CFOs at companies ranging from Chipotle to Adobe on how they’re already harnessing AI in finance functions
Good morning. Across industries, AI is top of mind for CFOs who are well aware, as noted by McKinsey, that the technology "won’t affect all businesses equally, and certainly not at the same time."
And while the "how" and "when" may differ when looking at, say, fast-casual chains compared to software creators, many of the finance chiefs I've spoken with lately were eager to share insights on using AI—for everything from crunching data to augmenting talent—and what they might use it for next.
Jack Hartung, CFO at Chipotle Mexican Grill
“We're just scratching the surface right now. I’ll give you a simple example: We have to pay a lot of bills. We have individual bills that will come into our restaurants. Most of them, we can automate because we're dealing with very large vendors. But a lot of the folks are individual independent businesses—like, for example, a window washer or a landscaper, a small business in a local community—and those are much harder to automate.
"So when a paper invoice comes in, our team will keypunch that. The first time you do it, you have to keypunch the whole invoice. When that invoice comes in again, the program will read it, and it will populate as much as it can. And after a few iterations, it learns where all the fields need to go. By the third or fourth time that invoice comes in, it'll be automatically scanned, and then the right fields will be populated. But if you've got tens of thousands of these paper invoices, and you can automate that, that is a game-changer and will save a lot of headcount.
"We also have massive amounts of data. We're starting to think about how we can use AI to sort through the data and provide insights in terms of what the opportunities are for us to provide a better experience, or to encourage our customers to come more often.”
Tricia Tolivar, CFO at Cava
“Overall, from a finance perspective, here in the office, we're always looking at tools and how we can use AI to forecast sales better. How do we use that to understand demands from our guests and how that might impact our labor models? And what's the best way to deploy tools, both team member resources and other tools, to do that in a more effective way?"
John F. Woods, EVP and CFO at Citizens Financial Group
“We have to think of ourselves as much as a technology company as we are a banking organization. We have many more engineers and data scientists on staff than we would have had in the past.”
Dan Durn, CFO and EVP of finance, technology services, and operations at Adobe
“We're going to make sure [employees] have the tools and resources to continue to grow and evolve, and future proof the careers of existing finance talent. For new people that we do hire out of school, I do think there's going to be an evolution of skill sets where you're going to see some more data scientists creep in.
"I don't think we will be technologists that do finance. I think we'll be finance professionals that have more familiarity with technology, data science, and automation going forward.”
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
María Soledad Davila Calero curated the Leaderboard and Overheard sections of today’s newsletter.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
