Two years. That’s how long one group of CFOs predicts it will take for their artificial intelligence bets to pay off.
In a survey of 400 finance chiefs conducted in September, consulting firm RGP reported that just about half of respondents (54%) expect to see “significant positive” return on an investment from their AI spending in 24 months. At present, according to the survey, only 10% of respondents said they’re seeing such a ROI. RGP’s survey went to finance chiefs working at businesses based in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific with revenue of $250 million or greater.
“The 24-month AI promise is now on the record, and boards will hold CFOs to it,” RGP officials wrote in the report. “The organizations getting returns have the integration capability, governance, and change capacity to absorb AI. CFOs should test AI business cases against execution capacity as rigorously as against financial return.”
It’s not exactly clear by what specific measures AI’s ROI will improve over the next two years. “It didn’t come out in the quantitative data,” said RGP Chief Strategy and Experience Officer Jennifer Jones in a Monday interview. But she added that respondents expressed a “very positive outlook, not just on AI, but generally.” And indeed, the survey showed that 89% of respondents felt positively about their own organizations’ financial outlook over the next year.
Greg Derderian, CFO advisory leader at RGP, maintained that firms are seeing both “hard and soft dollar” savings from their use of artificial intelligence. He pointed to changes in one client’s vendor contracting as an example. Previously, the client submitted vendor contracts to an outside counsel for review, but by pairing artificial intelligence with an internal contract management system, the company was able to clear some contracts without paying for an external counsel’s help.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, RGP’s survey detected notable variation in AI expectations and outcomes based on sector and revenue. For instance, among finance chiefs working at firms with annual revenue below $1 billion, just 1% reported “significant AI ROI.” But for those working at firms with revenue of $5 billion or higher, 17% said they’re seeing “significant” returns from their investment in the tech.
Meanwhile, 84% of finance chiefs working at tech firms reported positive ROI on AI, according to the survey.
Whether every employee will ultimately be on board with new forms of automation remains to be seen, too. Jones noted that many organizations tend to underestimate the human side of change management. “Change management and adoption is the No. 1 point where initiatives stall,” said Jones, pointing to RGP’s own survey data.
And who’s responsible for sweeping workforce transformations still isn’t yet clear, either. Though CFOs have long said their own remit is expanding, they’re hardly ever steering through major initiatives alone. RGP’s survey found that 13% of CFO respondents said their organizations “run major initiatives through enterprise-wide governance with a single point of accountability.”
