AI Takes Cross-Departmental Collaboration to a New Level

From driver-based forecasting to spend analysis, scenario planning, financial modeling and much more, AI is entering the finance world to make tasks and projects easier, more efficient and more effective. An area that is often overlooked, however, is the extent to which AI can take cross-departmental collaboration to a new level, strengthening the business in diverse ways. 

The Value of Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Strong, productive collaborative relationships aren’t a “nice to have” feature of company culture because they give employees a warm, fuzzy feeling about their work. On the contrary, effective collaboration is a major strategic advantage for companies that can achieve it.

• Collaboration is a fact of work. Office workers spend an average of 42% of their time collaborating – reflecting its importance in professional life and achievement, and the necessity of ensuring the time is used well. 
• Persistence and hard work. A famous study from Stanford University found that participants encouraged to work together persisted for 48% longer on a challenging puzzle than the participants who were solo. Moreover, the collaborators reported they worked hard because they found it interesting, which has implications for employee satisfaction and retention. 
• High performance. A study from Babson College and the Institute for Corporate Productivity found that companies promoting collaboration were 5 times more likely to be high performers.
• Profitability. Working together increases team engagement, for 21% higher profitability and a 41% increase in customer satisfaction.

So cross-departmental collaboration is valuable in ways that matter, breaking down silos and enabling employees to see and handle both risks and opportunities in time. 

AI At Every Level, Including Collaboration

It’s not surprising to hear of AI being used in finance in the context of data analysis and management. Major British bank Lloyds isn’t paying for its senior management to take part in a six-month learning program to expand their AI capabilities for fun, but because they think that every level of an organization needs to be able to work with and understand the potential of this new technology in order for the entire company to benefit fully. 

Since collaboration is often thought of as a soft skill, however, it doesn’t seem as intuitive a candidate for technological aid. If the whole point is talking to each other, artificial intelligence seems to miss the point. 

In fact, artificial intelligence has shown itself extremely impactful in enabling teamwork. It in no way replaces the human aspect, but instead enhances it. Humans are at the core of collaborative work, but AI eases and expands collaboration. A study commissioned by Zoom found that 75% of leaders whose teams use AI report that their teams collaborate better. 

AI Enables More Investment in Collaboration

Part of the assistance AI brings with it when it comes to collaboration is the simple fact that integrating AI into work routines, tasks and workflows can save individual employees and teams huge amounts of time. 

This time can be invested into the kinds of things that professionals often feel they want to do more of but used to lack time for – such as investing in relationships and exploring opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration. 

Teams using Firmbase’s AI-first FP&A platform automate up to 80% of their manual FP&A workload, in the process freeing up time, thought and energy that can be more effectively used for strategic work that can’t be performed by a machine. 

AI Directly Empowers Improved Collaboration

As well as giving finance professionals back time in their week, AI also directly enables improved collaboration by making important tasks and processes that were once burdensome and infrequent into simple, fast actions that can be easily included into discussions and decision making. 

At Firmbase, we see this frequently through our customers, who use our platform to do things like:

• Use AI agents to create forecasts and plan new scenarios 10x faster than before, meaning these activities can become a regular element of mapping out possibilities and their ramifications during strategic and cross-departmental sessions.
• Automate reporting for smarter insights meaning that multiple departments or leaders can receive regular updates about developments that should inform their work and plans.
• Instantly identify data and modeling errors so that teams no longer spend hours chasing down an error weeks or even months after it was first made, and then further time correcting any mistaken calculations or assumptions based on the incorrect information. The reality is that the work of one department inevitably impacts others, so relationships and work are far smoother when these situations are avoided.
• Build models in minutes to test, analyze and explore different options, ideas and implications. This can be done both to investigate historical data and to make predictions about future scenarios.
• Create clearer budgets in collaboration with diverse stakeholders. Budgeting is a high pressure process no matter how you do it, but using AI can take a lot of the drama out of it. Clarity about BvA, KPI reporting, scenario planning etc. means both that the process is impersonal and that it’s based on mutually shared and agreed on data. 

There’s no coding ability, technical expertise, special learning or course required for any of this. AI has reached a level of sophistication that makes it easy, intuitive and impactful for any professional who knows their own job well. AI, in a sense, takes care of the details we all used to wish we had an assistant to handle. 

Faster and More Frequent Can Become a Whole New Level

AI enables finance teams to bring their expertise to bear for the benefit of the company in ways that simply weren’t possible before. 

It would not have been possible to get instant answers about how a change in pricing might affect various aspects of the business, as part of a discussion about pricing. It would not have been possible to get a real-time, data-based summary of the company’s cash flow position in a meeting. No one could get a projection for the ROI of proposed capital expenditure projects simply by typing the question into an agent. 

It’s not that the projections, analysis, reports, etc. were not possible beforehand. But they would have taken a lot of human time and effort and, therefore, were not undertaken lightly or on a whim, and could not be integrated into ordinary meetings and discussions. 

The ability of AI to bring this level of detailed insight and information into everyday business conversations elevates the role of every professional who uses it in this way. Instead of guesses or assumptions which need to be laboriously checked (if it is determined to be worth confirming them), questions are immediately followed by accurate answers leading to data-driven plans. 

It’s collaboration the way it was always meant to be, an excellent example of how artificial intelligence can enable human intelligence to shine and deliver results.