For all the excitement about AI, finance leaders are focused on much more fundamental things like accurate numbers, reliable processes and time to do more valuable work.
Apparently, the future of finance is all about AI.
AI-powered forecasting, intelligent agents, automated analysis. There's no shortage of promises about how technology will transform finance.
But when Grappler's Head of Delivery, Vivienne Kang, and Platform Support Lead, Amar Kairon, attended the Finance Transformation Summit NZ this month, they came away with a somewhat different impression.
Yes, AI was on the agenda. But the conversations in the room were much more pragmatic. Finance leaders were talking about the same challenges they've been grappling with (no pun intended) for years. Spreadsheets, manual processes, unreliable data, limited visibility and the time it takes to get numbers they can trust.
Are we getting ahead of ourselves with AI when there's still so much to gain from getting the basics right?
Finance leaders are under enormous pressure to make decisions faster, forecast more accurately, manage costs and navigate an increasingly unpredictable business environment, often with smaller teams.
And they're still spending far too much time reconciling transactions, validating data, chasing information across departments and piecing together spreadsheets to understand what's really happening in the business.
This slows decision making, makes planning harder and leaves businesses less able to respond when things change.
One word that kept coming up at the summit was trust. Trust in the data, trust in the processes and, increasingly, trust in the outputs of AI.
Because in regulated industries like insurance, accuracy, accountability and financial controls aren't nice-to-haves.
And while AI has potential to help, it can't magically fix disconnected systems, inconsistent data or processes that don't work properly. Automating a bad process doesn't make it a good one.
There's nothing particularly glamorous about improving reconciliations, reducing manual data entry or making financial information easier to access. But these are often the changes that make the biggest difference to a finance team's day-to-day work.
At the summit, speakers shared practical examples of technology already delivering results, from reducing manual effort in accounts payable to simplifying financial reporting and cutting down on the time spent validating numbers and chasing spreadsheets.
The common thread was what the technology allowed people to stop doing.
Every hour spent checking numbers, correcting errors or tracking down information is an hour that can't be spent supporting the business.
For insurance finance teams, this is familiar territory. The movement of money through insurance is complicated. Premiums, claims, commissions, settlements and reconciliations create an enormous amount of financial work, much of it still handled manually.
As businesses grow, that workload grows with them. Unless the underlying processes change, finance finds itself working harder and harder just to keep up.
The conversation went beyond technology to the changing role of finance.
CFOs and their teams increasingly want to do more than crunch and report the numbers. They want to help shape business decisions, identify opportunities and play a bigger role in driving growth. That's hard to do when you're spending most of your time keeping the financial back office running.
You can't confidently advise on growth if you don't have a clear picture of your cash position. And it's hard to explore new opportunities when your team is tied up processing transactions.
This is where getting the basics right starts to make a much bigger difference.
When the numbers are reliable and the processes work, finance teams can spend less time checking what's happened and more time thinking about what should happen next.
They can spot problems earlier, help the business make decisions faster and work more closely with the people driving growth. And that changes how the rest of the business sees finance.
Finance is no longer just the team that keeps the books straight, they’re the team helping the business move forward.
AI absolutely has a role to play. There were great examples at the summit, from faster forecasting and analysis to identifying anomalies and preparing for audits.
But there was also a healthy dose of scepticism. Finance leaders want to know they can trust the technology, understand what it costs and retain human judgement where it's needed.
Perhaps that's the right approach to transformation more broadly. Start with the problem you're trying to solve, not the technology. Sometimes AI will be the answer. Sometimes it will be rules-based automation, better-connected systems or simply fixing a process that's become unnecessarily complicated.
At the end of the day the real measure of finance transformation isn't what technology can do. It's what it frees finance people to do.