If you think the cloud ERP market’s hot already, picture this: with only 10% of finance teams currently equipped to harness and exploit the power of AI, the cloud ERP business is set to soar as more finance teams inevitably begin using the AI tools and capabilities central to the modern apps from market leaders Oracle, Workday and SAP.
A study of more than 700 finance leaders from across the globe discovered that while there’s an indisputable correlation between AI deployments AI and revenue growth, “89 percent of organizations have not deployed AI in the finance function and only 10 percent of finance teams believe they have the skills to support the organization’s digital ambitions.”
Here at the dawn of the digital economy, that’s very bad news indeed for those companies in the 90% whose finance organizations are lagging behind the rapid advances in digital lifestyles among consumers and digital operations among businesses.
But as those laggards face the inevitable and begin to take aggressive action to come up to speed in today’s digitally driven world, two scenarios point to a boom for cloud ERP vendors, which I analyzed in detail six weeks ago in Oracle, SAP and Workday Driving Red-Hot Cloud ERP Market Growth into 2019:
First, those behind-the-curve companies might feel they have no recourse but to try to jumpstart their modernization efforts by switching to cloud ERP applications into which AI and other modern tools have already been built; and
Second, some of those might bring in new tech-savvy CFOs who will realize that modern cloud ERP applications are essential in today’s high-volume, high-velocity and high-change marketplace.
In either case, the three companies currently leading the way in cloud ERP—Oracle, Workday and SAP—are in strong positions to capitalize on what I would call an inevitable reversal in how finance teams look at and execute upon their work and their contributions to modern end-to-end digital enterprises.
But that’s much easier said than done, as these details from a press release about the study indicate:
- 46 percent of tech-savvy finance leaders report positive revenue growth, compared with only 29 percent of tech-challenged leaders;
- companies that are growing are more likely to be deploying AI (seems obvious in today’s world, but this underscores the need for CEOs to be the primary drivers of digital-first thinking); and
- only 11% of finance leaders have implemented AI solutions in their organizations, according to the research conducted by the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants and Oracle.
Of course, simply buying an enterprise app isn’t the solution—that requires strategic vision and leadership, intense collaboration across all involved teams, and in this case an unconditional commitment from the CFO to make her/his organization a world-class performer with the modern digital technologies that are essential in today’s economy.
And as more and more of the 90% that lack requisite skills undertake the aggressive commitment to fix that glaring deficiency, Oracle (last quarter, said Fusion Cloud ERP revenue was up 44%), Workday, SAP and others will be more than happy to jump in and show the way forward with modern cloud ERP solutions built from the ground up with AI, machine learning and more.
Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Oracle and SAP are clients of Evans Strategic Communications LLC.
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