Gartner Says Finance Leaders Must Clarify Their Role in AI Initiatives

As investment in AI accelerates, in most organizations the question of who should be responsible and accountable for AI initiatives remains unanswered. To adopt AI effectively, finance leaders need greater clarity on their roles as they relate to AI, according to Gartner Inc.

“CEOs are expecting finance to step up to deliver on AI in a variety of ways. That includes collaborating with vendors, leading in-house AI initiatives, participating in central committees and providing strategic guidance to IT,” said Marco Steecker senior director analyst in the Gartner Finance practice, speaking today at the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference. “This is a lot of things to manage on top of the long list of day-to-day finance activities.”

At an enterprise level, finance leaders will mostly find themselves in a familiar “project sponsor” role like their role in many other technology initiatives. Key responsibilities will include oversight and governance, for example building and evaluating business cases for AI initiatives and involvement with data and analytics matters such as provisioning financial data to be used in analysis as well as validating and ensuring proper interpretation of analysis.

“Finance leaders should approach enterprise AI oversight and governance with a proof-of-concept mindset,” said Steecker. “This means scoping the potential impacts of the AI initiative and the level of investment required, while putting in place processes to track business outcomes, mitigate risk and determine whether to continue investment in the initiative.”

When focused on finance function specific AI initiatives, different roles emerge depending on two main factors. The first factor to consider is whether the AI solution requires building, training, or other forms of customized development. If some customization is required, a second factor comes into play. Are there central resources that will support the required training and development of the AI solution (see Figure 1).

“By considering these two factors, finance leaders can identify one of three roles to fulfil that is appropriate to the finance AI initiative in question,” said Steecker.

• End User Advocate
  If buying an AI solution off the shelf, the finance leader must demonstrate deep business and domain knowledge that enables them to outline processes and preferences and get involved in testing and troubleshooting solutions while understanding and documenting how to operate the AI solution.
• Co-Developer
  In this role, finance is responsible for guiding the use of AI and facilitating technical coding, modeling, and implementation work carried out by AI engineering and testing partners, typically from IT, an internal AI taskforce or a consulting partner. At the business and domain knowledge level, finance leaders will need to source problems to solve with AI, outline the challenges to AI use and serve as a proxy for end users in the piloting stage.
  
  Additionally, the role will entail adding governance guardrails as necessary as well as data and analytics responsibilities such as ensuring data quality and access, identifying relevant inputs and validating outputs.
• Pioneer
  This role envisions a significant expansion of finance’s capabilities to position the function as an innovation leader within the organization. Finance leaders assume most of the responsibilities held in the “co-developer” role. However, the role goes further by including responsibilities, such as data engineering, data science, and AI modeling and development, which have not traditionally been within finance’s remit.
  
  Finance leaders in this role must hire and develop technical experts into the finance function to help with the development and deployment of AI and learn how to manage these individuals in what will eventually become a more digitally oriented finance function. They must also do some learning and development of their own, to be at least literate and conversant about some of the more technical topics in the area.

This press release was adapted from the sessions “Finance Leaders’ Role in AI Initiatives” at the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference, taking place today in National Harbor. Nonclients can read The CFO Report.