When it comes to artificial intelligence, it’s important for technologists and software providers to ensure they’re not just building a “faster horse,” Alok Ajmera, CEO of Office of the CFO software provider Prophix said.
Ajmera referenced a quote on innovation often attributed to famed automobile maker Henry Ford, which notes that if asked what they were looking for, his customers would have simply said a faster horse as opposed to a car. In examining AI’s capabilities and potential, the quip represents “the exact moment in time that we’re in,” he told CFO Dive in an interview.
Agentic AI’s forward leap
In the space of the Office of the CFO, the AI equivalent of Ford’s automobile would be something like continuous budgeting: a concept “we've been talking about for 20 years, but it's just logistically very hard to do,” Ajmera said.
A 22-year alum of the Toronto-based company, which offers financial planning, budget and forecasting products for the Office of the CFO, Ajmera has served as its CEO since November 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before taking the top executive seat, he served for 12-years as its president and chief operating officer.
Today, many budgeting or forecasting processes still run on old infrastructure, with the same historic patterns and stumbling blocks when it comes to closing the books or creating an annual budget. However, if the “drudgery” associated with that work is eliminated, “you can actually rethink how these things are done,” Ajmera said.
“These are things that we've been talking about for 20 years, and we've been slowly moving down this path with technology, but we have the opportunity to take a monster step forward with agentic capabilities, because you can now meaningfully offload work,” he said.
To make use of that forward leap, however, technology companies need to approach customers with the right mix of innovation and comfort.
You “can’t leave your customers behind,” Ajmera said, noting both the “challenge and opportunity” of finding the right balance at an incumbent provider such as Prophix, which has about 3,000 customers globally. Providing value and service is key, but “having said that...as a technology company, you can't ignore where the world is going to be, and you need to rapidly build to that world,” he said.
Customer comfort vs customer needs
To reach that balance, retaining sensitivity to human needs is essential. Many tech or software providers caught up in the development race may forget “there’s a set of human beings on the other end that are going to be recipients of this technology, and this technology is going to completely transform how they work,” Ajmera said.
For example, though finance professionals may dream of the continuous close, CFOs currently have legitimate reasons to be wary of AI, as ensuring the financial data they are working with and presenting is 100% accurate remains a paramount concern.
While CFOs are certainly tapping AI, they aren’t especially gravitating out of their comfort zones, he said. There’s still an “inherent fear” surrounding the use of AI among financial leaders — many are comfortable with the technology analyzing financials or numbers, but not with the technology modifying a number, Ajmera said.
He pointed to a conversation with a CFO and Prophix client which had made use of the company’s One intelligence platform, a financial planning and analysis solution. While satisfied with the Prophix One product, when asked if she uses the AI agent budgeting tool, she replied, “‘Oh, no, no, I will not let it touch a number,’” he said.
For those on the tech side of the fence, such as Prophix, proving that the technologies are safe and trustworthy is a critical step to convincing finance chiefs, or other customers, to step out of their comfort zone when it comes to where they implement AI.
“What we have to do as technologists is really…we have to make sure that there are legitimate guardrails,” he said. “There is real trust that's baked into applications. There's auditability, there's traceability.”
