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Half of current finance artificial intelligence (AI) deployments will be either delayed or cancelled by 2024, while the use of business process outsourcing (BPO) for AI will rise from 6% to 40% within two years, according to Gartner, Inc. CFOs face major barriers to scaling up the use of AI in-house and will increasingly turn to business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions to meet their digital transformation objectives.
Gartner experts provided CFOs with a breakdown view into some of the key predictions around the growing use of AI-driven technologies via the finance and accounting outsourcing market here today during the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference.
“While finance departments have made reasonable progress in laying the groundwork for AI, the challenges come when attempting to scale up solutions that can manage the complexities of function-wide use,” said Sanjay Champaneri, senior director analyst in the Gartner Finance practice. “The upfront costs of building scalable infrastructure in house, and the overreliance on stretched citizen developers, will lead many CFOs to rethink their current strategies.”
Digital automation in finance often fails to meet the expected benefits outlined in business cases for deploying such technologies. Much of this is down to a lack of truly functional automated processes, according to Champaneri, who notes that a significant proportion of automation work fails and is rerouted to a human for manual input. Without correcting for this state of “fake automation,” finance departments will struggle to scale automated solutions, such as AI, effectively across the function.
Barriers to Scaling AI in Finance
As the number of AI solutions and users grow, so does the complexity in scaling efforts. CFOs who attempt to keep AI in-house will hit a productivity ceiling, as the complexity of maintaining projects tax internal resources and slow or prevent the deployment of new solutions.
Champaneri notes three key barriers that finance departments will face when attempting to scale up their AI processes across the functions.
“CFOs need help operationalizing AI, and also ensuring that their limited resources are focused on projects generating the highest return of efficiency,” said Champaneri. “This reality will drive a significant growth in the use of BPO providers for AI, which offer ready-made solutions to overcome these barriers.”
Advantages of AI-Enabled BPO
Finance departments have thus far been slow to adopt BPO providers for AI, with just 6% currently utilizing an AI-enabled BPO. Gartner predicts this usage will rise to 40% by 2024, as the benefits of deploying a market ready solution for AI become more apparent to CFOs.
Champaneri highlighted three key advantages of AI-enabled BPO for finance departments:
“CFOs are increasingly learning from past experiences of ‘going it alone’ with technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), which have failed to achieve the expected ROI,” said Champaneri. “The case for offloading AI to an experienced BPO provider is even stronger, as it frees up internal resources while providing access to economies of scale that improve the accuracy of the technology and account for the complexities of scaling it up across the function.”
Gartner clients can learn more in Predicts 2022: Digital Finance Transformation via AI-Enabled Outsourcing.
Nonclients can learn more in Digital Finance Transformation via AI-Enabled Outsourcing.
About the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference
Gartner experts are providing additional insights on the key issues facing CFOs during the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference, June 6-7, 2022, in National Harbor, MD. The Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference delivers actionable, objective insight to CFOs and their teams to help them leap-frog forward on their digital journey by understanding what successful teams are, and are not, building, buying, and borrowing in the market. Conference details are available at https://www.gartner.com/en/conferences/na/cfo-finance-us.
About the Gartner Finance Practice
The Gartner Finance practice helps senior finance executives meet their top priorities. Gartner offers a unique breadth and depth of content to support clients’ individual success and deliver on key initiatives that cut across finance functions to drive business impact. Learn more at https://www.gartner.com/en/finance/finance-leaders. Follow Gartner for Finance on LinkedIn and Twitter using #GartnerFinance to stay ahead of the latest expert insights and key trends shaping the Finance function. Visit the Gartner Finance Newsroom for more information and insights.
Justin Lavelle
Gartner
justin.lavelle@gartner.com
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