Experts share how orgs can successfully implement new technologies

Finance experts at CFO Brew’s recent live event, Next-Gen Finance: Future-Proofing Your Business Operations, had lots to say about smartly investing in technology to supercharge organizations.

But the big takeaway for CFOs was this: Successful implementation is easier said than done, and requires a thoughtful approach.

Chris Ortega, CEO and a fractional CFO of Fresh FP&A, warned finance leaders to not fall for the “shiny” new piece of technology that promises to solve all an organization’s challenges. Rather, companies should do their due diligence first, build a solid foundation consisting of the right people, processes, and partnerships to ensure the technology they adopt is fully integrated.

“This is always where I’ve seen successful technology adoption: when it’s integrated in the decision-making of the business,” he said.

Companies should identify any barriers to implementing new technologies, Adriana Carpenter, CFO of Emburse, advised.

“Typically, it is data related and operations related,” she said. “So I’m making sure that I’m partnering…with executives across the business to really understand, where is our data, what’s our governance like around that data, and how do we get access to it?”

AI takeover? Speakers reassured the audience that AI would not be replacing finance roles en masse…at least not immediately.

“You can almost think of AI as part of the team,” Jack McCullough, president of the CFO Leadership Council, said. “But no, it’s not going to replace the human element, at least in the near term…If you’re talking in the next few years, I sort of don’t see it.”

By taking on the more menial finance work, AI will enable CFOs to focus on more strategic tasks, Eric Mason, CFO of the city of Quincy, MA, said.

“We want to push more of our roles to the strategic side—that’s where our value is,” he said. “Our value is not in hitting ‘average’ on an Excel spreadsheet. It’s about what you do with that average number.”

However, experts’ stances appeared malleable. When audience members challenged them, they admitted there’s a chance they could be wrong.

In fact, Ankur Agrawal, partner at McKinsey, opined that finance is “the profession of the future.”

“You cannot make any decision in any organization without having a factual, rational, data-driven approach,” he said. “And imagine the power of that with generative AI, and if you combine your intellectual curiosity of asking the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’ it is boundless. So, I think finance is the future.”