For Sarah-Jayne Martin, Director, ICA Global AR Practice, Quadient, a generational tech gap plays a key part in finance’s fears and hesitation to adopt AI and automation in their roles.
“Finance professionals tend to lean on the side of ‘trust but verify.’ Any finance professional reading this will likely be nodding their head. It’s obviously good practice to always make sure that accounting entries are accurate. And for some, the thought of a software platform or other solution automating those transactions can be slightly unnerving or even intimidating.
Second, we’ve all been through technology implementations where things didn’t go as planned and, in some cases, a solution has ended up causing more problems. So, there’s a healthy skepticism towards anything that removes control from accounting and finance managers.
Lastly, according to a study by Zippia, the average age of an accountant in the U.S. is 43 years of age. While this doesn’t make us all dinosaurs, it does put us in the category of being slightly less technologically savvy. For most of us working in finance, we’ve been performing our job functions manually for many years. And change is frankly scary.
The benefits of automating these functions though definitely outweigh the concerns. Technology can reduce manual tasks and repetitive chores which in turn allows professionals to focus on more value-added or strategic initiatives. This leads to overall better employee satisfaction and reduces churn. In addition, leveraging technology can provide greater transparency into the finance function which allows teams to assess areas of their processes that can be improved, ultimately benefitting the bottom line.”