Understanding these three trends will help leaders have more automation
Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) and controllership leaders need to have a plan to better leverage digital acceleration, which is disrupting legacy processes in their functions. The prediction is from Gartner,
world leader in business research and advice.
“We are seeing widespread acceptance among leaders that technology is driving financial processes towards a state of autonomous operation,” said Matthew Mowrey, Analyst and Senior Research Director for the Practice of Finance at Gartner. “Around 80% of CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) we surveyed in 2022 expect to spend more on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the next two years, yet nearly two-thirds of finance leaders think their role will reach an autonomous state only six years from now ”, says the Gartner analyst.
To make autonomous finance a reality, organizations need to go beyond investment priorities and rethink three aspects of their operations. Thus, they should consider: how functions can strengthen semantic models to improve data quality and transparency; how technology can expand the number of teams performing judgment-based activities versus manual labor; and how autonomous finance can improve business performance by lessening the burden of data analysis and decision making.
To help FP&A leaders and controlling boards plan for their futures, Gartner experts have made three predictions for the impact of autonomous technologies through 2028:
1.By 2025, 70% of organizations will use data lineage enabling technologies such as graph analytics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain as critical components of their semantic modeling – FP&A teams create reports and analyzes using data from multiple systems that are often disconnected. End users don't always have clear visibility into these transformations and may end up mistrusting or misusing financial data while making decisions. “When poorly understood data is used and the FP&A team can't explain its treatment, decision makers often turn to intuition,” says Mowrey. According to him, data lineage solutions promise to better explain the treatment of databases and improve their transparency for decision makers.
The analyst points out that an increasingly regulated data environment alongside a growing volume of information and demands for decision support are driving organizations to seek more ambitious solutions to their problems. FP&A teams tend to perceive this as an IT initiative because they are tied into the corporate data and analytics architecture. However, these teams have the right skills and resources to drive this process across the organization.
2.By 2027, 90% of both descriptive (“what happened”) and diagnostic (“how or why it happened”) analytics in finance will be fully automated – Gartner has identified that there is a recent trend for vendors of analytics and business intelligence tools to Businesses (A&BI) have acquired other data science and machine learning vendors, indicating a desire to leverage these capabilities to automate the generation of descriptive and diagnostic information. “Today's A&BI platforms are shifting the emphasis from the analyst as a consumer to the decision maker as a consumer,” says Mowrey.
According to him, although the descriptive insights and diagnostics of business intelligence and analytics (A&BI), automated or augmented, can minimize the barrier of analytical skills, decision makers must still understand them to act appropriately. Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) leaders must help establish ongoing and evolving data literacy programs for all employees, including senior executives, to remain relevant and competitive.
3.By 2028, 50% of organizations will have replaced time-consuming, bottom-up forecasting approaches with Artificial Intelligence (AI) resulting in autonomous operations, demands and other types of planning – Decision making supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just emerging as a practical, off-the-shelf innovation and is expected to mature over the next five years. “Although it is available in many financial planning applications, it is not used widely, but we expect this to change significantly in the coming years,” says the analyst.
Gartner recommends that organizations test solutions in places where current approaches to decision management inspire this need in decision-makers, so that users are more comfortable with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the decision-making process. In this way, greater comfort with the performance of the resource will lead to wide acceptance and will drive the company to adopt it.
