Artificial intelligence is making a real impact in corporate finance, but its success depends on a strategic and disciplined approach. This was a key theme emphasized by senior finance leaders from major U.S. companies such as Alphabet, Meta, HP, IBM, and ServiceNow during an online conference hosted last week by Financial Executives International.

The event, held from November 13 to 15, explored the "challenges and emerging opportunities" reshaping modern finance teams, with AI taking center stage on the third day. Attendees shared lessons learned from their organizations' AI initiatives, with a general consensus that a cautious, methodical approach is critical.

"I think embedding responsible technology principles and governance throughout the entire process—from design and deployment to monitoring—will become a true differentiator for companies in the long run," said Denise Lucas, Vice President and Assistant Comptroller at IBM, during a Thursday panel discussion focused on strategic use cases for AI in finance functions.

Several speakers emphasized the importance of keeping a "human in the loop" in AI deployments. Danielle Fontaine, Assistant Comptroller at ServiceNow, said of the company's AI strategy: "We are being thoughtful and cautious." According to Fontaine, ServiceNow's revenue accounting team is currently using a third-party contract review tool based on natural language processing and generative AI to optimize the order-to-cash process.

"At the end of each quarter, our team is extremely stretched," she said. "So we want to ensure that complex or unusual transactions receive appropriate attention, while standard contracts flow through smoothly." The tool extracts data and automatically generates revenue contract review checklists, enabling the team to "quickly know where to focus their efforts." Fontaine added: "Currently, all checklists generated by the tool require human review, because the inherent risk of improper revenue recognition is high."

Lucas also shared IBM's experience using AI in expense forecasting. Joe Bohnert, Head of Innovation Architecture at Meta, described an AI use case involving the company's prepaid accounting process. Earlier that day, during another panel on digital transformation, other finance-related AI use cases were showcased, including how HP's credit and collections team uses agentic AI to resolve customer payment disputes more quickly.

Meg Dholabhai, Head of Global Finance Transformation at HP, said the company always asks first when starting a process or workflow transformation project: "What problem are we trying to solve?" She emphasized: "Technology is secondary." This view was echoed by Saqib Baig, Chief Accounting Officer and CFO of the commercial business at fitness equipment company Peloton.

"We've all seen firsthand that when you try to digitize a suboptimal business process, you're essentially creating long-term technical debt," Baig said. "So getting the order right is crucial." Amie Thuener, Chief Accounting Officer and Corporate Comptroller at Alphabet, noted that before advancing transformation efforts, one must have "very high-quality, clean data" and "know where the data resides."