Doing more with less is the defining characteristic of finance and accounting departments in midsize enterprises, which ISG research defines as organizations with between 100 and 999 workers. One frustrating truth confronting executives in these organizations is that, once their company stops being a small business, it has many of the same challenges that large enterprises face but with fewer resources to deal with them. Over the past two decades, advances in information technology have had the...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
natural language processing,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Consolidate and Close Management
Agents are all the rage—and for a good reason. They are a way to automate work almost effortlessly so that repetitive and boring tasks get done with the least amount of effort on the part of the operator. In business, agents can be a boon for customer satisfaction and a way to improve worker productivity. They are alluring, with an almost unlimited number of potential use cases.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
natural language processing,
digital finance,
Work Management,
Generative AI,
AI and Machine Learning,
Digital Applications,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management
ERP systems have been the central nervous system of enterprises for more than three decades, handling business-critical process management and recordkeeping. While their basic outlines are unchanged, today’s systems are far more capable in their functional depth, adaptability, usability and manageability. Especially for cloud-based systems, they are far easier to maintain. Decades of refinement and focused development to support specific industries, and even specialized categories within these...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash
Improving data management is at the forefront of my Office of Finance research practice because, when not managed well, it can have a profoundly negative impact on departmental efficiency, individual performance, organizational agility and sustainability. Conversely, straight-through processing (STP), a business process design and data management methodology, reduces process friction throughout an organization and, by minimizing errors, builds trust in the accuracy and reliability of all data,...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash
At this stage of the development of Generative AI, there’s much we can see clearly (at least we think we can), but there’s even more likely to surprise us. As that great 20th-century philosopher and hall-of-fame catcher, Yogi Berra, famously said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The breadth and speed of innovation today in all aspects of GenAI rivals that of the internet in the 1990s, and for the same reason.
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Topics:
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Model Building and Large Language Models,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash
Oracle held an industry analyst summit recently where the focus was on artificial intelligence (AI) and embedded AI. At the event, Oracle demonstrated progress in adding useful AI-enabled capabilities to its business applications, especially in finance and accounting, supply chain, HR and revenue management. To put this into context, across the software industry, AI is already at work in many finance-focused applications that are currently available, albeit often in limited release. We are in...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Analytics,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
AI,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
AI and Machine Learning,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management
We’re quickly approaching the moment when it becomes clear that artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) will not be free. As that happens, we will discover who’s willing to pay how much and for what. After nearly 18 months of unlimited use-case fantasizing, it should be obvious that not all the potential applications of AI can be realized over the next three to five years because they fail a cost/benefit test. In theory, AI’s potential is almost limitless, but so far, little...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Analytics,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
AI,
digital finance,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management
There have been a multitude of potential use cases for artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) dreamed up over the past 18 months. ISG-Ventana Research describes AI as the development of systems and software capable of automating tasks that have previously required human intelligence. It encompasses machine learning (ML), deep learning and GenAI to deliver capabilities including predictions, recommendations, personalization, speech and visual recognition as well as translation...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
digital finance,
Procure-to-Pay
Zoho recently held its annual analyst day to communicate its strategy, objectives and product roadmap. The privately held company, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, has an unconventional approach to the software market. Its self-described corporate philosophy emphasizes making bold moves that challenge assumptions. Its design engineering approach stresses simplicity and cost while aiming to provide easy-to-use software with sufficient capabilities to improve personal and...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Voice of the Customer,
Digital Commerce,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Customer Experience Management,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash
After a year of near-constant AI chatter, the broad strokes of how the technology will roll out in business over the next three to five years are coming into place. It’s almost trite but worth repeating that artificial intelligence will drive a substantial boost in productivity as it’s adopted. Rather than making large swathes of jobs obsolete, it will take the robotic work out of those job descriptions, enabling people to focus on tasks with a greater economic return.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
AI,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management