Dive Brief:
- Concerns about artificial intelligence-driven job displacement in finance are on the rise as the technology takes on more routine tasks in the workplace, according to a recent report from tech firm insightsoftware.
- Twenty percent of finance professionals said they fear AI will replace their jobs, up 7 percentage points from last year, the study found.
- The findings put pressure on CFOs to communicate more clearly with teams about how AI will impact roles and the organization’s strategy for helping employees to leverage the technology to become more productive and have greater business impact, Jennifer Warawa, president of insightsoftware, said in an interview. During periods of uncertainty, “more communication is better than less,” she said.
Dive Insight:
The findings come as AI moves into a wider range of finance tasks. In Deloitte survey results released in July, 51% of CFOs said their finance functions use AI for operational productivity, while 44% use it for financial planning and budgeting and 41% use it to analyze financial data.
The insightsoftware study also comes amid a broader debate over whether AI will displace workers or create new jobs. In an August analysis, the Stanford Digital Economy Lab found no evidence of widespread, economy-wide job displacement, but found that employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations was 19% below where it would have been had it kept pace with similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations. The researchers cautioned that the findings are descriptive and do not establish how much of the gap was caused by AI.
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council and a top adviser to President Donald Trump, weighed in on Monday, saying AI is creating jobs rather than killing them.
Despite such perspectives, worker anxieties over AI persist. In the survey by insightsoftware, fear of job displacement ranked as the biggest barrier to AI adoption in corporate finance.
Data privacy and security concerns held steady at 19% year-over-year, while accuracy concerns, including hallucinations, rose to 18%. Meanwhile, the share citing a lack of understanding or knowledge of AI fell 5 percentage points to 12%. The findings suggest that barriers are shifting from understanding the technology toward concerns about its risks and impact.
As displacement concerns rise, finance leaders need to show employees how their roles will change as AI takes on more work, rather than leave them wondering whether those roles will survive, according to the insightsoftware report.
“Finance professionals are not resisting AI because they misunderstand it,” the report said. “They are hesitating because they understand it well enough to ask what happens next, and too few organizations have given them a credible answer.”
The State of AI in Finance report is based on survey responses from 854 finance professionals at organizations with more than 500 employees.
