Finance can rise as a strategic powerhouse in the age of AI

In a time defined by constant change and disruption, finance leaders have an opportunity to push their organizations in ways that substantially elevate partnerships and inform market strategies. They can realize ambitions to harness hindsight, insight, and foresight to shift finance from a necessary cost to a value-creating entity. It is a future enabled through automation, augmentation, and collaboration between humans, data, and machines.

Imagine a world where:

Data is real-time, is available on-demand, is predictive, personalized, and actionable.

Applications are even more engaging, interactive, conversational, and proactive.

Talent is even more influential, impactful, accretive, and trusted.

Soon, AI agents could be handling the laborious and process-driven work, unlocking time and capabilities for human analysts to become more embedded in, and focused on, strategic and value-generating areas. The result? A finance function exerting greater impact for itself, for the enterprise, and for the market.

Finance for finance

The days of the spreadsheet user spending hours, if not days, downloading data sets, manually matching information, and analyzing trends seem to be over. Autonomous finance becomes reality.

Transactional and routine activities that form the foundation of an organization’s financial integrity can become fully touchless. Humans own the loop for exception processing and AI model management. An interconnected agentic workforce seamlessly shifts work from labor-intensive routines to value-added insight generators.

Humans engage with agent-driven experiences that deliver personalized finance insights. Think of a social media feed for your organization—one that delivers insights based on real-time insights and analyses. The finance function transforms into capability centers focused on on-demand insights that drive real-time actions that create financial value for the company.

Finance for the enterprise

Expanding its impact, tomorrow’s finance function moves beyond delivering static reports, ad hoc data analyses, and data visualization dashboards. It becomes a true thought partner and strategic advisor to the enterprise.

Exponential access to data and computing power allows for proactively generated scenario modeling that grows the top line and manages the bottom line. Finance teams advise the business on risks before they occur. They discover untapped opportunities. Advanced analytics, AI, machine learning, and predictive modeling are embedded into daily tasks and decisions.

Finance is no longer solely measured on cost and control, but rather, on its advanced ability to create sustainable value across business lines.

Finance for the market

AI continues to drive finance towards reaching its full potential: influencing outward from the organization. From understanding and navigating blind-side risks to providing always-on support of strategic decision-making, finance becomes the engine that measures value while also actively shaping it.

Tomorrow’s stakeholders, from regulators to investors to consumers to suppliers, have greater access to corporate information and market dynamics. Predictive modeling incorporates market signals and adjusts as they change. AI enables finance to canvass large data sets to promote growth, catalyze change, and capture market potential.

Finance eventually serves a major role in shaping market impact, while remaining grounded in organizational transparency, accountability, and integrity. As a result, finance owns the corporate narrative that builds value, trust, and credibility in the marketplace.

Enabling the future

AI is already everywhere in the finance tech stack, becoming increasingly embedded in core and edge technologies and purpose-built solutions. Domain-savvy AI agents will emerge to provide answers to our questions. Go-to apps will likely be replaced by go-to AI agents. And it will be driven by data. Garbage in equals garbage out; therefore, clean, governed data sets will be important for setting the foundation for consistency, governance, and security across the enterprise.

For human workers, digital and AI skillsets, from prompt engineering to data science, will be table stakes. But enduring human capabilities like problem solving, intellectual curiosity, influence, empathy, and imagination will differentiate tomorrow’s finance talent. In the age of AI, the enduring province of people will be asking interesting questions, identifying problems worth solving, and coming up with altogether new ideas.

Are you ready?

The future can be bright for finance leaders who seize this transformative moment. By leveraging the expansive potential of AI and technology, elevating finance talent, and thinking boldly about what could be, leaders can evolve beyond the traditional role of finance—for finance, for the enterprise, and for the market.

Learn more from Deloitte about how AI advances will unlock the Future of Finance.

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