FEI Daily Managing Editor Olivia Berman spoke with Marc Rind, Chief Data Scientist and VP of Product Development at ADP and keynote speaker at the conference regarding his views on the ways new technologies are disrupting the way financial leaders will work in the future.
Oliva Berkman: How is automaton changing the role of the financial executive?
Marc Rind: Some of the areas of finance, some of the positions that are being disrupted through automation, there are many, but at different levels.
Any process that is repeatable. There might be report outputs or analysis. It could be things like approvals, workflows. These are things that machines do extremely well, and in a fashion, that can be repeated to leave the human to do the higher-level thinking.
Where I see finance positions changing and being disrupted is more on the side of analysis, identification of where the problems might be. And what I hope to see is finance being freed up to do more of the higher level thinking that humans do very well, from the analysis and judging the business impact versus the moving the ball forward. A lot of the regular finance positions that can be helped with automation.
Berkman: What will all this change mean to the CFO role?
Rind; I think the CFO position in the next five to 10 years will change dramatically. I think the finance arm of the business function has always been obviously very data-centric. What I do think is going to change for the CFO is the ability to have insights pushed to them based on what the data findings are, to allow for that CFO to go in and have people dig in deeper.
Not just identify where the areas are, but what do we do about it? What are some strategies we can take to adjust it? I think the CFO position will change in looking at the data that they have at their disposal to help decide and a strategy going forward.
Today it might be gut feel. There's going to be a lot of data involved, but also having data to show what others have done in the past to work through issues or strategies or business outcomes that they're looking for to help inform strategies for them going forward into the future