AI IN FINANCE
The human role in AI-powered spend management.
Technology’s influence on finance.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has already made an enormous impact on the ways that people across a range of industries do their jobs every day. The same is true for the finance sector, an industry where massive volumes of data, complex internal and regulatory requirements, and other historically highly manual workflows present perfect opportunities for AI assistance and automation.
AI has the potential to revolutionize the financial landscape and redefine the way CFOs, controllers, VPs of procurement, and other financial leaders make decisions. However, while AI is poised to transform the way these roles operate, it will still be the people in those roles who make the decisions. Artificial intelligence simply amplifies human effort with automation, assistance, suggestions, and guidance, offering massive potential for greater efficiency and productivity.
In 1967, John M. Culkin wrote, “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” Throughout history, humans have changed their environment based on the tools they create. As those tools played a bigger role in our lives, they started shaping us and unlocking the next level of innovation. Each new invention has yielded new possibilities and innovations, advancing what’s possible and pushing us further.
AI is now a similarly disruptive tool in the financial landscape.
Technology has always impacted the finance industry, from the calculator to the spreadsheet, from portable computers to spend management software. The people who thrived during these disruptive transformations were finance professionals who embraced innovation, learned new skills, and used new tools to improve their decision-making.
Source: WBR Insights
How should finance leaders think about AI?
Mandates to do more with less, increasing globalization, and volatile macroeconomic conditions — all of these and more make the job of the finance leader more complex and consequential than ever. Add to that the fact that AI isn't going anywhere, which leaves CFOs in the position of getting on board or getting left behind. That means the time is now to let AI and LLM amplify your efforts.
You have the vision and judgment, but AI will augment your skills and help run analyses and scenarios faster based on the enormous volumes of data that your company produces. Gartner states, “Leading finance teams will learn to position AI-driven tools and solutions as co-workers that help them do their jobs better.”
Finance leaders are asking, ‘What will AI do for me?’ The answer is, anything you tell it to. What’s more, next-gen AI can suggest new models and insights proactively.
This paper will delve into the future of finance where AI becomes an invaluable ally to the finance team at enterprise companies. Already, AI is helping to drive automation, fraud detection, analysis, risk mitigation, and more, but we will again emphasize the undeniable importance of human expertise and decision-making in leveraging AI technologies for spend management.
Take advantage of AI now — and be ready for the future.
There’s a lot of talk today about where AI is going tomorrow, but today there are already AI capabilities readily available that are making a difference for CFOs, finance teams, and employees, particularly in the spend management space. As a finance leader, AI-powered spend management will give you access to infinitely helpful data — as well as suggestions, automations, and insights — that you can use to achieve your organization’s spending goals.
At Brex, AI has been a key part of our DNA since our inception to:
Automate compliance to improve the employee experience by automatically adding receipts, auto-filling reimbursements for out-of-pocket expenses, blocking out-of-policy merchants and merchant categories in real-time, and much more.
Detect fraudulent card and cash transactions, applications, and customers using proprietary fraud models that scan for fraudulent activities across logins, banking transfers, card transactions, and system-wide anomalies and fraud rings
Automatically underwrite new customers and adjust limits for existing customers based on decreasing or increasing risk factors.
Our dedicated AI Products organization is staffed with machine learning specialists who leverage everything from classical models to deep neural network architecture, with safety and data privacy at the core of everything we build.
“We chose Brex for enterprise-grade spend controls, automation, and integrations. The transparency and real-time insights we get into spend enable us to better manage our budget and AP.”
— Teddy Collins, Vice President of Corporate Finance at SeatGeek
The introduction of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked even more possibilities for improving the user experience and our internal development to deliver enterprise-grade applications of AI. Our partnership with OpenAI has put us at the forefront of LLM application development for spend management. We have already established ourselves as thought leaders in AI, and our prompt engineering guide has been widely shared amongst the AI community.
We also have several exciting AI-powered features available now that can amplify your efforts or help you offload tasks entirely:
A conversational assistant that uses natural language and access to spend data to answer questions employees would typically ask the finance team.
Accounting automations that will populate expense documentation for employees, including receipts, memos, category, and budget.
Expense reviews that flag risky expenses, helping managers save time and review by exception.
Spend insights that surface information about your org’s spend, allowing you to save money.
And that’s just the beginning. Going forward, we firmly believe that every CFO needs an AI strategy. “If implemented and leveraged correctly, generative AI can be a true game changer for a business,” says Michael Tannenbaum, CFO and COO at Brex. “But as with everything else it requires a thoughtful, measured approach.”
The impact (and potential) of AI.
The future of finance will be shaped by financial leaders’ willingness to embrace and adapt these powerful technologies and by understanding how and where to apply them. AI-powered spend management capabilities — automation, suggestions, insights, and assistance — will greatly improve the “business-as-usual” close process and empower you to deliver thoughtful, strategic guidance to your leadership team.
The benefits to enabling AI to be your tireless assistant are many, including:
Efficiency
With improved automation and AI, finance tasks that take months can be done instantly.
Natural language processing and APIs can immediately turn unstructured data into structured data that can be moved from system to system, getting rid of previously manual processes.
On average, enterprise finance teams that use Brex saved 250 hours per year with accounting automation.*
Speed
When transactions can be processed and coded instantly by your software, financial statements and accounting reporting can be delivered immediately.
Reviewing transaction data, reconciling accounts, and analysis can be automated, allowing financials to be produced faster.
Quicker access to more accurate data means decisions are being made on what’s true now versus what was true last month.
Compliance
AI can restrict out-of-policy spending before it happens, rather than after.
Conversely, you can automate the approval of expenses that meet your policy rules and requirements.
Companies following Brex’s best practices for automated compliance improve employee compliance by an average of 30%, for an average compliance rate of 99%.*†
Productivity
Managers can offload time-consuming tasks to AI like budget requests and reporting.
The shift from repetitive tasks to strategic tasks will allow finance employees at every level to focus on scaling the business instead of simply maintaining it.
Enterprise employees and managers save an average of 4,000 hours per year with Brex’s compliance automation.*
* The metrics provided are from July 2023 and for illustrative purposes only. Past performance does not guarantee future results, which may vary.
† The 99% compliance rate takes into account a cohort of our top customers that follow our best-in-practice guidelines and recommendations.
“Brex is the only solution that checks all the boxes, from reliable corporate cards to time-saving automations that make our accountants’ lives so much better.”
— Ty Barton, Accounting Manager, Signifyd
An inexhaustible ally for tomorrow's finance roles.
Legacy spend solutions are built on a manual approach with no AI in sight — and no AI insights. With large language models and agents, AI-driven spend management can increase your efficiency by delivering daily automations, forward-looking insights, and real-time alerts. You will be able to see your business spend from every angle, spotting anomalies instantaneously rather than after lengthy reviews or month-end close.
AI is changing the status quo of accounting and finance processes and maximizing their capabilities. It is not replacing the role of the CFO, accountant, or controller, but instead elevating it to new heights, allowing you to be more refined and judicious in your tasks. By embracing AI as an inexhaustible ally, you will make your finance and accounting function the greatest partner it can be to the broader business and to the executive team, enabling the organization to make the best decisions possible in real time.
Empower yourself with AI: learn more about the ways you can employ AI throughout your spend management tools here.
Unlock the power of automation.
The time is now to increase efficiency, compliance, and control with AI-powered spend management. Let’s talk.
Unlock the power of automation.
The time is now to increase efficiency, compliance, and control with AI-powered spend management. Let’s talk.