There will be a time at some point in the future when you're on a road trip, let's call it California, and the passenger next to you will lean over and say, "You mean you used to have to touch the steering wheel?" And now, we understand that on this road trip you're not touching the wheel at all. And so, the same thing will happen in the finance function. Staff in the future will ask, "You mean the books didn't close instantly? You mean you had to run a model? You mean you had variance in the model?" Right, staff will not understand the former world. Autonomous finance is made up primarily of three major technologies that are revolutionizing corporate finance: artificial intelligence, blockchain and hyperautomation. Of all of the corporate functions that support the enterprise, finance is right for autonomous simply because it is all numbers code and rules flowing through the organization. Given slowing growth and persistent inflation, companies more than ever need to be predictive in the way that they look at their inventory, their staffing, their pricing and their global supply chains. Autonomous is really that predictive and prescriptive nature where decisions are being made based on a constant stream of data, not just you picking a technology to save time and make something more efficient. We predict that the cost of finance will come down significantly, nearly 40% in the coming years. That will force CFOs and their leadership teams to reorganize the core functions of finance, which will force many organizations to integrate with the rest of the organization and rethink the way that work gets done. There's a large retailer who we know missed their earnings last quarter due to the fact that they couldn't see how things were changing midquarter because they couldn't close their books quick enough, they couldn't see around corners when it came to inventories. They actually were ordering the wrong goods and services, and not meeting customer demand. Finance organizations told us that they would accept a 10% variance in a forecast that was produced by a human. Then when asked the same question about how much variants could be accepted from an AI-algorithm-based forecast, it was only 5%. But intuitively, why would we trust technology to a lower threshold than we would trust humans? We forever will have challenges related to data, related to the tools themselves and related to pace of adoption. However, the biggest barrier that holds us back from making headway on all of those is our mindset. We need to open the aperture and be willing to trust technologies as they come on this journey with us toward autonomous finance. One of the first shifts in our mindset that must be made is that we need broad experimentation. Starting small with things like artificial intelligence will not yield the compounding effect that we can achieve If we broadly pilot many initiatives in the finance function. The CFOs that we talk to that are learning the most are the ones that are also achieving the most, and so broad experimentation is allowing CFOs and their leadership teams to quickly learn about where artificial intelligence is working and scale those learnings across the broader finance function. If we start incremental, we too easily fall back into our old ways. The technology is good enough. It's our ability to learn and experiment across the finance function that is the linchpin to achieving growth toward autonomous finance. Automated is me checking my smartwatch to see what my heart rate is. Autonomous is an ambulance pulling up next to me saying, "You're about to have a heart attack, get in." I'm excited to help CFOs realize their full potential by removing them from the day-to-day necessity of collecting data, entering data and analyzing data. We can integrate with the rest of the C-suite. We can drive the enterprise, we can find new opportunities, we can meet new customers, we can establish ESG outcomes. When those things happen automatically and decisions are put in front of us, wow, does life get a lot more interesting.
