Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are betting big on new age technologies like Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation, analytics, and blockchain. According to Grant Thornton Survey, companies are increasing the bet to enhance efficiency, agility, and savings of the organization.

The survey reveals that CFOs are planning to invest a huge sum in disruptive technologies to boost digital transformation.

Reportedly, the voyage of digital transformation requires a change in the mindset of C-suite executives especially CFOs for hefty investment. They must experiment with the current technologies, take up the risk and proceed towards yielding great outcomes from them.

Although CFOs are judged on the basis of financial savings and long term thinking, they need to focus on lowering labor cost and enhancing automation to accelerate productivity and efficiency.

Well, the survey also tells that advanced analytics, machine learning, optical character recognition, and AI are on the priority list of the aforementioned finance aces. CFOs are operating on use cases and handling technologies at a quick pace.

As per the data presented by the Grant Thornton report:

•  Approximately 38 percent of CFOs confirmed that they have applied advanced analytics, which was previously 24 percent last year.

•  From 7 percent in 2018, the implementation of AI has surged up to 25 percent by CFOs in 2019.

•  The implementation of blockchain by CFOs is of 22 percent.

•  Other than these, CFOs are lifting up investments on RPA, and machine learning as well.

Since the boards are insisting more on digital transformation initiatives, CFOs are betting big on emerging technologies. Additionally, as per the survey reports, nearly 90 percent of finance aces recognize CFOs as the one responsible for ensuring technology benefits. Also, 80 percent of them agree to it that technology purchase expenditure should consider quantifiable ROIs.

With the emergence of the digital savvy world, data analytics, technology purchase, innovation, customer experience and application development all count as core skills that need to be adopted for digital transformation.