Insight in action: Gen AI use cases for CFOs and procurement

For CFOs, and the finance and procurement functions in general, Gen AI continues to offer significant potential.

Indeed, only two years ago a Gartner survey suggested that 80 percent of CFOs expected to increase spend on the technology by the end of 2024.

This is unsurprising of course given the CFO’s ongoing preoccupation with cost and risk, and the many repetitive, time-consuming, manual tasks that routinely need to be undertaken to manage these metrics. Hence the attraction of Gen AI as a tool able to generate insights at speed to transform the way organizations answer questions such as:

• What suppliers should we avoid doing business with?
• How can we make the entire bank reconciliation process touchless?
• How can we maintain oversight on the key trends relating to contracts?

With its ability to process vast amounts of data quickly and accurately, alongside the use of natural language processing to generate human-like text, the opportunities presented by Gen AI across both finance and procurement are extensive. AI agents can further enhance these processes by acting as intelligent assistants that can interact with various systems and users. They can automate routine tasks, provide real-time insights, and facilitate decision-making by integrating data from multiple sources. All of which makes the first challenge that of identifying specific use cases for delivering more dynamic operations. So, let’s take a brief look at the main candidates to help shape expectations.

Enabling a dynamic transformation of P2P

The delivery of Gen AI often involves the building of a bot to generate content for end users. This makes perfect sense for CFOs when the content supports their wider efforts to streamline processes, mitigate risk, and reduce levels of manual intervention. Hence a common starting point being the procure-to-pay (P2P) process to enable outcomes such as:

• Sourcing and procurement: analyzing supplier data (delivery times, quality standards, etc.) to identify the most reliable and cost-effective suppliers.
• Vendor invoice matching: complementing the invoice reconciliation process and augmenting vendor invoice matching to replace Optical character recognition (OCR)technologies.
• Payment anomaly detection: enabling the early identification of accounting irregularities or deviations from established policies, procedures, or thresholds.
• Financial insights: generating recurring financial reports, automating the import of data into templates, and delivering board-level insight into performance.
• Planning and analysis: reducing forecasting cycles down from weeks to minutes and conducting more sophisticated data querying from different sources.

Getting more intelligent about suppliers

Another area ripe for Gen AI utilization is vendor management. Again, the objective being to help simplify and streamline standard processes, from onboarding a new supplier to validating invoices. These processes involve vast third-party data sets, ranging from audit information, sustainability data, quotations, and even social media reviews. The result of all this data, analyzed and turned into actionable insight by Gen AI, is an elevated capability for assessing and quantifying suppliers based on the key metrics of cost and risk – alongside more time efficient processes. For CFOs, this means having a virtual assistant that can handle everything from generating financial reports to analyzing market trends, thereby freeing up time for more strategic activities.

For example, Gen AI can help select a supplier, based on detailed cost comparisons (including all related costs), then convert a request for quotation into a purchase order. It can also help detail potential supply gaps and recommend alternative suppliers – both existing and new – based on a stated risk profile. These capabilities and more are introducing new cost efficiencies to both finance and procurement teams, while easing the move toward more dynamic sourcing.

Streamlining the AP process

Alongside benefits for the P2P process comes Gen AI’s involvement in a touchless accounts payable (AP) process. The value here is easy to imagine, given the huge amount of data involved in picking the correct invoices and translating them to the required format – before the manual scrutiny even begins!

Where Gen AI offers huge potential is its ability to automatically scan all these paper invoices and extract the correct data and processing invoices – while also providing recommendations on the fields being captured. In doing so, the Gen AI bot is bringing a greater “touchless” element to AP, as it can:

• Be trained on historic data – to understand key fields and what marks an invoice as “correct” versus “problematic”
• Match invoices to purchase orders and receipts – while handling complex scenarios like partial deliveries and multiple invoices for a single order
• Clarify whether invoices are PO or non-PO based
• Route invoices for approval based on predefined rules and exceptions
• Analyze patterns and anomalies to detect potential fraud or duplicate invoices.

AI agents can also ensure compliance by continuously monitoring transactions and flagging any anomalies, thus reducing the risk of fraud and errors. By leveraging AI agents, CFOs can achieve greater efficiency, accuracy, and agility in their operations, ultimately driving better business outcomes.

The Intelligent procurement study 2024 report by Capgemini Research Institute highlights how generative AI is reshaping procurement by driving efficiency, mitigating risks, and fostering innovation in a rapidly evolving landscape. Ultimately, these capabilities are helping redefine AP workflows and are significantly cutting back on what tasks need to be completed by humans – and the time required to do them. This is a development that quickly leads to a sizeable cut in invoicing processing costs, while also helping inspire greater velocity of cash flow.

Final thoughts

It’s important to note that these Gen AI capabilities and more are already in the here and now. Capgemini has clear offerings in each area, built within the RISE with SAP framework, delivered in the SAP BTP layer, or through hyperscaler tools like Microsoft Power Platform, and available as plug and play solutions. With them, CFOs and procurement leaders can finally remove the burden associated with traditional tasks. From contract reviews and validations to fraud detection and financial forecasting, Gen AI can be called upon to do much of the heavy lifting – or at least the more time-consuming, repetitive tasks.

Not that it finishes there. Gen AI is also now able to assess the strategic insights needed by the board, reviewing key dashboards, and providing personalized summaries for those involved. This “narrative design” further reduces the time needed to pull such insights together, while automating the alignment of summary insight with key performance indicators. It’s just another example of how Gen AI is helping fast-track journeys toward the intelligent business.