AI Poised to Transform Accounting

The finance department isn't always regarded as being at the forefront of digital business transformation. But as artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to mature, one of the biggest drivers of AI adoption when it comes to accounting will be the fiduciary responsibilities of the chief financial officer (CFO). Accountants spend a lot of time laboriously matching invoices with other various statements of work to determine whether a payment should be made in, for example, 30, 60 or 90 days. Given the fact that these activities are largely an exercise in pattern recognition, it's only a matter of time before tasks such as these are more efficiently accomplished by machine learning algorithms capable of visually inspecting documents and determining what actions need to be taken based on rules defined by the CFO. In fact, SAP is already predicting that the days when organizations hire large numbers of accountants just to process documents are near an end.