UK finance leaders upbeat on tech investment and AI potential
UK CFOs are getting more positive on AI and digital. A recent survey shows 59% of the largest UK businesses are more optimistic about AI's impact on their own performance than a year ago, up from 39% in Q3 2024. And 96% expect investment in digital technology and assets to rise over the next five years.
Optimism is useful. Returns are better. The question is where to point spend, how to prove value fast, and how to manage the risks without slowing momentum.
Where spend is likely to flow
- Data foundations: Clean, governed data pipelines; identity resolution; metadata and access controls.
- Automation of back office: AP/AR, close, reconciliations, policy checks, and case triage.
- Forecasting and FP&A: Driver-based models, short-term cash forecasting, scenario testing.
- Risk and controls: Transaction monitoring, anomaly detection, model validation, audit trail generation.
- Commercial analytics: Pricing, churn risk, sales pipeline quality, marketing mix efficiency.
Make ROI visible early
Treat AI like any other capital allocation bet. Stage-gate it, instrument it, and shut down what doesn't compound.
- Core KPIs: Cycle time, cost per transaction, forecast accuracy, working capital turns, SLA hit rate.
- Time-to-value: 90-day pilots with a single use case and a hard baseline.
- Adoption: Track actual user engagement, not just licenses provisioned.
Build vs buy: control the economics
Most teams will blend off-the-shelf tools with a light internal layer. Keep architecture open to avoid lock-in.
- Contracts: Usage-based pricing caps, clear egress terms, audit rights, exit plans.
- FinOps: Tag cloud spend, set budgets and alerts, right-size models and inference endpoints.
- Data risk: Ring-fence sensitive data, use private endpoints, enforce least privilege.
Accounting and tax treatment
Get policies straight before spend ramps. Capitalize qualifying software and development where criteria are met; expense configuration and routine operations. Test for impairment and document amortization lives and methods.
Review R&D relief eligibility for qualifying development. Align procurement, engineering, and finance on what gets capitalized versus expensed to avoid rework at close.
Governance without drag
Speed matters, but so do controls. Set lightweight, repeatable checks so teams can ship safely.
- Model risk: Validation standards, drift monitoring, versioning, fallback plans.
- Compliance: Records retention, explainability expectations, third-party risk, privacy impact assessments.
- Security: Data classification, encryption, key management, secrets hygiene.
People: upskill finance and put AI where work happens
Tools don't move numbers without adoption. Train analysts, accountants, and controllers on prompt quality, data awareness, and tool usage inside their daily workflows.
- AI tools for finance to scout quick wins.
- Role-based AI courses to standardize skills across teams.
A 90-day CFO plan
- Weeks 1-2: Pick two use cases with clear baselines (e.g., invoice cycle time, cash forecast MAPE). Assign owners.
- Weeks 3-6: Run pilots, wire KPIs into dashboards, set guardrails, and lock cost controls.
- Weeks 7-10: Decide scale/kill. Negotiate pricing based on real usage. Start training at the task level.
- Weeks 11-13: Publish results, update capitalization policy if needed, and queue the next three use cases.
The signal is clear: capital is shifting to digital and AI. The edge goes to teams that quantify impact fast, keep costs honest, and build repeatable ways to deploy safely.
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