EY-Microsoft High-value Intersections Initiative

The 2023 EY Global DNA of the CFO Survey report emphasizes the CFO’s need for cost efficiency, improved cash management and accurate financial planning. Intelligent finance, defined by standardization, advanced analytics and integrated planning, allows organizations to address these challenges strategically and efficiently. 

EY teams help enterprises transition from conventional to intelligent finance: 

• Automate processes for streamlined, touchless operations. 
• Advance technology from basic enterprise resource planning systems to ones enriched with AI and machine learning. 
• Shift from a conventional, transactional finance role to a strategic, value-centric one. 
• Centralize data management and recognize data as a strategic asset. 
• Transition from isolated finance functions to scalable, outsourced ones. 

This strategic agenda is implemented across finance processes: 

• Order-to-cash 
• Procure-to-pay 
• Record-to-report 
• Financial planning and analysis 

By integrating AI and analytics, such transformation delivers real-time insights, helps minimize errors and enhances decision-making for proactive, value-focused finance operations.

Procurement has evolved from its humble beginnings as a transactional back-office function into a multidisciplinary, value-creating one responsible for insight and opportunity identification, sourcing and contract management, risk management, sustainability, and strategic partnerships with suppliers.  

This strategic elevation has resulted in an explosion of data, analytics and decisions handled by the function. Leaders are leveraging AI, predictive analytics and automation to help increase the function’s efficiency and ability to continue generating business value. 

EY generative AI-powered intelligent procurement solutions help boost procurement capability and capacity, deliver a step change in process efficiency and effectiveness, and reduce value leakage and risk across operations. Benefits include the following: 

• Optimized demand management: aggregation, analysis and optimization of business requirements to help improve ROI 
• Intelligent category agent: real-time automated spend analytics and categorization to enhance insights for procurement teams 
• Negotiation agent: augmented negotiation support and generative dialogue with suppliers 
• Third-party risk scanning: horizon scanning and automated checks to drive compliance and mitigate risks