Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference Sydney: Day 2 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference 2024, taking place this week in Sydney, Australia. Below is a collection of key announcements and insights coming out of the conference.

On Day 2 of the conference we are looking at building finance teams for an AI future; refreshing finance technology strategy and addressing the gender gap.

• Gartner Survey Shows a Third of CFOs Involved in Developing Enterprise GenAI Strategy
• Gartner Says Finance Leaders Should Factor Change Fatigue into Project Planning
• Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference Sydney: Day 1 Highlights

Presented by Mark D. McDonald, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

AI can simulate human behavior and work, but it will require radical shifts in the way finance teams work. In this session, Mark D. McDonald, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, explored how to create finance teams that can use AI effectively and responsibly.

• “Corporate finance teams have painted themselves into a corner: demand for finance work has grown beyond the function’s ability to meet it.”
• “Technology adoption levels do not satisfy modern needs, and people are maxed out working long hours, making the profession unattractive with fewer entering the profession and a growing number leaving.”
• “AI offers a way to excite a younger ‘AI generation’ that has the skills to use the technology. It provides a way to codify and preserve the knowledge of the most experienced employees, and it can cope better with the increased complexity of modern finance demands.”
• “It is important to position AI as a coworker, and to divide labor in the most effective way, so people and machines each do the work they are best suited for."
• "Progress can be delivered in a learning loop where people build machines, frame the rules, and scope the work for them. Machines can parse through large datasets, make calculations, automate mundane processes and give warnings and advice, while humans handle exceptions, update processes and refine the machines.”

Presented by Nisha Bhandare, VP Analyst, Gartner

Seventy percent of finance technology investments fail because of outdated attitudes to technology in finance teams. In this session, Nisha Bhandare, VP Analyst at Gartner, explored ways that finance can improve agility and deliver innovation with a composable technology strategy.

• “A composable paradigm is designed around modular technology solutions and best-fit vendors that deliver specific finance capabilities."
• “CFOs don’t have to choose between being efficient or being innovative. Composability enables finance to do both by driving standardization in core capabilities and differentiation in value added capabilities.”
  
• “Enable a technology governance that supports experimentation and a fail-fast culture in innovative technologies, such as AI, while sticking to traditional implementation approaches in stable technologies such as ERP.”
  
• “Think top down by identifying where innovation is most urgent in finance and encourage experimentation. Execute from the bottom up by building the foundation and promoting composable thinking across the organization to accelerate agility.”

Presented by Shannon Cole, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

Women leave their jobs more often than men due to caretaking and burnout, which reflects an antiquated working model. In this session, Shannon Cole, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, explained that creating a new work design is a vital step in making the workplace more equitable.

• “If leaders are going to transform the organization, and not just transform women, they need to change many of the foundational—but outdated—assumptions some people have about women and men at work.”
• “Work design in our ‘day job’ was built for a man, and certainly wasn’t built for couples where both parties work a day job.”
  
• “Changing minds is hard, but we’ve just been through a global pandemic, and we all saw work design change overnight. To transform the organization, there needs to be a mindset shift.”
  
• “If employers want to start to redefine ‘professional’ at their organization, they have to get rid of those who uphold the old, outdated, and often sexist and racist versions of professionalism.”
  
• “Organizations must recognize that women, and increasingly all employees, work ‘multiple jobs’, and retention in the ‘day job’ will hinge on easing friction across those jobs.”
  

That's a wrap for the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference 2024 in Sydney. See you next year.