19 FINANCEOUTLOOKINDIANOVEMBER, 2025What measures you take to evaluate the ROI of finance automation?Evaluating the ROI of finance automation requires treating it not as a simple cost-saving exercise but as a strategic investment in core data assets and a force multiplier for resilience. We employ a layered approach that ties investment directly to quantifiable business outcomes, efficiency gains in an accelerated timeframe, and critical risk mitigation. The foundation begins with hard ROI and Time-to-Value (TTV), focusing on rapid operational throughput through metrics like close acceleration--enabling clients to achieve up to 40% faster financial close--and compliance cost reduction of 30-50% in monitoring expenses, while prioritizing FinOps principles to optimize cloud data spend, a critical lever in a GenAI-intensive P&L.The second layer measures strategic value creation by quantifying the percentage of time senior finance analysts now spend on activities like pricing model development, market analysis, and M&A due diligence rather than routine reporting, tracking the diminishing variance between AI-driven forecasts and actual results for better capital allocation, and ensuring R&D expenditure and IP creation costs are precisely tracked to provide auditable support for higher asset valuation arguments.The third and highest strategic layer addresses risk and governance value, measuring financial returns from preventing fraud, waste, and error through Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) services that consistently deliver 3-5x ROI within the first year, utilizing platforms like konaAI to flag anomalous and high-risk transactions--having already tagged hundreds of millions in risky payments across 20+ Fortune 500 customers and processed over $1.6 trillion in transactions--while assigning quantifiable quality scores to key data sources to mitigate the exponentially magnified risk of "Garbage In, Flawed Strategy Out" when feeding sophisticated AI models.In what specific ways has GenAI improved the accuracy or timeliness of your rolling forecasts and budgeting cycles?GenAI has revolutionized our rolling forecasts by introducing probabilistic accuracy and real-time responsiveness through agentic systems, moving us beyond static modeling into three specific areas of improvement. First, continuous, dynamic Smart Forecasting powered by machine learning allows our finance organization to dynamically predict and adjust needs in real-time through our Investment Agent, which connects both structured (ERP) and unstructured data (emails, PDFs) to provide a complete, auditable financial picture based on operational reality rather than past trends alone, with this AI-native architecture ensuring continuous monitoring that allows organizations to close books up to 40% faster.Second, accuracy is significantly enhanced through granular demand sensing and market context, where we ingest volumes of unstructured data--including sentiment from customer support logs, product usage telemetry, and sales pipeline transcripts--and translate them into quantified business signals, with GenAI assigning weighted propensity to each revenue line item to predict churn risk or service expansion potential based on real-time qualitative signals that dynamically adjust the rolling forecast within the cycle. Third, the speed and volume of GenAI enable accelerated scenario modeling and compliance, allowing our FP&A team to generate dozens of plausible simulations--such as the impact of significant shifts in GPU compute costs versus strategic increases in global service adoption--in minutes, enabling executive leadership to stress-test the budget and proactively define trigger points for capital redeployment while the AI-native architecture enables automatic tracking of department budget compliance with daily financial summaries that flag any deviation requiring management attention.What role does GenAI play in dynamic financial modeling or capital allocation?As Group CFO overseeing two distinct entities--a commercial GenAI Services/Platforms business and an AI-led Global Capability Center (GCC) enablement service--GenAI provides continuous, risk-adjusted optimization that transforms capital allocation from a periodic, discrete event into an autonomous, proactive process. We approach this through two distinct perspectives that ensure balanced investment strategy. For our clients--large global enterprises--GenAI enables highly complex, dynamic modeling through our platform leveraging Agentic AI systems that act as "intelligent entities" which perceive, reason, plan, and take action, supporting autonomous execution of financial workflows we design for customer GCCs while running robust, complex scenarios with thousands of daily Monte Carlo simulations that project the full range of possible
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