Digitalization, Automation & Finance function in near future

Every other digital automation story starts with self-driving car taking you from work to home; as you are about to reach home, IOT turns on your air-condition; fixes your sandwich; prepares your bath; orders your groceries and so on.

What about as we leave home for office of-course in our self-driving battery operated clean car; wouldn’t it nice our day’s work is planned a way before we reach office? All emails, messages are sorted out, summarized as we enter the car; replies and responses are prepared in advance based on how we have responded in past and Artificial Intelligence will play an important role. All we have to do is review and instruct to make changes and send the communication. As we approach the office car estimates the arrival time and coordinates with other cars and schedules the meetings, reviews etc.

For CFO organization future looks very disruptive and promising in digital age of office automation and robotics. Our beloved XLS is facing serious threat of digital... With onslaught of digital, anything and everything that is manual will be digitized and all tools will move away from XLS to online. So far most of organization’s finance function has implemented and using big ERPs, finance applications, but lot of these tools & applications are still working in silos and not integrated at all. Finance departments put lot of effort in pulling data/reports from a number of sources and spend disproportionate time in collating data which can be used for decision making. We all use XLS pivot tables to accomplish our day to day jobs. All of this is going to change in future, where most of the tools & apps will be integrated and instead of getting a number of reports/data, a meaningful information with recommendation will come out which will help CFO organization in financial planning, execution and decision making. Desktop automation and robotics will optimize and eliminate lot of manual jobs in AP, AR, GL functions. Financial planning, budgeting, audit, investor relations, statutory reports, tax prep/filling work will be completely automated, only decision making will be done by experts.

Other tasks such as office meeting rooms, travel booking, T&E submission, reimbursement etc. will be fully automated and our car will automatically book flights, hotels reading our email invitation and submit bills for reimbursement & follow up with payments….