Controllers Council recently held a webcast discussion on Using AI to Control Costs and Drive Growth, sponsored by Brex.
Brex is the AI-powered spend platform that provides corporate cards, banking, treasury, business accounts, and global payments, plus intuitive software for travel and expenses, that make it easy to plan and track all company spend in one place, in real time. Tens of thousands of companies from startups to global enterprises — including DoorDash, Flexport, and Compass — use Brex to proactively control spend, reduce costs, and increase efficiency on a global scale.
Our subject matter expert panelist was Erik Zhou, Chief Accounting Officer at Brex. Eric started his career in PWC’s banking and capital markets practice and built over 11 years experience working with banks, broker dealers, and large multinational financial institutions and operational management. Eric is an inactive certified public accountant who holds a BS in both accounting and finance from Georgetown University. He leverages his comprehensive financial skills and knowledge to drive Brecht’s operations towards growth and success.
Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webinar archive video here.
The finance leader’s dilemma
One thing that we want to call out is in a recent PRBC poll survey mentioned how 89% of CFOs say that one of their top priorities is to balance cost cutting and growth. It’s one of their top challenges and we’re all just being pulled in both directions.
Growth is a top priority. I will say the thing about revenue growth that goes hand in hand with cost cutting, is that revenue growth is one of the things that also solves the cost cutting problem. Meaning, you’re only cutting costs if you think the investments that you’re making into those call centers aren’t working for your top line or the general operating efficiency of your company.
It’s important to have healthy growth. It’s important to kind of sustain that growth. And it’s important to do that so that the equity of your company is valuable to shareholders and that you can run an operationally efficient business just for the foreseeable future.
But finance teams have a lot of busy work that is getting done nowadays, such as purchase orders, card transactions, invoices, day-to-day bookkeeping, etc. There’s been automation that existed for a while now, especially before with configurations that you can do within your ERPs. And then going forward, there’s been RPA or robotic process automation. And now with AI, it’s really what it’s done. It’s added a dynamic layer to existing technology to make their use cases a lot easier.
A way to control and manager spend
There is a better way to control and manage spend and it’s to automate away as much of the compliance and bookkeeping and GL mapping as you can, such as
- Proactive spend controls: manage spend before it happens with powerful card controls, customer spend limits, and AI-powered approval flows.
- Real-time view of all spend: Track every dollar spent in real time with budgets – across departments and teams, from cards to invoices.
- AI-powered automation: Automate receipts, invoices, and accounting so you can close the books faster and focus on driving growth.
Benefits of Generative AI
The thing with GenAI is that it can make that process a lot more dynamic. Here are a few examples:
- Automate busywork: Reduce manual data entry, improve accuracy, and streamline and optimize accounting functions.
- Analyze spend: Automate your flux analyses for your spend month to month, category by category, or GL account by GL account.
- Move faster: free employees from the burden of manual expense reports and give finance teams more time to focus on higher-value work.
- Forecast and place: Leverage predictive analytics for more accurate revenue, cash flow, and profitability forecasts.
- Gain market intel: Benchmark your business performance in your industry.
- Optimize strategy: Optimize pricing, product development, purchasing decision, and go-to-market strategies.
Risks of Generative AI
There are many benefits of generative AI, but not everyone is prepared to make the leap. Here are a few risks of AI:
- Change management: Depending on the maturity of your company and how long you’ve been doing the process that you have in place today, I think there is a question of, okay, if I implement some kind of change to my process, whether it’s bringing on a new system, whether it’s adding some level of GNI processing to my workflow, you know, is my team ready to do that? And do we have the resourcing to implement something new?
- Cost consideration: Some of these AI tools can be expensive. It’s like the hot thing in the market right now. Pricing is what pricing is today. Sometimes, you see a demo and it’s neat, then you see the price tag and you think to yourself, is it worth it. Maybe it is better to just get a few more offshore resources to do this work. Especially if the technology itself and the tool itself is very nascent and it hasn’t proven its ability to scale as my company will scale in all the different processes that we may develop in the future.
- Security and privacy: I think for a lot of companies, they don’t want to have an AI tool leverage their own proprietary data to then train their model for then the use of that model by other folks or competitors in the industry. And I think that’s a real concern. One thing that I think has been helpful is the creation, at least at OpenAI, of their enterprise model, where they basically partition your data and that data will then be used just for you in your instance, but it won’t be shared across the entire model for consumers or other businesses. And I think people have to get acclimated to trusting OpenAI to do that. And that’s going to take time for them to earn that trust.
To view the complete webcast, view full webinar here.
ABOUT THE SPONSOR:
Brex is the AI-powered spend platform that transform finance teams from reactive no-sayers to proactive growth drivers. With Brex, companies spend with confidence by empowering employees to make smarter financial decisions from anywhere. Brex provides corporate cards, banking, treasury, business accounts, and global payments, plus intuitive software for travel and expenses, that make it easy to plan and track all company spend in one place, in real time. Tens of thousands of companies from startups to global enterprises — including DoorDash, Flexport, and Compass — use Brex to proactively control spend, reduce costs, and increase efficiency on a global scale. Learn more at www.Brex.com.
