Transforming Financial Functions and Elevating Professionals with AI: An SAP Concur Conversations Podcast with Oversight

Artificial intelligence (AI) dominated conversations in 2023 and AI-powered technology will continue to make rapid advancements in 2024. It’s set to drive big changes in the finance industry, but the impacts are still largely unknown. Questions continue to be raised about how AI is transforming financial functions and elevating the work of financial professionals, how financial professionals can become AI champions, and how organizations can embrace AI to bring out the best in their business.

To investigate these questions and learn more about AI in business, Jeanne Dion, Vice President of the Value Experience team at SAP Concur, spoke with Nathanael L’Heureux, Chief Client Officer at Oversight, which provides AI-based solutions to identify risk, error misuses, and fraud within T&E and accounts payable.

Here are some highlights from their conversation about how finance professionals can leverage AI to elevate their roles and their organizations.

You can listen to this episode on Apple, Spotify, or your favourite place to find podcasts.

Finance Forward: How AI is Shaping the Future of Financial Professionals

Find out more about the different AI technologies and how you can leverage them to elevate your business in this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast.

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Leverage AI to elevate your work

There is a big shift occurring within the finance profession. Less talent is entering the workforce, the older generation is retiring, and more is being demanded of those who stay. With up to 80% of finance-based work estimated to be manual, it’s easy to look at this field and see a major opportunity for AI to revolutionize and automate the work.

However, some fear that jobs will be lost and people will no longer have an impact. The reality is quite different. As Dion says, “AI will not replace you, but a person using AI will.” It’s time to upscale your work and figure out how to better use accessible data to elevate your business thinking.

While powerful in what it can do on its own, AI still requires a person to guide and direct it. Dion adds, “It’s still going to take humans to interact, because what it does is it basically elevates us, it turns our problem-solving efficiency onto hyperdrive.” In other words, AI makes finding the needle in the haystack easier so you can spend your time focusing on what to do with those needles versus rounding them up in the first place.

According to L’Heureux, AI is at the intersection of providing “immediate information that is now synthesized and summarized for consumption to really help an individual make better decisions.”

Use existing tool frameworks to choose AI technology

Evaluating AI tools can seem daunting — there are so many new acronyms and language models to try and understand. L’Heureux suggests evaluating AI tools much like you do any tool you’re considering for your business — by establishing a framework. “Think about some financial processes that you are working with and ones that have either a lot of manual steps or maybe it’s just a process that you have responsibility for…then figure what would be your goals in this process,” he says. 

Not all AI tools are created to solve the same problems, so familiarizing yourself with the different language models and capabilities is equally important to understanding your goals and processes. As L’Heureux points out, “LLMs (large-language models) are no good at analyzing financial data, but there are a lot of machine learning tools that are excellent at both predicting the future, giving estimations of the future, and also identifying abnormalities and fraud detection…those are some of the capabilities that are good to understand.”

Be an AI thought leader

When we think about it, AI isn’t really all that new. We have been leveraging predictive text and autocorrect for years in our personal lives, but we are just seeing these applications in our business lives. Dion suggests that as professionals, “Don’t be afraid of the technology. In fact, be an evangelist for it and become that person who becomes an expert at it so that you can teach the rest of the world to fish.”

L’Heureux adds that “championing this kind of a thing can be quite beneficial…elevating your role as an individual but then bringing the benefit to the entire company.”

Continue to think about the problems you’re trying to solve and seek out technologies that can help simplify your processes.

Find out more about the different AI technologies and how you can leverage them to elevate your business in this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast.