Junko Swain, the chief accounting officer of Workiva, knows how to harness the power of technology to transform a company’s finance function.
Swain sat down with CFO Brew at her company’s annual Amplify conference in metro Washington, DC, earlier this month. She offered CFO Brew examples of the tangible benefits that technology can bring to finance teams and shared how she’s leading her team to adopt AI in their processes.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Since joining Workiva as CAO in 2023, how have you helped transform the accounting and finance function?
I was brought in to transform, I would call it digitize, the finance function…When initially I joined the company, we were closing the book around business day eight. I mentioned to the team I really wanted to reduce the cycle, not because of my ego, but nowadays real-time accurate data is a power. When you give accurate financial results to the CEO and CFO, they can quickly pivot; they can change direction. When you don’t have real-time data until business day 10, 15, the data is already stale…Now, the team is closing around business day four.
We continue this journey, and we need to really focus on automation. Being in finance, we’re going to be the last one to receive headcount. If you’re not going to receive headcount, you need to rely on systems a lot more. Two years ago, when I joined Workiva, we talked about RPA—that’s robotic process automation—but now, I can’t think of any day that we don’t mention AI. That’s how much AI became part of day-to-day professional life.
Since you’ve joined Workiva, how has AI technology impacted the team’s workflows?
I have to be honest with you, we’re taking baby steps. Actual adoption of AI itself takes time because it requires such huge change management. Not all employees can keep up the pace that AI is being evolved. One thing I have been doing is to educate employees that there is a lot of training out there that people can take and then learn from it. The other thing I’m encouraging my team to do is to start small. So, don’t think about a big AI project. [Instead, start with] something that you can see a quick win and a quick benefit from using AI in a secured environment.
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An area that my team has seen some quick wins is automation of journal entries. It used to take 10, 15 minutes. But if AI can get it done within a one or two minutes, it’s still a win. We [also] do a lot of benchmarking studies of financial reports or sustainability reports. My team used to pull the report from somewhere in a Google search, but now we can tell AI, “Bring all this company’s data and put it into the table.” Of course, AI is not going to be perfect, but the more that you feed AI, it’s going to be more perfect.
How is Workiva tackling bigger and broader implementation, and incorporating AI where it will be most impactful in the future?
In terms of the finance function, we have a list of so-called process improvements. It sounds like an old word, but technically, a list of process improvements is where manual process is involved, and my team is going through an analysis of: Where can we automate or use a system? What is the best candidate for AI adoption? And what else? We’re going through those analyses, and we are prioritizing as an organization.
I do manage controllership, but tax is under me, [and also] procurement, transformation, and internal audit. So we do have a wide range of functions under me. I want my leadership team members to think like me, that if you’re sitting on the top, how do you prioritize all those areas that we can potentially automate and use AI?