Finance leaders expect to see the biggest impact of generative AI in forecast and budget variance explanations, according to a new Gartner survey.

Gartner surveyed 100 finance professionals in November to identify the top anticipated use cases for GenAI in finance. Roughly two-thirds (66%) of respondents put forecast and budget variance explanation in their top three, and for 26%, it was their first choice.

Respondents’ top choice “reflects the availability of embedded GenAI interfaces within business intelligence tools,” Clement Christensen, senior director analyst of research in Gartner’s finance practice, said in a news release. “This enables users to perform natural language queries to quickly assess known common causes of variance.”

Other popular use cases for GenAI in finance include:

• Classifying revenue/spend data: 44% of respondents put it in their top three, and 10% made it their first choice
• Drafting management reports (34%, 7%)
• Creating financial/regulatory reporting drafts (30%, 7%)
• Reviewing contracts and documents (29%, 13%)

Finance leaders also identified expected challenges around GenAI. According to Gartner, respondents “expect to contend with issues around talent, data accuracy and governance, technical compatibility, budgeting, and change management.” They’re slightly more worried about data accuracy and talent limitations, Gartner found.

Experts agree that organizations need buy-in from employees in order to succeed with their AI implementation, CFO Brew recently reported.

To read more, click here.—AZ

With so many new modern-day considerations and requirements, it’s no surprise that the retirement landscape endures constant shifts as a result.

Stay up to date on these changes and learn how they might impact you and your employees with this report from Marsh McLennan Agency. It lays out the key factors impacting how people save, invest, and plan for retirement. You’ll get insights on:

• generative AI’s transformative potential in finance
• the impact of inflation on retirement savings
• the blurred lines between wealth management and retirement planning
• fraud and cybersecurity challenges (ft. AI again)

Get the insights and analysis you need to make informed decisions about the financial future—for you and your team.

Download the report.

Daren Campbell, tax technology and transformation leader at EY Americas, has been into cars his whole life. But it wasn’t until a couple years ago that he kicked his passion into high gear when he started driving on a race track.

Campbell recently talked shop with CFO Brew about driving on the surprisingly (to us, anyway) data-driven nature of racing and its similarities to his role in finance.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Do you see any similarities between the work you do in finance and your hobby?

The opportunity we have right now is data is much more readily available. We have tools now that allow us to analyze that data in much more efficient ways than we ever have done before. So, we can now make much better decisions; we can make data-based decisions. And then we can measure the impact of those decisions. If we’re looking at a company—at their finance and tax function—and we’re looking at how they’re organized and how they’re performing, we’re able to actually get some of the data together to be able to make recommendations.

The same thing relates on track. There’s some [times] as I drive around that I’m thinking, “I have a feeling there’s a particular corner of the track that, if I improve on that corner, I can cut a second or two off my lap time.” And then when I get back and I look at the data, and I start lining things up between different laps, then I see that there’s a different corner altogether.

Click here to continue reading.—AZ

Coworking is a weekly segment where we talk to CFOs and other leaders in the finance space about their experiences, their companies, and the larger economy. Let us know if you are—or you know—a CFO we should interview.

Dimitri Syrkin-Nikolau is not a typical CFO. In college, he studied history and biology, not business. And alongside his role as co-founder and CFO of design cooperative Ruca, which is mainly staffed by freelancers, he is founder and owner of Chicago-area pizza chain Dimo’s Pizza. He spoke with CFO Brew about motivating two very different groups of employees, and about Ruca’s approach to investing.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Ruca has declined external funding. Can you tell me more about that decision?

I think what it comes down to is: Why do you exist? [That’s not] a knock on anybody else for a direction that they might have taken. But for us…when you take on external funding, you now have another stakeholder whose interest is generally not aligned…We could grow much faster…[but then] we’d have to be focused on ensuring that we’re going to make a return, and our objective is not to do that. Our objective is to deploy our capital to create and to build.

For more, click here.—CV