In AI’s wake, what challenges need to be addressed by finance professionals?
Patrice Bouexel explores how AI and automation are impacting employee expectations and behaviours in the wider financial ecosystem.
In the rapidly evolving financial ecosystem, AI and automation are playing a significant role in shaping employee expectations and behaviours, said Patrice Bouexel, general manager for Europe at Sis ID. Companies are grappling to meet these expectations, as finance teams are pressured to do more with the same headcount and faster than ever before.
According to Gartner, AI adoption in finance rose from 37% in 2023 to 58% in 2024, while Deloitte's global survey of over 1,300 finance leaders found that adopting new technology, including AI, was a top priority for 48% of respondents.
Bouexel emphasised that for most companies, automation is no longer a nice-to-have feature, but a baseline expectation among boards and investors. They view it as a central way of managing risk and cost. However, the challenges for modern-day finance professionals go beyond the introduction of new technologies. Ensuring high-quality data and proper governance is crucial.
"The gap sits between deploying a tool and trusting what it produces. Organisations that get this right treat automation as a governance exercise first," Bouexel explained.
Skills are also a significant challenge, as AI, automation, data analysis, and technology integration are becoming critical for experts in this field. "Automation succeeds when finance teams are given the time and training to own the exception cases, not just the software licence," he added. Additionally, relying on AI and automation for financial data is risky.
"An automated process will execute a bad instruction just as efficiently as a good one. If a vendor record is outdated, if bank details were changed without proper verification or if a duplicate invoice slipped through months ago, automation does not catch that. It accelerates it."
The real goal, according to Bouexel, is prevention rather than cleaning up a mess once it has already happened. In the face of fraud, AI, and regulation reshaping payment security, Bouexel advised finance leaders to focus on three areas. First, they should separate process risk from technology risk. Second, they need to build AI literacy into finance teams to develop a human-based tech skillset. Lastly, they should treat regulatory change as a floor, not a ceiling.
Written by urgent.news from Silicon Republic's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
