Is it too early to talk about artificial intelligence in 2024?
Not according to Ernst & Young, which hosted an early October roundtable on what 20 Fortune 250 chief financial officers expect to see with big-ticket corporate issues going into the new year.
AI was near the top of the list during the discussion, as “all CFOs” included in the roundtable are using generative AI at their companies and are doing so in ways other C-level executives may not have expected.
At the roundtable, the panel discussed ways that “processes and systems” must be “reinvented” to maximize the full potential of GenAI.
Noting the Internet had existed “long before it had easy-to-use consumer-facing uses,” the EY panel pointed out that AI and machine learning “are not new concepts.”
Karim Lakhani, professor at Harvard Business School and chair of The Data, Digital, and Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard, said most large companies have AI “in their plumbing” at some point in the past 20 years.
GenAI is a game-changer in that the technology goes way beyond what CFOs believed AI could produce in the day-to-day operations of their companies. “It’s transformational, Lakhani said. “(AI operates) through a simple interface that greatly reduces the learning curve” for new users.
“My perspective is that the bigger barrier right now on adoption is that very smart people use it as a search tool instead of as a thinking tool,” he noted “The worry I have with this tool is that we’ll all do chatbots and be happy with it, instead of thinking about them transformatively.”
From Experimentation to Implementation
The most common uses include leveraging GenAI for fraud detection, preparing for investor meetings, evaluating analyst sentiment, and generally improving journeys.
Each roundtable executive noted GenAI was up and running at their companies in some form, “either with early experimentation or full implementation of capabilities.”
“We started experimenting on mega-cases with productivity and revenue improvements,” one CFO told the roundtable. “We’re trying to get our arms around how the supposed benefits are not arriving as quickly as anticipated.”
What CFOs can’t do is expected to deploy a “plug and play” approach with GenAI implementations. Instead, Dan Diasio, EY Global AI consulting leader views proper artificial intelligence deployments in a different way.
“One of our clients makes fashion accessories, and they have new releases every quarter,” Diasio stated. “The original ask was: how do you develop a system for a designer to ask for designs? It was a querying tool.”
Instead, after discussions, EY helped the company develop a system “that mines social media data to understand influencers and what’s trending, compared against the 34 characteristics of what this company produced,” Diasio added. “Then it enabled 3-D modeling and A/B testing. That’s a continuous process rather than every quarter.”
In many ways, EY and the 20 CFOs included in the roundtable are having a shared AI experience, with everyone learning something new – and sharing that knowledge – along the way.
“Our clients are trying to figure out how to jump on the AI bandwagon and streamline their operations at the front or back end – and we’re doing the same,” said Julie Boland, EY US chair and managing partner.
Brian O’Connell, a former Wall Street bond trader and best-selling author, is a prominent figure in the finance industry. With a substantial background as an ex-Wall Street trader, he has authored two best-selling books: ‘The 401k Millionaire’ and ‘CNBC’s Creating Wealth’, demonstrating his profound knowledge of finance and investing.
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