Rohit Gupta

Oct 3, 2023

“We’re moving to a world with massive amounts of data, massive complexity of data, and data that is continuously changing, and that’s where AI comes in,” said tech executive Rohit Gupta. Published Oct. 3, 2023 Today’s data-inundated corporate finance department is ripe for artificial intelligence-driven automation in a range of areas from scenario planning to invoice processing, according to Rohit Gupta, CEO of finance software company Auditoria.AI. The rapidly growing volume and complexity of data handled by CFOs and their teams is putting a strain on the tools they have traditionally relied on to do their jobs, Gupta said, speaking at a conference hosted in San Francisco, California last week by Workday, a provider of cloud-based finance and human resources applications. “We’re moving to a world with massive amounts of data, massive complexity of data, and data that is continuously changing, and that’s where AI comes in,” he said. Gupta, whose Santa Clara, California-based company is a venture partner of Workday, introduced a Thursday panel discussion titled, “AI for the Finance Office: Finding a Competitive Edge.” He and other panelists asserted that generative AI, an emerging technology that has been catapulted into the public spotlight over the last year, can be used today to meet a host of needs in the corporate finance world. “We actually think that the opportunities are huge,” said Ray Wang, founder and chairman of Constellation Research, a technology research and advisory firm based in Silicon Valley. Still, polls show that many C-suite leaders are worried about some of the risks associated with generative AI, which could be a barrier to implementation in some cases. Such risks include the potential for data leaks and “hallucinations,” where the technology asserts inaccuracies as if they were true. Generative AI refers to technology capable of producing text, images, or other content based on data used to “train” it. ChatGPT, a generative AI tool created by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, quickly gained fame after its launch last November. It’s known for a wide range of sophisticated capabilities from answering complex questions across a variety of subject areas to writing reports and software code. Gupta asked audience members, many of whom were CFOs, to imagine using AI — for financial forecasting purposes — to simulate global events, such as the supply chain disruptions that were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “That’s an example of technology that is available today that you can pilot,” he said. Other potential use cases include helping finance teams to predict customer behavior; automate “mundane” tasks associated with invoice processing; and detect anomalies in transactional records, he said. Amit Sharan, chief information officer and head of business transformation, at LiveRamp, a San Francisco, California-based software-as-a-service company, acknowledged that some CFOs may not be ready to fully embrace AI. “The CFO is not typically a shiny object grabber,” he said. “They’re risk averse, but more importantly, that’s their job.” Recommended Reading