At the end of 2024, we surveyed our CFO Advisory Board, a community of 50 CFOs at companies ranging from growth-stage startups to publicly traded businesses, to understand how they are thinking about generative AI.

We weren't surprised to see broad interest in leveraging generative AI to accelerate finance workflows – in our team's conversations with this group throughout the year, this excitement has been evident. 79% of CFOs surveyed indicate that their AI budget will increase in 2025. 94% indicate that generative AI can strongly benefit at least one activity area within the finance organization in the next 12 months. 63% indicate that it can strongly benefit three or more finance organization activities this year.

Is your company planning to increase, decrease or maintain AI investment in 2025?

However, adoption lags interest. 71% of CFOs surveyed are not currently using generative AI in their finance and accounting function. Many CFOs indicate that they are actively researching and evaluating tools for activities they consider worth automating. Others note that, despite interest and budget, they have been held back from adopting AI because they have not yet been able to find solutions that meet their needs. Early adopters are experimenting with AI for a variety of activities including procurement, FP&A and expense management.

How much did you spend on gen AI tools and features in 2024? (left)

Are you currently using AI in your finance and accounting functions? (right)

Where are you currently using gen AI in the office of the CFO?

Where CFOs have adopted generative AI, they have often reached for tools from their existing vendors, rather than adopting net-new, AI-native solutions. Some CFOs also mention deriving value from generalist foundational models, rather than purpose-built solutions. For instance, survey respondents mention using AI features from existing vendors such as Microsoft, Ramp, Pigment, Zip and Snowflake, and indicate that their teams use ChatGPT for activities including expense management, contract review, procurement, A/P automation and FP&A.

As adoption progresses, CFOs aim to bring on AI tools for a broad range of activities, from repetitive operational processes to high-level planning. They view AI as particularly valuable for either strategic, analytical activities that involve numerous, disparate inputs (e.g., FP&A, forecasting), or document-intensive workflows (e.g., procurement, expense management).

Which office of the CFO activities can benefit the most from gen AI in the next 12 months?

CFOs who adopted gen AI tools in 2024 have seen initial ROI primarily in terms of efficiency gains:

• “We're still in the early stages, but we've already seen several impactful wins across our team. The biggest area has been reducing the time it takes to complete our AP workflows. We created a custom workflow that automates vendor identification to quickly prepare journal entries. This process used to take 20 hours during month-end close, and now, it takes us just 2 hours each month.“ - Andrea Ellis, CFO of Fanatics Betting & Gaming
• “Across the board, [the biggest benefit] has been the ability to increase speed of analysis. Gen AI hasn’t replaced anything, but it has made our existing processes and people better.” - Jason Whiting, CFO of Mercury Financial

As they continue their adoption journeys, CFOs are most excited to apply the technology to long-standing pain points that prior generations of technology have been unable to solve. Cosmin Pitigoi, CFO of Flywire, notes that, “Forecasting trends based on large data sets has been around for a long time, but the issue has always been the model’s ability to explain the assumptions behind the forecast. AI can help not just with forecasting, but also with explaining what assumptions have changed over time.” Seun Sodipo, CFO of Glossier, sees an intriguing potential unlock in inventory planning: “Inventory planning at the SKU level is traditionally a manual, time-intensive process, relying on historical data and thousands of touchpoints in Excel,” said Seun. “Gen AI offers a powerful opportunity to greatly streamline this undertaking, analyzing vast and often nuanced datasets to factor in inputs such as promotions, new product launches and market and channel dynamics – enabling smarter, more predictive and adaptive inventory decisions.”

To wrap up the survey, we asked CFOs where they are looking for an AI-powered solution, but have not found one yet. The answers here largely align with the areas where CFOs see most value for gen AI, including FP&A, forecasting & planning, compliance, accounts payable and procure-to-pay. Many CFOs double-clicked on these high-level categories, mentioning that they would find value in automation for discrete activities such as:

• “Taking operational inputs from our financial plan and running something like a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate financial outcomes.”
• “Doing variance analysis similar to what an FPA analyst does, and providing results and commentary.”
• “[Generating] flux verbiage for key metrics and P&L / BS line items for quarterly close.”
• “Looking at underlying metrics in our business to help inform our forecasting and provide more dynamic real time forecasting, [leveraging] data on usage of our product.”
• “[Performing] multivariate retail store and ecommerce performance analysis, incorporating things like data on weather, store labor and marketing activity and comparing against business outputs.”

Our View from Just Outside the Office of the CFO

We share our CFO's belief that generative AI can revolutionize Office of the CFO operations. Generative AI is highly effective at analyzing large or disparate datasets, identifying patterns and relationships within data and accelerating repetitive or iterative tasks. These characteristics make it an apt technology both for operational finance workflows, where gen AI can support fast, high-fidelity data review, aggregation and reconciliation, and strategic finance workflows, where gen AI can supercharge data analysis, pattern recognition, forecasting and scenario analysis.

We're excited about the emerging players we see building solutions to the pain points that are top of mind for our CFO Advisory Board.

Numeric expedites month-end close with its intelligent close checklist, automated reconciliation, AI-powered flux analysis and AI accounting assistant. Aleph allows teams to query financial data in natural language and generate intelligent predictions, automating basic modeling and saving teams time on answering stakeholder questions. Tabs automates the entire contract-to-cash process by unifying data across systems and leveraging AI to ingest contracts, create invoice schedules and run revenue recognition. Klarity streamlines revenue accounting by reviewing sales contracts, extracting key data, surfacing data disparities between sources and automating related reporting.

Omnea’s AI features accelerate procurement by extracting data from vendor documents to streamline intake, intelligently analyzing vendor risk and identifying opportunities for spend reduction. Baselayer and Duna expedite and improve business verification and onboarding, leveraging AI to more quickly and accurately assess risk and identify fraud signals. In the realm of compliance, Fonoa applies AI to transaction data to automate tax ID verification, tax calculation, and invoice creation, while Numeral automates sales tax compliance for SaaS and ecommerce businesses specifically.

Tools like Doss, Everest, Quanta and Rillet seek to revolutionize the CFO stack from its core, replacing legacy systems with next gen, AI-native ERPs that unify data across activities to create a real-time financial source of truth and enable end-to-end automation. As the role of CFOs continues to broaden, tools like Thatch enable strategic CFOs to create benefits programs that better satisfy employee needs without blowing employer budgets.

AI is equally applicable to external finance operations – Basis automates data entry, data review and error checking for accounting firms, while Black Ore accelerates tax preparation and review processes for CPAs. Even highly-regulated industries like insurance, where finance operations are particularly nuanced, stand to benefit from this wave of tools, as vertical-specific players like Comulate and Ascend are emerging to harness AI to automate accounting workflows for carriers.

If 2024 was the year of initial experimentation for AI in the Office of the CFO, we expect to see early majority adoption begin in 2025, with new tools emerging to meet CFOs’ appetite for automation. If you're building an AI tool to address our CFOs' pain points, we'd love to connect.