How Emerging Tech is Evolving the Finance Function

EY’s Myles Corson and Chief Data Analytics Officer and Emerging Technologies Leader, Chris Mazzei, discuss the ways in which emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and robotic process automation are impacting businesses and how finance executives are adapting to these changes.

Key takeaways

• Emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, process automation and robotics are changing the nature of competitive differentiation in most industry sectors.
• What these technologies will do for the finance function is provide better insights into the business to facilitate decision support, better efficiency in core finance processes such as reporting, and better risk management through new real-time identification.
• We shouldn’t implement technology like blockchain or robotics just for its own sake, we need to start from the business problem or the business outcome and work backwards.
• One thing that’s accelerating adoption is cost of performance; many of these innovations were cost prohibitive just a few years ago.
• Robotics and automation isn’t about eliminating roles and jobs. It’s about complementing the professionals and ultimately redeploying those hours into higher value tasks.
• Change management is a key part of implementing any new technology. To navigate this, there needs to be more technical depth brought into the organization — people who really understand the technology. And to compliment this, there also needs to be an “upskilling” of the workforce so people can be good partners of the technology folks.