny from auditors, as they themselves are facing increased pressure to “do more digging into our compliance side, outside financial regulation.” She added that the shortage of talent only “creates more challenges” with the heightened requirements faced by both companies and their auditors. 

The central nature of the role of the controller, who typically oversee their company’s daily accounting operations, is generally reflected in their pay, with the position ranking among the most well-paid on finance teams, CFO Dive previously reported. They earn average salaries around $210,750, according to data from human resource consulting firm Robert Half. 

More data, more often

Controllers are also facing demand for more frequent reporting and forecasting periods. What used to be a monthly process just a few years ago has become something weekly or even daily; for example, D’Eon said his company now has weekly reports and enters new data into the general ledger daily. 

“We have a line of sight into how revenue is tracking, how our players are acting, where we’re tracking for that period — in addition to the typical month-end close, which is always a challenge in and of itself. But [reporting and forecasting] has been much more continuous from what I’ve seen,” he said. 

It’s not just those inside the company who want frequent updates. Medline recently became private-equity sponsored, which Albert said has “certainly changed our requirements for reporting and forecasting” after many years of focusing more on growing the business and serving its customers. As a medical device company, she attributed this changed environment at least partially to the pandemic. 

Yet while the demand for finance talent is rising, the supply of finance professionals has been shrinking for years. The panelists attributed this to a combination of the 150-hour CPA licensure rule which effectively requires a fifth year of college, negative perceptions of the accounting profession, and lower pay relative to fields like finance or technology. While they said a lot of work is being done to address these issues, until it’s solved they're relying on a combination of outsourcing and technology. 

Both said they use a shared-service model that works with accountants in India to fill key gaps, and view these professionals as vital parts of their team who perform not just routine accounting tasks but complex jobs like data analysis or external reporting alongside those in the U.S. 

“With the shortage of CPAs and the labor dynamics in the field… it can be tougher for us to recruit folks, say, in the suburbs so for a variety of reasons our team [in India] is an extremely critical part of the organization,” said Albert. 

They’ve also used technology to automate many routine processes, such as accounts payable and receivable. While traditional AI is a major component of this upgrade, neither were diving into generative AI beyond things like drafting memos or job postings. D’Eon noted that, as accountants, “we need to make sure the numbers are right” but generative AI so far struggles with this. Still, in the long term, he said knowing how to use AI will be a vital skill for controllers. 

“In a few years there will be a big division of people who know how to use AI and leverage it effectively and people who don’t, and you want to be in that first bucket for sure,” he said.

Today’s finance chiefs are making strategic decisions and driving digital transformation, but to execute their changing roles successfully, they need to be supported by an equally resilient, adaptive team.

New technologies, ways of working and shifting business needs are impacting the day-to-day roles not just of the CFO, but of other crucial financial executives as “at the highest level, the entire finance organization is [undergoing] a seismic shift in ways that they haven't seen ever,” said Sanjay Sehgal, advisory head of markets for Big Four accounting firm KPMG.

Taking a look at the evolving new responsibilities that controllers — as well as other staff in finance departments  — must embrace will be crucial for finance chiefs who must build modern finance teams capable of tackling the upcoming challenges of 2024.

Trusted advisor

The controller “is really becoming and has become the trusted advisor to the CFO,” Sehgal said in an interview.

As with many jobs, the role can vary depending on the company. But generally controllers oversee their company’s daily accounting operations, along with payroll and the accounts payable and receivable departments, according to human resource consulting firm Robert Half. It can also entail preparing internal and external records, handling the firm’s general ledger and taxes as well as reconciling accounts, coordinating audits and managing budgets. 

Already, the importance of the controller position is reflected in compensation trends: the role ranks among the most well-paid members of the finance team, with corporate controllers in the 75th percentile — meaning they take home salaries greater than three-quarter of financial professionals — in compensation earning annual average salaries around $210,750, according to data from human resource consulting firm Robert Half.

Central to the role too is the responsibility controllers take for their company’s close activities, ensuring the business is “producing information in a controlled fashion, to report to the street and to the Securities and Exchange Commission for a public company,” said Kevin McBride, corporate controller and chief accounting officer for software-as-a-service company ServiceNow.

In his capacity as controller for the Santa Clara, California-based SaaS company, McBride oversees global payroll, accounts payable, travel, collections, and credit, he said in an interview. The role of controller and chief accounting officer can also have some overlap, but don’t need to be combined; a CAO can be another name for a principal accounting officer as required under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, for example, McBride said. A CAO typically focuses on more broad corporate governance, therefore, while a controller’s focus is more narrowly on processes such as the close and ensuring financial statements are compliant with GAAP.

Controllership is “really getting to the numbers and the descriptors and the story behind financial performance and ensuring that process is well-controlled,” McBride said. Joining ServiceNow in November 2021, he previously logged a 21-year tenure at tech giant Intel, where he served in a variety of key financial roles including as its vice president of finance and corporate controller as well as its global accounting and financial services controller. He also spent time at the Financial Accounting Standards Board as an industry fellow before joining Intel.

Opening a path to the touchless close

In recent years, however, controllers have also found themselves branching out from a pure numbers function as part of the ongoing “seismic shift” taking place in the whole of finance — driven partly by the advent of generative AI, machine learning, cloud technologies and other digital tools which have captivated the attention of finance leaders in recent months, Sehgal said.

New technologies such as GenAI could fundamentally change how controllers operate and the purpose of the role — for example, “I can see a future where we have a touchless close process,” Sehgal said.

This would mean the entire financial close process would no longer need routine manual intervention by such people as the controller, according to a 2022 report by Gartner which noted 55% of finance executives were targeting a touchless close by 2025.

Finance teams could inch closer to making such a process a reality in 2024 as companies continue to experiment with the applications of generative AI, something that could rapidly shift where today’s controllers are directing their time and focus.

The new technologies that have filtered into accounting over the past few decades have enabled their own improvements in quality, efficiency and cost, McBride said, allowing business leaders to get the information they need to run the business at a lower cost. When it comes to the controllership, “it also gives us capacity to invest in other ways to help drive business impact,” he said.

However, it’s also important to remember that technology is “nothing new in accounting,” McBride — who started his career working on paper spreadsheets — said and that in “each one of these technology introductions, there's the hype and then there's the reality,” he said. Generative AI and the promise it brings remains in its early stages, he said.

As automation seeps into finance, technology opens up more time by removing routine tasks, in turn enabling the controller and the CFO to deepen their relationship. “With the CFO, we're spending more time talking about strategic matters and how to best position not just the controllership but finance,” McBride said.

The evolution of the relationship comes as CFOs are likewise pivoting to a role more focused on driving strategy and controllers are finding themselves responsible for processes that may previously have been under the remit of the finance chief.

“As the CFO elevates himself or herself, I think the controller plays a bigger role in the organization,” Sehgal said.

Finance chiefs are serving more and more often as the “right hand” of the CEO and spending less time poring over day-to-day numbers, said Claire Bramley, CFO of San Diego, California-based AI cloud analytics and data platform Teradata. The controller and the CFO work closely together to drive an effective, innovative and forward-looking finance function, but that focus on day-to-day operations is what separates the two positions, Bramley said in an interview.

As a finance chief, “you need to make sure that you've got the processes in place, you understand what's going on,” she said. However, the finance chief is now spending more time figuring out how to drive things forward at the company, she said.

Adding free cash flow forecasts 

Bramley pointed to something like free cash flow as an example: because she’s now spending more time conducting strategy transformation work on part of Teradata, she’s now relying on her controller to take on free cash flow management forecasting, she said.

Controllers, critically, still serve as “the owners of the financial data, from a protocols perspective, from a reporting perspective, and the CFO and the executive teams depend on that,” Sehgal said. Indeed, taking responsibility for the numbers is still the core of the controller’s role, McBride agreed.

However, controllers are not immune to the job creep plaguing the financial function amid a lack of qualified accounting talent, emerging technologies and new business needs. As the CFO’s role evolves into a more strategic position, the rest of finance could potentially be pulled along in their wake.  

“It's very easy for a controller to be kind of put off to one side … and not be pulled into, I'll say some of the business and strategic decisions,” Bramley said. “But if you decide as a controller that you want to be more involved in that, I think many companies give you the opportunity to build your business acumen, to build your business relationships and to be able to be an important part of managing the business.”

For example, the controller today has a huge opportunity to take point on digital transformation at a business — the controller organization tends to be the biggest team in the finance function, “so if they can drive [digital transformation], and they can be leading edge, then the rest of finance can adopt that moving forward,” Bramley said.

This can also provide a pathway to controllers to the CFO seat — Bramley spent two years serving as the global controller for HP, where she logged a 14-year tenure before making the jump to Teradata.

“The modern-day controller who is involved in strategic decision making, who is helping add business value, who is having an impact from a technology standpoint, I think, is an obvious candidate for a CFO,” she said.