CFOs have ambitious plans to reach a state of autonomous finance within the next three to six years that will require a significant reshaping of finance team structures to achieve, according to Gartner, Inc.
“Most finance leaders, including many CFOs, are ill-equipped to identify and address the rapidly evolving digital skills needed in finance,” said Shannon Cole, senior director analyst, research in the Gartner Finance practice. “Expertise in traditional finance topics, while valuable, does not prepare leaders to train staff to execute on capabilities, such as deploying bots, machine learning, and AI algorithms.”
Autonomous finance is a target operating model that CFOs are seeking to deliver finance capabilities through processes and activities that are partly governed, and majority operated by self-learning software agents that optimize front-, middle- and back-office operations (see Figure 1).