“Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance.”

Here is the number that should worry you. Gartner presented data this year showing 84% of finance AI spend goes to individual productivity and process improvement. Only 16% goes to anything that materially changes a business outcome. 

Their diagnosis is the part that stuck with me. CFOs stuck in the pilot phase have built what one analyst called an accidental factory: lots of new machines, but no systems connecting them. 

I’ve written before about tool sprawl, where three products do the job of one. This is a different problem, and a harder one to see.

In an accidental factory, nothing is redundant. Every tool works. The AP automation genuinely processes invoices faster. The reporting copilot genuinely drafts the commentary. The forecasting tool genuinely runs scenarios. Each one passed its business case.

And the enterprise value doesn’t move.

Because a faster task is only worth something if it changes a decision downstream. Speed up invoice processing and you get faster invoice processing. That’s it. The benefit plateaus almost immediately unless something on the other end consumes it differently.

The evidence bears this out. In a survey of finance leaders earlier this year, only 17% reported significant or transformational value from productivity-focused AI. For investments aimed at decision quality, it was 31%. Nearly double. 

This isn’t the same as my usual argument that automating a broken process gives you a faster broken process. That’s still true. But this is worse, because the processes can be perfectly good and you still get nothing.

Two questions I’d ask about every AI line item in your budget.

Does this change a decision, or just a task? If the answer is task, be honest that you’re buying efficiency and cap your expectations accordingly.

And what consumes the output? If the faster close doesn’t reach anyone earlier, you have bought a faster close and nothing else.

Machines are easy to buy. The system connecting them is the actual work, and nobody sells it.

Look at your AI spend, what share of it changes a decision rather than a task?

#TheAccidentalCFO #FinanceTransformation #AI #FPandA #INERSEC