AI can increase efficiency by automating manual, FTE-heavy finance processes such as the order-to-cash cycle. It can also help optimize data profiling, remediation, and integration. Cleaner data, greater accuracy, and more opportunities for efficiencies, which can lead to improvements in days sales outstanding, working capital, and margins. AI can uncover discrete patterns in complex structured and unstructured data, giving finance managers new insights that can support more meaningful analyses while increasing forecasting and financial planning speed and accuracy. By automating customer-facing finance processes such as invoicing, AI can enhance the customer experience, improving customer relationships and brand perception. AI mimics human intelligence to automate activities that nonintelligent technologies cannot, which can free more finance professionals to focus on value-driving activities.

We've come a long way in finance and accounting. From purely manual bookkeeping carried out in large, dusty, paper ledgers, through to Excel-based solutions and advanced accounting systems, we've been plunged into the exciting world of intelligent automation – powered by the "golden triangle" of robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and smart analytics. Representing a complete game-changer in improving finance processes, particularly promising under the umbrella of AI, is the concept of machine learning (ML). ML algorithms enable a specific task to be performed without it being explicitly programmed but rather through learning by example. The solution is based on statistical models created from sample data provided to the algorithm.

Discussion around the impact of intelligent automation often centers on what it means for consumers, or its implications for the workplace and the changing nature of jobs. But what does it mean in practice for finance professionals? As the CFO of an S&P 500 company with more than three decades of finance and business experience, I find that the aspect of robotics and artificial intelligence that has most surprised me is the extent to which we have come to implement these technologies in corporate finance. Digital transformation to this degree is something that has been talked about for years. Now, however, seeing the impact on the individual, day-to-day functions of my team makes transformation seem much more real.

Following a number of years during which robotic process automation (RPA) was something only a relatively small number of companies had yet dabbled in, notable progress is now evident, a new report suggests. In a survey of 500 senior finance executives in North America and Europe by technology and outsourcing consulting firm Capgemini, 41% said their organization has an enterprise-wide automation strategy in place. Finance is leading the way -- something that the report acknowledges may be counterintuitive for IT professionals. "After all, back-office functions are not often the first to benefit from investment in advanced digital technologies," the report states. "But the era of intelligent automation provides a way to change that."

In recent years, public cloud SaaS changed the way packaged applications are delivered, implemented and used, leading to a new generation of solutions and vendors in areas such as human capital management (HCM), procurement and financial management. But although various cloud-based financial management applications are now available in the market, they haven't fundamentally changed the way finance processes work. There is also little functional differentiation between these applications. All this is set to change as artificial intelligence (AI) is introduced into financial management applications. "By 2020, embedded AI will become a key differentiating factor in finance systems evaluations, and vendors with this capability will be able to highlight greater functional advantages," says Nigel Rayner, vice president at Gartner.

From loan officers to data analysts to financial advisers and the automation of the back end finance processes, automation is making an impact on the finance industry with greater advancements to come in the next decade. For an industry that is based on processing information, it is of little surprise that the finance industry faces a huge threat from automation. According to research by Oxford academics released in late 2013, they suggested that the financial industry had more jobs, approximately 54 percent, at high risk compared to any other skilled industry. Automation of jobs is happening right now and as machine learning progresses, more and more higher-paying jobs, like the medical industry, which we previously thought immune, are starting to be altered. This market snapshot will look at what impact automation is having on the finance industry, with a particular focus on the back-end finance processes after a Q&A session with Steve Palomino, Director of Finance Transformation at Redwood Software.