Will AI Take Your Job?

The question—Will I lose my job to AI?—comes up often in conversations I have with finance professionals. Interestingly, it’s most often asked by those who know little or nothing about AI.

Once people start learning and experimenting, they begin to see its limitations. This understanding replaces fear with clarity and confidence, giving them a sense of control. Another shift happens as they progress on their AI journey—they realize they are now ahead of the competition. 

In this week’s newsletter, I’m sharing insights on which jobs are more likely to be impacted by AI. Spoiler: even if you’re in the AI-safe group, now is not the time to relax.

The Balanced View: Navigating Job Disruption and Security in the Age of AI

AI is reshaping the finance sector, bringing both opportunities and challenges. As automation becomes more capable, some roles face significant changes, while others are likely to thrive by leveraging AI.

AI’s impact isn’t uniform across all finance roles. It depends on the type of activity you perform. Here's how I break it down:

Routine Manual Tasks: AI Is Coming for These

Think about activities like:

• Account reconciliations

• Month-end closings

• Invoice verification

• Bill processing

These tasks follow consistent rules, involve little creativity, and are prime candidates for automation. AI can already handle many of these functions, and its capabilities are only growing.

Exception: If your manual tasks involve substantial communication—like working through complex invoice discrepancies with vendors—your role is safer for now. AI isn’t yet great at nuanced, human-centric conversations.

Takeaway: If most of your work fits into this category, start upskilling immediately.

Expertise-Driven, Data-Intensive Tasks: You’re Essential, But Expect Pressure

This category includes:

• Financial analysts conducting M&A assessments

• Business analysts creating complex financial models

• Data analysts processing large datasets

• Finance business partners combining insights into reports and recommendations

Here, AI won’t replace you but will become your productivity partner. Tasks like extracting insights, preparing drafts, and performing basic analyses will become faster with AI. For example, a report that used to take three days may now be completed in three hours​​.

Your expertise remains critical, but the expectation for speed and efficiency will skyrocket. AI will handle the groundwork, but your strategic thinking and interpretation will make the final product valuable.

Takeaway: Stay ahead by mastering AI tools for data analysis and reporting. By leveraging AI, you can meet rising expectations without burning out.

Strategic and Managerial Roles: Safe but Transformed

If your work involves:

• Decision-making

• Collaborating with various stakeholders

• Building and structuring processes

• Building, coaching, and managing teams

AI won’t replace these roles—it can’t replicate the nuanced judgment and leadership these positions require. However, the demand for efficiency will trickle up. Finance executives, for instance, will need to make faster decisions and structure more agile processes.

Takeaway: Focus on your leadership, strategic thinking, and team-building skills. These are areas where AI can assist but not replace you. Use AI to free up time for higher-value tasks like coaching and innovation.

When You’re Safer in Your Role

Your role is more secure if:

• You have niche expertise and excel in your field.

• Your company has messy processes or data: AI needs structure to function, so these organizations have a longer path to automation.

• Your role involves frequent communication, especially in-person meetings, negotiations, or relationship-building. Just be mindful—are these meetings genuinely valuable?

• You manage or mentor teams: While AI can analyze performance or suggest hiring criteria, the human touch in leadership remains irreplaceable.

• Your tasks vary significantly day-to-day: AI struggles with unpredictability and roles that require wearing multiple hats.

It’s time to rethink your position if:

• You spend most of your day processing data and documents or creating similar reports.

• Your work is highly repetitive and rule-based.

• You act as a middleman connecting people to information.
  

Action Step: Reflect and Prepare for Change

If you fall into the “less safe” category, start identifying areas where you can add more strategic value or build communication-driven expertise.

Change is coming faster than you might think. AI solutions don’t take long to implement, and within months, you could find AI doing 80% of your tasks. The pressure for productivity will increase, and expectations will rise. There will be no room for excuses—only opportunities for those prepared to adapt.

Case Study: AI-Enhanced Credit Management

Context and Challenges
A B2B company working with high-value clients faced a complex credit management process. Determining payment terms for new clients or contract extensions was a balancing act. The sales team, CFO, and sometimes other departments had to negotiate between winning business and managing the risk of bad debt.

The company’s credit policies were straightforward in theory: upfront payments for low-credit or new clients and up to 90-day payment delays for insured or reliable customers. However, practical implementation was often slow and inefficient:

• Sales Bottleneck: The sales team had to justify requests for extended terms to the CFO, who would then gather credit data from external sources like credit bureaus. This process often took days, delaying deals and costing potential revenue.

• Collections Tension: When clients were late on payments, the finance team would follow up directly, sometimes harming the client relationship. The client success team was frustrated by this approach and felt it damaged trust.

Additionally, the company had unwritten rules for handling credit terms based on clients’ payment behavior. Diligent clients with a history of timely payments could be granted extended payment terms, while those with a record of late payments faced stricter terms. This added complexity to an already cumbersome process.

The AI Implementation Process

Mapping the Process and Data:
The first step was to map out the credit management workflow and identify key data points. This included:

• Credit management policies

• Client payment history and classifications

• Data from credit insurance portals

• Historical credit decisions made by the CFO, including informal rules tied to client payment behavior

Building the AI-Powered Knowledge Base:
The team created a Custom GPT trained with vast amounts of company-specific data. This included:

• Policy documents

• Client payment behaviors and credit classifications

• Exported credit ratings from external portals

• Historical decision-making patterns from the CFO

The knowledge base was regularly updated. Custom GPT was designed to consider both formal policies and behavior-based patterns when generating recommendations for credit terms.

Empowering the Sales Team:
The AI became a decision-making helper, enabling sales representatives to:

• Instantly check a client’s payment discipline and classification before negotiations or routine client check-ins.

• Receive a preliminary decision on payment term extensions and credit limits without involving the finance team.

• Access a detailed summary of the client’s credit situation for cases requiring CFO approval, speeding up the final decision-making process.

Integrating with Slack:
To further streamline the workflow, the Custom GPT was integrated with Slack. This allowed all involved teams to interact with the system effortlessly:

• Sales and finance teams could place credit requests directly in Slack.

• Notifications were automatically sent for key updates, such as late payment alerts, changes in credit ratings, or decisions on credit term requests.

• This real-time communication ensured that everyone stayed informed without needing to rely on lengthy email threads or meetings.

  
  The Outcome

• Faster Decision-Making: The AI reduced the decision-making process from days to hours, allowing deals to close faster and eliminating sales bottlenecks.

• Enhanced Collaboration: Slack integration fostered seamless team communication, improving overall efficiency.

• Improved Client Relationships: AI flagged overdue invoices and suggested follow-up actions. Instead of the finance team directly chasing payments, the client success team could more tactfully address payment delays, preserving relationships.

• Consistency and Transparency: Historical decisions and behavior-based rules embedded in the AI ensured consistent credit decisions, reducing subjective biases.

This project highlighted that even a non-obvious process like credit management can be enhanced with AI when approached thoughtfully. By targeting and resolving a critical bottleneck, the company achieved faster, more transparent decision-making while preserving all key controls—every custom payment terms clause still required CFO sign-off.

While it’s too early to quantify the full financial impact, the project is expected to significantly reduce late payments and, ideally, eliminate bad debt. Given the high stakes of working with large clients, this improvement is expected to greatly enhance cash flow stability and mitigate the financial risks associated with potential client defaults.

If you’re considering implementing a similar solution or need help identifying the best AI use cases in your operations, schedule a free consultation with me—I’d be happy to help you explore AI’s potential and tailor strategies to enhance your financial processes.

AI Tool Spotlight: Integrating AI into Your Workflows

One advanced way to leverage public AI models like ChatGPT or Claude is to integrate them with your existing tools through router software such as Zapier or Make.com. These platforms act as bridges, enabling seamless connections between AI tools and your software ecosystem without requiring extensive coding or infrastructure changes.

By embedding AI directly into your workflows, you can supercharge efficiency and collaboration.

In the earlier example, we showed how integrating Slack with ChatGPT transformed a company’s credit management process.

Here are some other use cases tailored to common finance challenges:

• Email Integration: Automate vendor and client communication with Gmail or Outlook by drafting replies, summarizing email threads, or preparing financial updates.

• ERP Integration: Connect AI to ERP systems like NetSuite to flag anomalies, generate financial insights, or streamline approvals.

• Accounting Automation: Use AI in platforms like QuickBooks or Xero to automate reconciliations, classify transactions, or create summary reports.

• Slack Integration: Enable Slack to handle notifications, requests, and updates to automate workflows and keep all teams aligned.

When I work with my clients, I always test AI outputs before integrating the AI into workflows. This means manually uploading data and refining prompts to ensure the AI delivers accurate, reliable results. Fine-tuning the prompts at this stage is critical.

Once the results meet expectations, we move to process integration. The router tools are relatively easy to use and don’t require any coding skills.

Closing Thoughts

So, will AI take your job? Maybe. Will AI change your job? Absolutely.

The reality is that no matter where you fall on the spectrum of finance roles, the way we work is evolving—and AI is at the heart of it. Depending on how you act, AI can either become your most valuable assistant or the tool that replaces you.

Think about your workflows: What process frustrates you the most? What bottleneck consistently holds your team back? Start there. Experiment with AI, refine your approach and integrate it where it matters most.

Remember, being proactive is your competitive edge. If you’re unsure where to begin or want help identifying the best opportunities for AI in your operations, let’s connect. Change is happening quickly, and those who embrace it thoughtfully will be the ones leading the charge.

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Until next Tuesday, keep balancing!

Anna Tiomina 
AI-Powered CFO