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Artificial intelligence is bringing many benefits to finance, from balance sheet accuracy to more powerful forecasts in the supply chain. And for a CFO, AI offers something invaluable: adding more time to his day.
Using AI to automate repetitive manual tasks such as data entry and invoice processing can open up opportunities for finance leaders to focus on financial planning, analysis and more strategic work, says Johnson & said Joseph Wolk, Executive Vice President and CFO. Johnson.
In a conversation with an MIT Sloan economist At the 21st annual MIT Sloan CFO Summit, Wolk said AI is poised to “free up time for people in finance to make better decisions.”
“At Johnson & Johnson, and especially in finance, we have a small belief: We are business leaders with financial expertise,” Wolk said. “Financial expertise is secondary to helping companies solve problems.”
As for how AI has rapidly gained global acceptance, Johnson attributed its adoption to its “fun factor” and existing infrastructure.
“We’re already building digital rails that will allow us to instantly distribute this product anywhere,” Johnson said. “You may need to scale up in some respects in terms of bandwidth, but most of the time you don’t need to scale up. Most of the time it’s readily available.”
Johnson is co-author of Power and Progress: Our 1,000-year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, which explores the history of AI and other historic technological transformations.
“I think AI offers a real opportunity to do something different: run the finance function better and help businesses invest and grow revenue. [and] It’s about making shareholders happy and creating better jobs,” Johnson said.
In their talk, Johnson and Wolk identified four use cases for AI in finance.
Predict supply chain disruptions in real time
Artificial intelligence is already being used to streamline supply chain kinks across manufacturing, distribution, and delivery. In the future, Wolk said, he believes AI will become even more useful in making predictions. This is invaluable in the medical field, where having a responsive supply chain can “save lives,” he said.
“What I hope AI will evolve for us is to get more involved in the predictive side of things,” Wolk said. One example is using predictive analytics to identify and predict potential disruptions in the supply chain in real time.
“We need to know when a medical device leaves a hospital supply room, or when a drug or biologic leaves a pharmacy. [and] It needs to be replaced,” he said. “We should know that [in] Real time; these are some of the huge benefits. ”
Reducing drug development costs
Wolk said AI could reduce drug development costs by increasing the likelihood of matching the right patient to the right clinical trial. In the healthcare field, researchers are already using machine learning algorithms to identify existing drugs that have the potential to treat various diseases.
“If you think about what these algorithms can do in a very short period of time compared to just four or five years ago, we can now match and recruit patients who are more likely to respond to them into clinical trials. It’s a form of therapy,” Wolk said. Although the practice is not yet widespread, “I think it has potential,” he says.
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Reduce the burden of compliance
Across its various locations, AI is helping J&J stay compliant and better manage legacy systems with better integration and “more certainty in the financial reports we approve,” Wolk said. says.
J&J operates in 170 countries around the world, which could create compliance issues, he said, adding, “You can imagine there are different types of accounting.” . AI is helping the company clean up its data and make “significant progress in data integrity.”
expand human capabilities
MIT Sloan’s Johnson said there are “a lot of very interesting possibilities” for using technology to augment human capabilities, especially for workers without formal education.
He conducted a joint study at Stanford University and MIT that found that contact center agents who had access to conversational assistants were 14% more productive on average, with the greatest benefit being experienced by new or low-skilled employees. I gave an example. “Inexperienced customer service reps are better,” Johnson says. “They like their jobs better. The people they’re helping are more satisfied, and turnover is lower in such positions.”
While Wolk extolled the potential benefits of AI, he reiterated his belief that humans will always be important to the healthcare industry. “I can diagnose things. [with AI]But unless someone is looking over the chart, something could be missed. ” In other words, there is still a lot of progress left to make, Wolk said.
Read next: Build better KPIs using artificial intelligence
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