CFOs and their fellow executives have had lots of thoughts about how AI has and is continuing to impact their roles. For this edition of the CFO Peer Audit Series, we asked CFOs:
Have you or the company provided any type of formal guidance around AI to your employees, and are you using these types of tools in your day-to-day now?
Here’s what finance leaders had to say.
Mandy Fields, CFO, e.l.f Beauty (global cosmetics supplier)
We have some AI incorporated, but I wouldn’t say it’s new AI. On the finance side of things, our accounts payable and optical character recognition technology has existed for some time. We automate some of our vendor onboarding, but I have not replaced the finance department with AI by any means. I think we are a significant way away from doing anything like that.
I am always challenging my teams to find efficiency and ways to use technology, so we can spend more time doing analysis and things that move the needle versus things that are just manual processes. Overall, I would say a wholesale adoption of AI is still a long way out in finance.
Jeffrey Klimkowski, co-founder, CFO, DUDE Products
We’ve been encouraging folks to use ChatGPT and other AI tools to the extent they need it — we’re embracing it.
We are not at the level yet where we can incorporate into our marketing campaigns with things like creating images and pictures and stuff, but we are definitely encouraging our people to explore how it can help us.
Mike Zielinski, CFO of Official League; minor league baseball teams the Lake County Captains and the Portland Pickles; 1845 management
There is no sort of formal guidance per se, but one thing I’ve learned, and I’m a dinosaur as my kids would say, is that I love it. It’s amazing how these new tools can aid the thought process and help improve what you’re trying to say. But, I also think the confirmation of accuracy is super important when it comes to this stuff.
I think AI has been around longer in finance and accounting than most people think. I’ve had AI in my accounting and finance tools for years now, and I remember going to one vendor’s CFO conference every year and they were talking about the impact of AI six or seven or seven years ago.
I’ve said that when it comes to AI, it’s like the old Ronald Reagan saying: “Trust but verify.”
Alan Miller, president of Official League and marketing agency COLLiDE. Owner of the Portland Pickles, the Lake County Captains and Cleburne Railroaders
I love it. I often will take analysis from the businesses and run it through ChatGPT myself to see how we could do better and to get a different perspective or wording on things.
I think that the more we can optimize, the more we can spend our time doing things that are more important.
Nathan Carter, CFO, Fireworks Over America (mid-large size fireworks distributor)
We haven’t touched on that much internally. There hasn’t been a lot of adoption or even talk about it within the office. I don’t believe it’s something we have a lot of exposure to.
Our ERP system has a lot of different AI options within it, which are useful to us. But things like giving away important information to the company on ChatGPT aren’t a concern for us at this point.
I haven’t gotten into ChatGPT myself. We run Office 365, so I’ve toyed around with co-pilot a bit when I needed help with something like a copy edit. But overall, like I said, it’s not a concern for us right now.
Jasmine DiLucci, owner, DiLucci CPA Firm (accounting, tax services provider)
We’ve seen a lot of benefits on the operational administrative side with these types of tools. I encourage AI use in things like email communication for instance. That stuff has been great for us, especially when we have a lot of things going on and it allows us to save time for little things like that.
The way I see it is that AI will take out people who aren’t good in the market, and it has created an initiative to figure out new ways in which people can add value. I hope that AI will one day be able to enhance my firm to the point where it’s easier to run, I can hire fewer employees with more output, that sort of thing.
But, there’s always a value in communication in our business, working with clients, and you need someone to filter information to make sure it all applies to our clients. So I don’t think people should live in fear of technology, but I do believe it should inspire them to find different ways to provide value.
