2025 Outlook for GenAI in Financial Management
As we dive into 2025, I’m thinking about the incredible progress that’s been made with Generative AI technologies just over the past year, going from excellent text generation to full multi-modal interactions and reasoning models, and the amazing innovations that have come. I’ve been reflecting on how GenAI has been impacting the financial management world, and what’s to come next.
During my experiences with public speaking and talking with financial management leadership over the past year about GenAI for accounting and financial management, the biggest challenge I have been seeing with adoption of GenAI isn’t a technology issue - it’s understanding. From C suite all the way to field teams, many tech-savvy finance organizations struggle to fully grasp what GenAI is, how it works, or understand the practical applications in financial operations and management.
Many of the leadership I talk to get stuck on hallucinations and data privacy, leading them to hold back on any true innovation or exploration of capabilities. While those are real concerns, they shouldn’t overshadow the discussions around solutioning. If organizations want to make true progress with GenAI, they need to move past their concerns and focus on the potential benefits, letting those drive the discussion around how they can mitigate the risks in order to achieve those benefits. Some of the leaders I’ve talked to haven’t fully accepted that these GenAI capabilities are real, and not just hype. The capabilities are here, and already having an impact on the CFO offices that are starting to use them, such as automated transaction analysis.
Based on my observations across various industries, I’m seeing four primary paths organizations are taking to adopt GenAI, each with its own risk/benefit profile:
Trusted third party vendors incorporating GenAI into their existing software offerings, such as research tools, search engines CRMs, and other productivity and office tools.
Individual leaders or employees using a GenAI chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude to be more productive, summarizing documents, reviewing email drafts, as an empathy coach and many other things.
Trusted consulting / advisory firms incorporating GenAI into their service offerings, boosting their services and capabilities significantly through GenAI. Not only does this allow financial professionals to benefit from GenAI, it shifts the risk of incorrect outputs or hallucinations to the third party consulting firms, who build in the risk mitigation frameworks and human in the loop to prevent and detect incorrect or harmful outputs. This third category, in my opinion, has the biggest potential for financial management leaders to benefit from GenAI with the quickest time and the lowest risk.
Internal research and development groups focused on testing and building GenAI capabilities for the organization. This has higher barrier to entry due to costs, skill-sets needed, and limited risk mitigation frameworks, but makes a lot of sense for certain organizations to do when they have the means.
I predict this trend will continue into 2025, with more and more interest and focus on using GenAI anywhere it makes sense. And I believe categories 1 and 3 should be the near-term focus for most organizations. The key to success will be finding the right balance between innovation and governance, and categories 1 and 3 shift the burden of most of those efforts to third parties.
What do you think GenAI’s role will be in financial management and operations in 2025?
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