In IDC’s Workday Multi-Industry Study, professional services leaders ranked the top way they are using or considering using AI and ML:
41.4% selected “recommendations,” such as resource management, customer payment matching, smart defaulting of expense items.
28.9% selected “automation,” such as receipt scanning for expenses, time tracking, auto-skip approvals, self-reconciling accounts.
28.5% selected “anomaly detection,” such as journal entries, expense reports, plans, outlier reporting.
This shows a real interest in the various use cases of AI and ML, with only 1.2% saying they are not considering these options.
In a nutshell, the future of work will be less of a slog. Organizations can use AI and ML to elevate human capabilities and improve the way we work everywhere by making finance and human resources (HR) more intelligent. But for AI and ML to really deliver on the possibilities it offers, it must betrustworthyand take a human-centered approach that augments employees not displaces them.
“I don’t believe AI will ever disintermediate the need for smart humans, but the kind of work we do will evolve over time,” saysVanessa Kanu, CFO at TELUS International. ”Anything that requires a higher level of complex thinking, relationship-building, spending time with investors and key stakeholders, or how you manage your board, all of those skills are not going to go away because of automation.”
According toour recent global surveyof 1,000 HR, finance, and IT decision-makers, 84% of professional services leaders are feeling the pressure to increase adoption—the highest of all industries surveyed—but many don’t know how to best utilize the technologies.
“It should be a tool, in essence, that helps us work differently, provide insights differently, and free up capacity to partner with our business teams differently,” saysKatie Rooney, CFO at Alight Solutions. “Change is hard, especially in finance, but once you help people see the value of how they can do their work differently, it resonates. For me, it’s helped by just honestly getting started and showing what it can be.”
Now let’s look at practical ways professional services leaders can leverage AI and ML.
Financial Management: Role of AI in Accounting
AI and ML can help finance leaders in professional services to intelligently automate, guide users through tasks, and predict outcomes. The good news is that leading finance organizations are already using AI and ML capabilities embedded in the core ofour platform.
A big need foraccounting teams是减少错误的数字或不准确的刺ough anomaly detection, which is challenging with the sheer amount of data, invoices, and reports they manage. One way to address this by using ML is journal insights. It helps surface erroneous journal lines to controllers—dramatically reducing the time and overhead spent by finance teams to close the books.
Journal insights uses ML to detect anomalies in accounting entries by comparing them to other entries for similar transactions. Because these are flagged in real time, people can correct potential reconciliation issues. This enables accounting teams to spend more time on analysis and tackle more strategic initiatives.
According toKanuthis automationhelps employees“by making them more efficient and enabling them to focus on more engaging, meaningful work.”
“For me, this is a personal mission because automation is key to unlocking the value from our team members,” she said. “People want to make a difference.”
Another opportunity is supplier invoice automation. ML can deliver intelligent automation in the accounts payable workflow with smart autocomplete and can upload and scan invoices in bulk, identify urgency, and prioritize for processing. It can also intelligently route invoices with potential issues to workers who have shown aptitude at resolving similar questions.
Supplier invoice automation leverages rules-based work queues and header-level scanning to direct invoices to the right person, and it can also handle invoices that come in via robotic process automation (RPA) or any other means.
WilsonHCG Chief Financial OfficerKen Bowlessays: “Workday allows us to implement more automation as we move into other countries and work with very different clients. For example, in billing, we often use monthly fixed fees, which are almost like a subscription plan, and variable invoicing. With Workday, we can automate our billing schedules so we can be more efficient and still address individual client requirements.”