The 4 Finance Processes Moving to AI in 2025
The AI revolution is transforming finance operations in ways that were once unimaginable, streamlining processes, enhancing accuracy, and accelerating decision-making. The adoption rate of AI among finance leaders is rapidly increasing, with over 80% of CFOs now actively investing in AI-based solutions, according to the KPMG Gen AI Innovation Playbook. This shift indicates that financial leaders see AI as integral to staying competitive and reducing inefficiencies in finance workflows. So how can you and your team begin to adopt AI in ways that matter to your company?
Here’s a breakdown of four critical financial processes moving toward AI in the coming year:
1. Accounts Receivable Automation
AI-driven automation is significantly impacting accounts receivable (AR) processes. Intelligent process automation, already used by 44% of finance functions, leverages AI to not only reach out to customers at the right time to collect payment, but also predict when customers will pay to maximize cash flow performance. ). Leveraging AI for collections allows for faster and more accurate invoicing, payments, and collections, reducing manual errors and speeding up cash flow cycles. By 2025, expect the majority of AR tasks to be handled by AI, resulting in greater efficiency and cost savings.
Many finance professionals may fear that adopting AI in AR could compromise customer relationships, believing that automation could lead to impersonal or delayed interactions. However, with the right practitioners AI can actually enhance these relationships by improving timeliness, accuracy, and personalized communication. By automating routine tasks such as invoice generation, payment tracking, and follow-ups, AI enables finance teams to provide customers with faster responses and more accurate information. For instance, AI can instantly identify overdue payments, trigger automated reminders, and even predict when a customer might pay based on their previous behavior, leading to more proactive and efficient communication. According to Bain & Company, AI empowers finance teams to engage with customers more effectively, offering them tailored, accurate information quickly — building trust through supercharged service and excellent information.
2. AI-Driven Insights and Forecasting
Generative AI is revolutionizing financial forecasting, shifting away from outdated manual data entry processes. Traditionally, forecasting required extensive data entry and collaboration across teams, often leading to “fat fingering” errors or misaligned inputs. But with AI, KPMG predicts an 80% increase in forecasting accuracy and a 15x faster financial close process.
Take NVIDIA, for example, which implemented AI forecasting tools and observed an 86% positive impact on revenue and a 50% reduction in operational costs due to better decision-making speed. AI allows finance teams to visualize future trends with more confidence and build strategies rooted in real-time, accurate data.
While all Finance teams today have a process in place for forecasting, they should be excited about the opportunities with AI to automate data collection across AR and AP, removing the ability to fat finger a cell or wait for team members to provide input, etc
3. AP Portal Monitoring:
For finance teams, handling Accounts Payable (AP) often means toggling between multiple vendor portals, leading to fragmented data and time-consuming reconciliation. AI-powered AP Portal Monitoring solutions like Tesorio’s are bringing all AP data under one roof, giving companies a real-time, single view of their payment obligations. A study by Accenture found that automated AP processes cut payment errors by 63% and reduce processing times by over 50% (KPMG).
Pro Tip: Ingesting and processing data from disparate sources can be a pain point when it comes to setting up your automated finance command center. Tesorio integrates with everything from your ERP, to your CRM, to your email inbox.
4.Unified Data for Strategic Decisions:
Perhaps the biggest advantage of AI in finance is its ability to bring disparate data together, creating a unified view of all financial activities. When AR, AP, and general ledger data are seamlessly integrated, it eliminates reconciliation bottlenecks, cuts down errors, and enables teams to collaborate more efficiently.
This data cohesion, according to Gartner, helps companies respond to market changes 60% faster, giving finance teams a strategic edge over those bogged down by disconnected data. According to that same Gartner study, companies with unified data systems report a 30% increase in productivity across finance teams and make decisions 20% faster than companies relying on manual reconciliation methods. So not only is your data correct, but everyone is looking at the same data and working from the same set of assumptions.
Conclusion
These four areas exemplify real-life ways in which AI is enhancing financial processes, reducing risk, and unlocking new efficiencies across finance teams. For finance leaders, the ability to access accurate, real-time data is a game-changer, empowering strategic decisions with unprecedented precision.
The move to AI in these areas isn’t just about saving time; it’s about setting a foundation for future financial resilience and growth. Much like the upgrade from paper ledgers to computer-powered bookkeeping, AI represents an extreme paradigm shift and a “new normal” when it comes to computational and analytic power available to finance and accounting teams. Business leaders who neglect to understand and embrace this reality while others use it to supercharge their teams will be left behind.
Ready to explore how AI can transform your financial operations? Learn more about Tesorio’s innovative platform and see how we’re helping finance teams stay ahead of the curve.