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The Promise of AI in Finance

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This is a blog post from our partner Workday, explaining how CFOs can help bridge the AI trust gap.

Potential enterprise uses of artificial intelligence and generative AI have garnered plenty of attention in recent months. AI is the next business game-changer, but if employees don’t trust what it can do and how it’s being implemented, your transformation efforts will stall. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the human side of the equation—and Workday CFO Zane Rowe sees an opportunity for finance leaders to bridge that AI trust gap.

“If you think about the opportunity that AI presents to everybody, it’s quite significant—and there’s a lot of excitement at the corporate level and at the leadership level,” he said in an interview at the 2024 World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “But what the research highlighted, and maybe not unexpectedly, is a gap between leaders and corporate sponsors versus the average individual at a company.”

Rowe cited the Workday 2024 global study “Closing the AI Trust Gap.” Commissioned by Workday and conducted by FT Longitude, the survey of 1,375 business leaders and 4,000 employees across the globe found that:

  • 62% of business leaders (C-suite or their direct reports) welcome AI, and 52% of employees expressed the same sentiment
  • 23% of employees lack confidence that their organization puts employee interests above its own when implementing AI
  • 70% of business leaders agree AI should be developed in a way that allows for human review and intervention

For Rowe, the study’s findings present an opportunity for organizations to improve their relationship with employees.

“It warrants companies really understanding what that opportunity is for them, but then doing a good job and explaining that to the workforce,” he said.

The role of a CFO has always centered on data and numbers, as well as how that data is compiled and used to produce forecasts and financial reports, Rowe said. Technology, he added, holds the promise of greater efficiency and productivity, as well as value creation.

“What AI can do is enable us to do so much of that in far better ways and to think about: How do we grow that business?” Rowe said.

The promise of AI in finance requires leaders to imagine new ways of utilizing data to generate growth. It also means CFOs will need to build partnerships on the road to becoming finance futurists.

Rowe added that building trust is a critical component of that goal.

“As a CFO, how do we build credibility?” Rowe asked. “How do we think about transparency, and how do we communicate internally and externally—[about] the ways we’re utilizing that data in a transformative way?

“It’s really a time for company CFOs, in particular, to embed trust with that data so everyone at the company can understand how it’s being used and how important that is.”

Noting that Workday has clearly laid out its approach to responsible AI, Rowe touted the trust engendered with customers as a result of the company’s transparent approach. 

That trust component is an all-important part of driving AI adoption and doing so successfully.

“There’s no doubt that there’s a lot you can do, but it really comes down to the fundamentals of data platforms,” Rowe said. “And if you don’t watch that trust gap, if you can’t have the average employee and the average leader really understand how things are being used, it’ll be challenging. It’s an endeavor that we all have to put at the forefront and think about what to do to help scale AI.”

This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

The Role of Generative AI in Forecasting

The Future of FP&A: Intelligent Forecasting

CFOs on AI, Partnerships and Skills

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The Role of Generative AI in Forecasting

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This is a blog post from our partner, Workday, highlighting findings on Generative AI from a Deloitte CFO Signals quarterly survey.

In the world of finance, Generative AI has entered the chat.

In a recent CFO Signals, Deloitte focused part of its survey on Gen AI and found that “a sizeable proportion of CFOs’ organizations (42%) are experimenting with it, while 15% are incorporating it into their business strategy.”

Nearly one-quarter (24%) of respondents said they’re “reading and talking about it,” while another 17% opined “it’s too soon to tell.”

Generative AI—the technology that can take vast amounts of data and use it to create new content—has captured the attention of a wide variety of industries. 

And it’s no surprise, considering the potential impact of the technology. Last year, McKinsey & Company estimated the global economic benefits of Generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 to $4.4 trillion a year across 63 use cases it analyzed. As a point of comparison, the report noted that the United Kingdom’s 2021 GDP was $3.1 trillion. 

A Cautious Approach Toward Gen AI

Reflecting a cautious, analytical approach as a whole, the survey’s 115 respondents expressed a few common concerns around Gen AI and the potential benefits of AI in finance.

Finance leaders’ top three concerns were around the technology: “impact to risk and internal controls” (57%), “data infrastructure and technology needs” (52%), and “investment needs (technology and capabilities)” at 51%.

The findings reflect the need for responsible AI on a wide scale to establish trust, minimize risk, and drive greater business performance.

What AI Can Do for the Finance Function

While a significant proportion of CFOs are considering the risks of an increasingly technology-enhanced future, the potential benefits of Generative AI are also dawning on them.

Almost half of finance leaders (49%) named planning, forecasting, and analysis as the top potential uses of Generative AI, far outpacing the automation of routine or transactional processes (26%) and increased efficiency (20%).

Meanwhile, CFOs identified the top three benefits they hope to achieve if their organization were to adopt Gen AI:

  • Reduce costs (52%)
  • Improve customer/client experience (50%)
  • Increase margins, efficiencies, and/or productivity (45%)

Other potential benefits include developing new capabilities, products, or services; creating scale and/or capacity; and improving the accuracy of forecasting, modeling, and scenario planning.

What’s Needed to Incorporate Gen AI in Finance

Lending weight to the idea that intelligent finance demands a human-centered approach to AI, a majority of CFOs (63%) said talent resources and capabilities present the biggest barrier to adopting and deploying Gen AI within their organizations.

Finance leaders further said that the single most important factor in helping them make decisions related to using Gen AI are use cases (39%). CFOs also mentioned wanting to understand the ROI of gen AI, as well understanding of risks and limitations along with best practices from peers within their industry.

While widespread adoption of AI in finance hasn’t yet happened, it’s clear that it’s on the radar of many CFOs in the forefront.

“Do they have the necessary data, technology, and talent to implement GenAI?” Deloitte wrote in its report. “The survey results suggest no―not yet anyway. But for now, CFOs appear to be curious about the upsides and downsides of GenAI, and what opportunities, as well as challenges, the technology might bring.” 

Read the full CFO Signals 3Q 2023 report at Deloitte.


This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

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CFOs on AI, Partnerships and Skills

Workday’s Global CFO AI Indicator Report

The Mandate for Business Agility

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The Future of FP&A: Intelligent Forecasting

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday. It provides insights on how Generative AI will impact FP&A activities.

Digital transformation and data go hand in hand. Most executives get this: today, the vast majority view data as a critical asset to be tapped, and new AI capabilities have made this data more beneficial than ever, says Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.

But here’s the catch, Schrage asserts: Most executives can’t name the five most valuable data assets within their organization, or their firm’s return on data (ROD). That’s a problem, he says, because if a business isn’t paying close attention to the strategic value of its data, making the right AI investments will be much harder. And as the age of generative AI and machine learning (ML) takes off, the potential ROI on those investments for CFOs and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams is massive. Achieving those returns requires merging and marrying your most valuable data with AI.

The ways AI can power a paradigm shift in forecasting and metrics are coming into focus, Schrage says. Trained on customized data sets, large language models (LLMs) can turn KPIs into intelligent mechanisms that help create new value, instead of just tracking and protecting value. And with ML supporting FP&A activities, forecasting can become a source of dynamic insights to support operations and workforce planning—far more than just an accurate financial picture of the future. KPIs become tools for better key performance insights and key performance investments.

In other words, “The generative revolution changes everything,” Schrage says.

Future-Ready Metrics

With data now a lifeblood connecting and defining the digitally transformed organization, metrics have become increasingly important for value protection and value creation. Schrage’s most recent research focuses on combining generative AI, ML, and KPIs, asking whether KPIs can evolve beyond being simple measures and instead become software agents capable of learning.

This idea is no longer a hypothetical, given dramatic developments in generative AI over the last few years. Aided by AI, metrics can become forward-looking tools to support forecasting and scenario planning activities, helping finance leaders be more proactive and strategic. 

Using ChatGPT, you can actually ask the KPI questions that matter most, Schrage says. “What could we do to improve you? Is the data helpful to you? What new data would improve your forecast? What would you say under this circumstance? Do you think this scenario would be good for you or bad for you?” 

The bottom line: AI can help the finance function drive value with more predictive and future-oriented KPIs, whether it’s classic metrics such as revenue, profit, and sales, or increasingly important hybrid financial custom-facing metrics such as customer lifetime value or customer churn rate.

“What if your customer lifetime value KPI could talk to your customer churn KPI? The math of that kind of thing is interesting,” Schrage says.

Data + AI = Intelligent Forecasting

The potential value of predictive insights unlocked by AI is huge. So long as LLMs are trained on quality data—bad data is a major stumbling block for organizations in adopting AI, a global Workday survey found—finance leaders have the opportunity to rethink what forecasting can and should be. 

“Is a forecast about being correct and precise, or is it about being a source of insight and conversation for how the business should prepare and prioritize, go to market, or respond to customer needs?” Schrage asks. With custom LLMs or ML in the mix, forecasting becomes a richer, more cost-effective way of gaining actionable insights for the organization.

When it comes to scenario planning, Schrage sees multiple potential forecasting use cases emerging via generative AI apps built atop customized LLMs. Expect to see emerging AI/LLM ecosystems (such as Hugging Face, LangChain, and OpenAI) allow businesses to connect data streams from platforms such as Workday with generative AI systems to populate scenarios with real data and defined parameters, he says. 

“The ability to interconnect, to create interoperability between Workday and specific scenarios—it could become really meaningful, something that could be part of a compliance stress test for one’s FP&A initiatives,” Schrage adds, observing that the costs for these kinds of analytics are coming down.

Starting Points

The scope and purpose of a custom forecasting model or scenario will vary business to business, of course. But all organizations should start their AI and ML planning journey from the same place, Castonguay says. 

“You have to start with your business needs,” he adds. “What problem are you solving for? Figure that out and go from there.”

Data can be another entry point, Schrage adds. “If data is an asset, then what are your most valuable assets—and how can you get greater value from them?”

Answering that question is made harder by data silos, which remain common. Nearly two-thirds (59%) of organizations report their data is somewhat or completely siloed—and just 4% say their data is fully accessible, according to the latest Workday global survey. Those numbers need to change.

To boost accessibility and value extraction in the age of AI, Schrage suggests the finance function needs to step up and take charge of data.

“For the future of capital allocation, CFOs should be first among equals,” Schrage says. “They should be the drivers of change.”

That makes sense considering that finance—once slower to adopt AI than other functions—is gearing up its AI activity. Gartner® predicts that by 2026, 80% of large finance teams will rely on internally managed and owned generative AI platforms that have been trained on their own proprietary business data.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

CFOs on AI, Partnerships and Skills

Workday’s Global CFO AI Indicator Report

The Mandate for Business Agility

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Workday’s Global CFO AI Indicator Report

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This a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, highlighting key findings in the “Global CFO AI Indicator Report,” which Workday commissioned with FT Longitude. 

While the opportunity for AI in finance is nearly unlimited, it can also be overwhelming. To clarify a path forward, we created the “Global CFO AI Indicator Report,” commissioned with FT Longitude.

The CFO role has always been a pressure cooker—but today’s finance leaders face higher expectations than ever. To fulfill their charge of increasing efficiency and managing costs while driving deeper insights, CFOs understand they need to embrace the promise of AI.

The potential value is huge: generative AI can cut through lengthy reports by highlighting relevant information. It can automate repetitive manual tasks such as gathering and reconciling information at period end. It can detect anomalies and manage exceptions with lightning speed, providing real-time recommendations so teams can turn their attention to higher-value strategic work.

While the opportunity for AI in finance is nearly unlimited, it can also be overwhelming. To clarify a path forward, we created the “Global CFO AI Indicator Report: Four Steps for Finance Leaders to Expedite Time to Value with AI,” commissioned with FT Longitude. Through extensive research this global report explains AI’s impact on everyday finance duties and underscores the urgent need for finance leaders to start embracing AI and explore use cases.

In the words of Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, AI gives CFOs a “wonderful opportunity to revisit the fundamentals of value creation, capital allocation, capital management, and regulatory and organizational compliance.”

AI Pioneers: Paving the Way

To serve as our North Star, we separated the top third of all respondents—including CEOs and the heads of finance, IT, and HR—who responded to our survey, based on their level of AI investment and adoption maturity. This cohort, which we call the AI Pioneers, has already embraced AI to work more efficiently and create significant value.

Among AI Pioneers, 195 of those are in finance. They are working faster and more efficiently, finding more opportunities to reduce risk, and delivering significant strategic value to the business.

These respondents also express higher confidence in AI’s ability to deliver key benefits. Consider: more than half of finance AI Pioneers (52%) call the technology a gamechanger for the finance industry, compared to 39% of finance respondents overall. Similarly, 43% of finance AI Pioneers say AI will drive increased revenue and profits, and 39% believe it will boost data-driven decision-making, versus just 30% and 32%, respectively, of overall finance executives.

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Based on our research, we expect this divide between AI early adopters and everyone else to continue to grow. This gap will be particularly problematic in the finance world, where they have been slightly slower to adopt and implement AI than those in other functions: only 31% of finance teams have made good progress in deploying AI to automate workflows, while 32% of HR teams and 41% of IT teams have done so.

To follow AI pioneers in creating an actionable AI strategy, finance should start to get their data in order, and then implement small, tangible use cases that produce immediate results. From there, confidence and investments in the technology can expand.

The Data Imperative: Why Strong Data Management Matters

Managing ever-increasing sources of data is proving to be a significant struggle for finance. In fact, 63% acknowledge that their company’s data is somewhat or completely siloed. This doesn’t bode well for AI, which relies on clean data to deliver high-quality outputs. To truly harness the power of AI, finance teams first need a strong data foundation that can unify and contextualize disparate data sources.

Right now, finance teams everywhere have room for improvement in this realm. Only 7% of finance AI Pioneers find their data fully accessible, while a staggering 41% report siloed data. Among other finance teams, it’s even worse, at 47%. Because they’re naturally positioned to lead the implementation of AI in data-focused processes, finance departments should embrace a robust data strategy immediately so they can reap AI benefits down the line.

Creating Value: Hitting the Gas on Finance Transformation

As finance teams’ age-old responsibilities around reporting cash flow, investments, and P&Ls become increasingly automated, CFOs face a growing imperative to lean into value creation through improved access to data and deeper, more informed analysis. With AI-enabled workflows, today’s CFOs are in a unique position to connect the dots and become a key value architect within their organization.

No wonder, then, that AI Pioneers are already seeing the benefits of AI to improve value delivery. Only 23% of this group expressed dissatisfaction with the number of administrative tasks their teams need to complete—versus 34% of finance respondents overall.

Leaning in: The Best Way to Mitigate Risk

While the repetitive tasks in the finance function provide obvious use cases for AI, the function’s emphasis on risk mitigation and predictability make it understandably skeptical of the technology’s potential pitfalls. 

In fact, 35% of finance leaders report finance and accounting as the area of the business least prepared for AI and ML integration, with cybersecurity, compliance, and privacy capabilities a close second at 30%. In addition, when we asked finance heads to what extent they were concerned about specific issues which might arise as AI and ML become more integrated within their function, we found that 36% believed a lack of AI and ML transparency would weaken security and compliance. 

We also asked respondents what they believed would be the biggest risks to AI and ML adoption in finance, finding additional concerns around errors, bias, and security (see below).

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Though it may at first seem counterintuitive, the best response to these valid concerns is to get your data in order and lean into early adoption. Not only does embracing AI allow finance teams to acclimate to the technology faster than competitors, but the AI itself will mature and become better as it ingests more data. Despite skepticism, the time to adopt AI is now.

As the “CFO AI Indicator” report concludes: “Finance may be a naturally risk-averse, careful segment of the business, but it is also one of the most promising areas in which remarkable innovation and change is possible.” By embracing AI and building a robust data strategy, finance teams can emerge as changemakers within their organization, fearlessly pushing beyond traditional roles to create new value.

Get your roadmap to value creation here: “Global CFO AI Indicator Report: Four Steps for Finance Leaders to Expedite Time to Value with AI.”

For insight into additional aspects of the C-suite and early adopter advantage, download “C-Suite Global AI Indicator Report: AI Is the Ultimate Level-Up.”

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

The Mandate for Business Agility

How Artificial Intelligence will Impact the CFO

Fortune Interview with Workday’s CFO on Artificial Intelligence

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How Artificial Intelligence will Impact the CFO

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This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday. It is the first installment of Workday’s Q&AI video series.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way finance leaders operate worldwide. Sayan Chakraborty, co-president of Workday, shares how AI is supporting CFOs in managing a range of global challenges, such as disruptions in supply chains and inflation. In addition, he highlights how AI can enable cost management, overcome talent shortages, and implement new strategies. Watch the video to gain insight into the effects of AI on finance.

This post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

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Fortune Interview with Workday’s CFO on Artificial Intelligence

The Power of the Growth Mindset: How CFOs Drive Success in Finance

Workday Adaptive Planning Recognized with the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Financial Planning Software

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Fortune Interview with Workday’s CFO on Artificial Intelligence

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This article by Sheryl Estradada (Sheryl.Estrada@Fortune.com) originally appeared in Fortune’s CFO Daily newsletter.

Generative AI developments are moving at a rapid pace. And CFOs are tasked with understanding the latest trends as it relates to the workplace.

“It’s not like finance people who are savvy in technology can do it all themselves,” Zane Rowe, CFO at Workday, tells me. “What I love about technology is that it actually takes more than just anyone with one discipline to implement.” You have to bring a cross-functional group together to think about what type of strategic changes are needed, determine the technology to support it, and create a plan for change management, Rowe says. “I’m very fortunate to have a wealth of people that I know in different areas that keep me challenged and learning,” he says. 

Rowe began his role as finance chief at Workday (which is a CFO Daily sponsor) in June. The enterprise cloud company’s total annual revenues for its fiscal year 2023 were $6.22 billion, an increase of 21.0% from fiscal 2022. Rowe succeeded former Workday CFO Barbara Larson, who stepped back to spend more time with her family, according to the company.

Rowe was most recently CFO of VMware, a developer of virtualization software, for seven years. During that time, he served as interim CEO from February to May 2021. Before VMware, Rowe was the CFO at EMC. He was also previously CFO at United Airlines and Continental Airlines and then led North American sales for Apple. 

Working as a finance chief in the people-centric airline industry was actually a catalyst for his love of tech. “Back in those days with the airlines it was about growing internationally and connecting people, and technology became such a big part of underpinning that,” he says. “And then I shifted, and had an opportunity to work at Apple, and found my passion for technology and driving change.”

Rowe says Workday’s people, culture, and products attracted him to the CFO role. The company recently announced a series of new AI and machine learning (ML) enhancements for finance and HR solutions, including generative AI capabilities for creating job descriptions and employee growth plans, for example. In using AL and ML technology, “on the financial side, you can be looking at variance analysis, you can take a lot of the mundane tasks out of the everyday work week,” Rowe says.

What CFOs are thinking about GenAI

Generative AI, and its impact on productivity, continues to be a hot topic in the business community. Recent McKinsey research estimates that generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.  

What’s Rowe hearing from fellow CFOs about investing in this technology? Companies that don’t prepare themselves for technological disruption run the risk of competitors capturing market share and taking business away, Rowe says. “I think many CFOs do recognize this,” he says.

“In the area of AI and the work going on there, a lot of the peer groups that I talk to are very inquisitive and want to learn a lot more about it,” he says. “I think the nature of the job has changed where I haven’t heard many CFOs pull back on that type of spending. In fact, they are encouraging it, to really understand where it adds value.”

According to Deloitte’s CFO Signals survey for Q3 2023, the finance chiefs surveyed said if their company decides to incorporate generative AI, these are the top three goals: to reduce costs (52%), provide better customer experience (50%), and achieve greater margins, efficiencies and productivity (45%), according to the report.

Thinking outside the box

Rowe still believes in being people-centric, so, since joining Workday, he’s been having a lot of conversations. “I’m spending a lot of time with customers to understand what we can do with the product, and spending time with our own product teams looking at cutting-edge ideas,” Rowe says. He’s also building out the finance and accounting teams, he says. 

What does he seek in a team member? Someone who can think outside of the box, according to Rowe. “We did a session fairly recently with our accounting team to think about how they can use AI to do processes a little bit more differently and creatively than they did before,” he says. You can find the original article on Fortune.com.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

The Power of the Growth Mindset: How CFOs Drive Success in Finance

Workday Adaptive Planning Recognized with the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Financial Planning Software

No, Artificial Intelligence Will Not Replace Finance Jobs

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No, Artificial Intelligence Will Not Replace Finance Jobs

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. It is a recent discussion between Workday’s Terrance Wampler and Stanford Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, explaining why CFOs are well-positioned to lead the AI revolution using a human-centered approach to artificial intelligence.

Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, has some advice for finance professionals concerned about whether artificial intelligence (AI) will replace their jobs: “AI is not going to replace CFOs. It is going to replace CFOs who don’t use AI with those who do.”

I [Terrance Wampler] had a great discussion with Professor Brynjolfsson recently at the Workday Future of Intelligent Finance Tour in San Francisco. The event—hosted in partnership with American Institute of Certified Public Accountants-Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (AICPA-CIMA) and Accenture—was designed to help finance and IT professionals leverage AI, machine learning (ML), and other advanced technologies to accelerate their journey to becoming finance futurists.

Brynjolfsson, who also serves as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, gave attendees a crash course on how AI will reshape the future of finance as we know it. Having just come from a visit to Washington, D.C., to brief the White House and the Council of Economic Advisors on the impact of AI, Brynjolfsson has a front-row seat to the potential for AI to change workforce dynamics. 

“In the early stages of AI, we knew that low-skilled labor would be impacted,” he told me. “As the technology has progressed, we’re seeing that professional workers—CFOs, accountants, lawyers, doctors—are going to be very much affected. Affected doesn’t mean automated. It doesn’t mean replaced. Rather, AI is going to augment your abilities and give you the freedom to do new things.” 

I couldn’t agree more with that positive assessment, which is why we’re investing so heavily in generative AI as the innovation engine for Workday Enterprise Management Cloud. As the group general manager for Workday’s suite of solutions for the office of the CFO, I see generative AI as an enabler of finance’s dual role as value protector and value creator.

Value protection tasks such as internal audit, risk management, and regulatory compliance can benefit from AI’s ability to comb through vast amounts of data to detect and surface anomalies before they destroy a company’s value or market reputation. Large language models (LLMs) can be trained to stay updated on the latest financial regulations, ensuring that compliance is always up to date. They can also assist in risk management by identifying patterns in data that might signify potential risks and by building robust risk models that consider a wide array of factors.

AI can also help drive value creation, whether that’s automating routine tasks to drive cost savings or enabling top-line growth. LLMs, for example, can help predict customer behavior, create more accurate forecasts, and improve scenario modeling by processing a large volume of data and considering a multitude of variables. Augmenting the capabilities of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams would allow them to prepare for a wider range of potential outcomes, making planning more resilient and adaptable to changing market conditions. 

Thanks to productivity gains like these, Brynjolfsson predicts that generative AI will be bigger than any of the technologies we’ve used over the last 10 years. He provided an example from new research he led on how generative AI is boosting call center productivity. 

“A couple of years ago, we teamed up with a company and a couple of Stanford professors and graduates to start a company that helps call centers do a better job,” he said. “And what we found was that the operators who used the AI model were dramatically more productive and more successful than the ones who didn’t, with the least skilled operators 35% more productive.” 

Brynjolfsson went on to explain that the model learned from the most successful operators, listening in on their conversations and identifying phrases or suggestions that improved customer sentiment. The model then passed on those skills to the newest operators. “That’s the kind of tacit knowledge that was previously really hard to automate.”

Generative AI and the CFO Role

Gartner analysts recently noted that CFOs are best positioned to help lead the implementation of generative AI in corporations because they have more insight into opportunities to leverage the technology to reduce costs, improve productivity, and increase revenue streams. “The CFO should be on the frontier of the AI revolution,” Brynjolfsson said. “CFOs understand how to work with unstructured and structured data and do sophisticated analyses on that data, which is why they can make such a big impact.” 

Brynjolfsson also sees human resources teams benefiting. “I did an estimate a few years ago and found that the value of human capital in the U.S. economy is a little over $200 trillion—10 times the value of the gross domestic product (GDP). But the problem with human capital is it’s very poorly measured and understood,” he said. “There are a lot of soft intangibles in there. AI’s large language models can do a lot to capture and understand the value of your human capital.” 

Given AI’s power to disrupt the economy, I asked Brynjolfsson about his take on the mood in Washington around regulating AI.

“I came away from my trip really impressed with how up to speed the government officials I met with were on generative AI,” he noted. “They understand that there’s a tidal wave coming that will be bigger than the impact of the pandemic on remote work, and they are taking it very seriously.” 

Brynjolfsson closed out our chat on a positive note, predicting that AI could potentially double the productivity rate currently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office over the next decade. He also sees AI giving us more resources to address challenges we face on the healthcare front, such as cancer, and on the educational front, such as personalized education. The reason is AI’s ability to unlock human potential versus just seeing it as cost-saving automation. 

“Any one of you who has tried to call an automated voice response system knows it can be very frustrating, especially when there’s a long tail of questions that we ask that aren’t common,” he said. “We humans are much better at dealing with exceptions than machines, so a good partnership is where AI can answer common questions and humans can deal with exceptions. AI has a much higher upside in terms of creating additional value than simply trying to take costs out.” 


Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Professional Services Firms Need Future-Ready Forecasting

Enterprise Planning Helps Professional Services Firms Adapt to Changes

FP&A Done Right: Trends in Accounting and Finance

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