Artificial intelligence is already having an impact in corporate finance — but success depends on strategic and disciplined adoption.
It’s one of the central themes that emerged as senior finance leaders from major U.S. companies such as Alphabet, Meta, HP, IBM and ServiceNow highlighted lessons learned from some of their organizations’ AI initiatives during a virtual conference last week hosted by Financial Executives International.
The Nov. 11–13 event explored “challenges and emerging opportunities” reshaping modern finance teams, with AI dominating discussions on the third day.
“I think embedding responsible technology principles and governance from design to deployment to monitoring will really be a differentiator in the long term for companies,” Denise Lucas, a vice president and assistant controller at IBM, said during a Thursday panel discussion exploring strategic AI use cases across the finance function.
Speakers emphasized the importance of keeping humans “in the loop” when it comes to AI deployments.
“We're being thoughtful; we're being careful,” Danielle Fontaine, an assistant controller at ServiceNow, said of her company’s AI approach.
ServiceNow’s revenue accounting team is currently using a third-party contract review tool powered by natural language processing and generative AI to help streamline the order-to-cash process, according to Fontaine.
“Our teams are incredibly crunched when we get to each quarter end,” she said. “And so, we want to ensure that the weird and wonderful deals are getting the right level of focus and attention, and the standard contracts are flowing through.”
The tool extracts data and automates the preparation of revenue contract review checklists, allowing the team to “know quickly where to put their energy,” Fontaine said.
“Currently, 100% of the checklists prepared by the tool are being reviewed by a human, given the inherently high risk of improper revenue recognition,” she added.
Lucas discussed her company’s experience with using AI for expense forecasting. Joe Bohnert, an innovation architect leader at Meta, described an AI use case involving the company’s prepaid accounting process.
Other finance-related AI use cases were highlighted earlier in the day during a panel discussion on digital transformation. That session included a rundown of how the credit and collections team at HP is using agentic AI to more quickly resolve customer payment disputes.
Meg Dholabhai, global finance transformation leader at HP, said her company always starts projects aimed at overhauling processes or workflows by asking, “What problem are we trying to solve?”
“Technology comes second,” she said.
The message was echoed by Saqib Baig, chief accounting officer and commercial business CFO at fitness equipment company Peloton.
“We have all seen first-hand that when you take a sub-optimal business process and try to digitize it, you’re basically [creating] long-term tech debt,” Baig said. “So, getting the sequence [right] is extremely important.”
Amie Thuener, chief accounting officer and corporate controller at Alphabet, said it’s important to have “very good, clean data” and “know where it all is” before pushing forward with a transformation effort.
