Survey Results Also Revealed High Levels of Uncertainty Among Finance Leaders About What Challenges Generative AI Implementation Will Bring
The survey of 100 finance leaders – carried out in November 2023 – revealed the GenAI use cases that corporate finance leaders anticipate will have the most impact on their function in 2024 (see Figure 1).
“Forecast and budget variance explanation as the top choice reflects the availability of embedded GenAI interfaces within business intelligence tools,” said Clement Christensen, Senior Director Analyst, Research, in the Gartner Finance practice. “This enables users to perform natural language queries to quickly assess known common causes of variance.”
Figure 1: Most Impactful Anticipated Use Cases for GenAI in Finance in 2024
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Source: Gartner (June 2024)
Finance Leaders Foresee Multiple Challenges Ahead
“GenAI is all about large language models, but the core of finance’s work isn’t in natural language, it’s in numbers, so many finance leaders are still waiting to see a GenAI application that can reliably handle complex calculations,” said Christensen. “For most finance teams, GenAI will likely be an interface to interact with other AI models based on machine learning, or other non-generative models for the next few years.”
Finance leaders seeking to adopt GenAI in their function should keep an open mind and involve key stakeholders, including the finance leadership and IT teams to discuss priorities and expectations. They should also identify when to approach vendors to help determine which GenAI offerings are worth acquiring for the organization’s needs. Finally, CFOs should audit critical data with respective owners before implementation, to decide what modifications must be implemented for use by a GenAI model.
“Finance leaders see potential in the accessibility of GenAI in finance, but valid questions on reliability, accuracy, auditability, and cost, as well as data privacy and security still remain,” said Christensen.
