We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. The revenue and margin leaks that services businesses never see coming tend to hit their financials the hardest. When there are gaps in customer success coverage combined with little visibility and control of services revenue, leaks can grow. Turbulent economic conditions make the leaks grow faster, giving customers a reason to question if they're getting the value they expect. Sure signs a customer success organization is experiencing revenue leaks include not knowing the costs of upsells, cross-sells, not having a financially based view of every customer engagement, growing churn rates and more.

Bottom Line: Using AI to measure and predict revenue, costs, and margin across all Professional Services (PS) channels leads to greater accuracy in predicting payment risks, project overruns, and service forecasts, reducing revenue leakage in the process. Professional Services' Revenue Challenges Are Complex Turning time into revenue and profits is one of the greatest challenges of running a Professional Services (PS) business. What makes it such a challenge is incomplete time tracking data and how quickly revenue leaks spring up, drain margins, and continue unnoticed for months. Examples of revenue leaks across a customers' life cycles include the following: Adding up all these examples and many more can easily add up to 20-30% of actual lost solution and services margin. Selling projects and the promise of their outcomes in the future create a unique series of challenges for PS organizations when it comes to controlling revenue leakage.

AI and machine learning are breaking down silos that hold Financial Services firms back from ... [ ] delivering more valuable insights to customers. AI and machine learning are reordering the Financial Services landscape, navigating an entire industry back to its customers. Fintech is forecast to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25% through 2022, reaching a market value of $309B. The broader financial services market expected to reach $26.5T by 2022, achieving a 6% CAGR. AI and machine learning are the catalysts that every organization in Financial Services is either adopting or evaluating to break down silos, automate processes and remove barriers between themselves and their customers.

If you were at Dreamforce 2017 last month, you know AI and analytics took center stage. It's hard to disagree that Salesforce's announcement of myEinstein was the biggest news of the week. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff set the theme in his keynote--"Intelligence as the fourth industrial revolution"--that carried through the rest of the event. In his "Blaze New Trails with AI" keynote, John Ball (SVP Product & GM Einstein, Salesforce) declared that Einstein makes 475 million predictions per day, giving me confidence that FinancialForce had made the right decision to go all-in on Einstein. Ball's concluding comment that "anyone of you could do the Einstein keynote next year."

While business intelligence (BI) is useful for looking at past trends, where it gets really interesting is when it becomes possible to accurately extrapolate the future. That's one of the big selling points for adding artificial intelligence (AI) to BI -- the ability to apply the brute power of machine learning to predictive analytics. With the help of Salesforce Einstein, cloud ERP vendor FinancialForce is now doing exactly that to help it manage churn, improve collections and pick out its best sales prospects. The SaaS vendor is currently refining these applications of the technology for its own internal use, but plans to productize the results to offer to customers during 2018. We've been pretty impressed with the technology.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 07, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FinancialForce, the number one customer-centric ERP cloud vendor built on the Salesforce Platform, today announced it has experienced resounding success as a result of being all in on Salesforce Einstein. Since this revolutionary, integrated set of AI technologies was debuted by Salesforce at Dreamforce 2016, FinancialForce has successfully mastered its capabilities to not only run its company on the bleeding edge of Einstein, but also bring world-class analytics and predictive capabilities to its customers. The company is currently running its internal operations on an app it created, entitled Pulse. A product of Einstein Discovery technology, Pulse quickly and easily tracks massive amounts of FinancialForce data -- everything from customer support cases, usage metrics, opportunities, survey data, financial data, communities, sales invoices, transactional data and more. Leveraging Einstein Discovery across the collected data, FinancialForce is able to unearth critical insights that help deliver specific and specialized service to customers.

Companies are facing a digital imperative to revamp business operations to better serve customers. To accommodate these shifts, CIOs are making sweeping organizational changes, adding new key roles, setting up innovation labs and tapping modern technologies to meet strategic mandates issued by their CEOs and boards. Social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) forms the primary digital fuel for most IT organizations. But CIOs who are eager to stay atop trends are also testing artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things and blockchain. Collectively, such technologies have the potential to help companies transform their business processes.

FinancialForce's latest high profile hire, Fred Studer, says the more time they can give back to customers, the better. Studer is the first chief marketing officer (CMO) of cloud ERP vendor FinancialForce, joining long-time friend and mentor Tod Nielsen who was recently appointed chief executive. AccountingWEB caught up with Studer, a former Oracle, Microsoft and NetSuite executive, to find out more about his accounting roots and his future vision for FinancialForce. Studer exudes enthusiasm and marketing flair, declaring at one point in our interview his quest to "bring sexy back to accounting", but he remains rooted in accounting and helping transform and evolve finance. Studer said he was drawn to the FinancialForce role in part due to his background studying finance and accounting, and then working as a managerial accountant rising up to assistant controller.