Editor's note: Anand Desai is the Vice President of Finance at Vic.ai, a New York-based company that provides an autonomous finance platform for accounts payable teams. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

Over the past two years, the economic environment across industries has become increasingly challenging. Rising interest rates have increased the cost of capital, budget cuts mean a smaller market share to compete for, and the demands for high performance and ideal returns have also increased.

To ensure the survival of their businesses, financial leaders have had to elevate their game and must continue to adapt in 2024 and beyond.

A New Strategic Height

Today's CFOs must be more strategic and forward-looking than ever—one might say they are becoming a kind of "Chief Future Officer." Financial leaders need a deep understanding of the business's economics, not just how the company is performing. They must understand how customers interact with products, what the competitive landscape looks like, and which levers drive efficient performance. Within the organization, no one has better insight into the factors that create value than the CFO.

And now, artificial intelligence is helping CFOs form these strategic insights to an unprecedented degree. AI accelerates the speed at which financial leaders integrate new information about business performance, generating richer, more insightful business outlooks. AI also provides financial leaders with tools to better understand and prevent risks, preserve optionality in capital allocation, and proactively address upcoming difficult decisions.

Building the Pyramid

So, how should CFOs begin to apply AI? Consider imagining all of the organization's tasks and processes as a pyramid shape.

When determining where to deploy AI, CFOs should start at the base of the pyramid. Although people have long envisioned the various problems that advanced AI might solve in the future, today's best AI solutions are trained on specific pain points, and business leaders should combine these tools to tailor solutions for their own companies and industries.

The easiest wins are in repetitive tasks: if CFOs can automate data entry-type tasks and hand them off to AI assistants, they can refocus resources on work that creates higher value for the organization.

From there, CFOs can continue moving up the pyramid—gradually transitioning from operational tasks to more strategic ones. AI is already helping financial leaders understand the overall lifecycle stage of large investments and projects. Depending on the company's maturity, AI can help CFOs enhance fraud protection, optimize investments, reduce the risk of costly compliance violations, strengthen customer service, perform risk assessments, and improve forecasting.

Taken together, AI helps CFOs gain insight into where the entire business is heading, enabling them to address risks before they occur and allocate resources in advance to achieve maximum performance and profit.

Reaching the Top with AI

As we readjust to a world where capital is no longer free, financial leaders have had to return to fundamentals. But AI is helping. In fact, AI is becoming the basic threshold for efficient, effective business performance.

The more CFOs can rely on technology to handle foundational operations quickly and autonomously, the more freedom and intelligence their organizations have to focus on innovation and competition.