The world of connected finance descended on Atlanta, GA this week during Radiance 2023 hosted by HighRadius, a large conference for the CFO offices of various-sized companies.
Radiance 2023 featured the digital convergence of finance transformation, digital future for the office of the CFO, end-to-end transformation and delivering competitive customer experiences, among other focuses.
During the first day of the event, as attendees moved about the field at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, several overlapping panels and discussions shaped the conversation around connected finance and its marketplace.
When looking at the degree to which connected finance and finance transformation have altered the landscape for the OCFO, understanding macroeconomic trends plays a key role.
During a panel discussing macroeconomic trends and forecasts, Dr. Chris Kuehl, managing director at Armada Corporate Intelligence, spoke about the role inflation plays in the global economy. Every central bank pays attention to inflation and it is the mandate of the central banks to raise rates until “they break something,” Kuehl said, then they start lowering rates to fix what was broken.
“So, the first thing they have to figure out is ‘have we broken enough of the economy to be able to back off on rate hikes,’ and about December of last year, you began to see a peek over inflation,” said Kuehl.
An area of concern for every business sector that was also highlighted during the conference is a worker shortage. Businesses are having a difficult time staffing people with skills necessary and it’s skewing how we look at employment because, as Dr. Kuehl says: we’re not seeing the behaviors that you would normally see running up into any kind of economic downturn.
According to Kuehl, manufacturers that he’s consulted with said they could have layoffs, but they’re not letting people go who have skills that are difficult to replace. It’s keeping the unemployment rate low.
The Age of AI
Automation software and AI have also had a significant impact on macroeconomic trends and the workforce. Founder and CEO of HighRadius Sashi Narahari declared during Radiance that the next revolution will be intelligent.
“If you just think about the history of time—the industrial revolution, the internet revolution—I think the next decade is the intelligent revolution,” Narahari told attendees. “AI will be the next leader.”
Narahari said during an Age of AI panel that we’ve done a generally good job with commercialization of AI, but we have done a poor job in understanding the evolution of human roles.
“This is something that we’ve been thinking about for the last two to three years,” he said. “All the feedback we get from our customers we kind of made an afterthought, and we need to do a much better job.”
Narahari explained that there are roughly eight billion people in the world and 3.3 billion people work in a corporate job, but there are only 27 million software developers. HighRadius itself develops autonomous software, which are cloud-based solutions for the Office of the CFO.
All the rules-based processing is going to machine learning and AI algorithms with data continuously changing, and it needs to adapt, according to Narahari. He says that organizations will need to deliver an experience where the humans and machines can effectively interact. It’s not that AI will replace the worker, but rather it is a tool that a worker will be expected to utilize, or they could be replaced.
Overall, the first day of Radiance 2023 was an immersive experience in learning how to utilize emerging technology to create error-proof credit and collections policies, overcoming I2C challenges, improving customer experience, among other discussions catered to assisting the CFO.
Description: The first day of Radiance 2023, an event hosted by HighRadius, focused on the digital convergence of finance transformation, end-to-end transformation, delivering competitive customer experiences, and several other aspects.
