We know, there’s a lot of talk about AI these days. But a recent report has the kind of figures, if correct, that are hard for CFOs, or anyone, to ignore: Revenue from the generative AI market is expected to grow to $3.7 billion this year and reach $36 billion by 2028, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Despite those eye-popping stats, generative AI is still a burgeoning field. “The generative AI software market is currently in the development stage,” and many of the companies S&P Global analyzed are “still in the beta or initial launch stage with their commercial products,” Nick Patience, a managing analyst at S&P Global, wrote in the report.
Yet it’s the combination of these factors that has everyone standing to attention. A nascent, growing field with billions in potential revenue? There’s a reason more and more CFOs are taking note.
But even as 70% of corporate executives are exploring generative AI projects, per a recent Gartner study, the application of generative AI is new enough that there’s not full consensus on best practices. To that end, it helps to turn to other CFOs who are exploring generative AI’s possibilities, like Ravi Inukonda, CFO of DoorDash, who thinks AI will soon become “more and more important and part of our daily workflow.”
“Think about the next five, ten years, right? Businesses are going to get more complicated. I think there’s going to be a lot more data available for CFOs to make decisions to help drive business outcomes,” Inukonda told CFO Brew. “What I think is going to happen is, CFOs [will] need to stay at the cutting edge of using data, analytics, and AI to be able to help drive decision-making in the business as well as [in] business outcomes.”
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Right now, Inukonda is eyeing how CFOs might use generative AI to improve their accounting workflow. “We work with thousands of vendors that send us a lot of invoices,” he explained. “I imagine a future when the end-to-end process from an invoice processing perspective can be handled by generative AI.”
He’s also excited about AI’s potential to help identify trends, which would otherwise take ample time and resources, on the dashboards that he already uses on a daily basis. The key to any AI adoption, in Inukonda’s eyes, rests in how CFOs think about AI in the first place.
When AI initiatives are rolled out ineffectively, they can alienate talent, Stephanie Bell, a senior research scientist at Partnership on AI, previously told CFO Brew. Many employees are worried that AI will take away crucial aspects of their jobs, or eliminate them altogether.
With that in mind, Inukonda thinks CFOs should consider generative AI as merely “another toolkit in your arsenal” that can “accelerate change” rather than something that’s going to disrupt anyone’s professional identity or remove the work activities they enjoy.
CFOs and other leaders should focus on how these tools can drive innovation and productivity above all else, Inukonda explained. “That’s what I think is truly going to differentiate the use of these tools in many companies.”