I recently watched a video of Evan Goldberg, Founder and Executive Vice President of NetSuite, speaking to Laura Moss, Vice President of Finance at Cohere about AI in finance. I thought this might be a great way to learn more about AI being used in finance, but I was unfortunately disappointed.
The problem is that AI has been hyped so much, and we have expectations of amazing breakthroughs with the technology. But what we hear most of the time is high-level aspirations like “synthesizing large volumes of complex data – from invoices, contracts, reports – to support holistic and creative decision-making, thus enabling finance professionals to focus on strategic growth and innovation” or “AI helps automate repetitive and unstructured tasks” or “a future where ERP systems will increasingly serve as platforms where AI-powered tools converge, making finance processes more integrated and intelligent.”
This all sounds wonderful, but it would be great to hear about some specific, practical applications. For example, I have heard about AI doing great things when it comes to processing supplier invoices using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and machine learning to know where to find the right data on supplier invoices. I did look at NetSuite’s website for some specific and practical AI use cases and found at:
- Invoice processing
- Text generation such as automating creation of sales emails
- Financial anomaly detection
- Reports & charts creation using a natural language interface
- Narratives & explanations creation from financial data
This is a start, but it’s hardly shaking our world as one would believe from all the hype. However, there are many examples of AI tools that are now being used. We use read.ai to summarize meetings and I just tried NoteGPT to summarize the YouTube video of Evan Goldberg and Laura Moss.
What are you using?
Written by Michael Burns
Michael Burns is both founder and president of 180 Systems. Michael has provided consulting services to a wide variety of industries including manufacturing, construction, financial, distribution, retail, third-party logistics, professional services, real estate and not-for-profit organizations. Michael is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and is certified as a PMP (Project Manager Professional) and as a Certified Information Technology Professional (CITP).
Michael has written extensively for a number of professional magazines and spoken at IT conferences. He was also a part-time professor at University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson). Michael’s experience also includes software development, project management and accounting.