How AI Will Save CFOs Hundreds of Billions

June 22, 2020
Ashu Garg

The CFO role is in a period of evolution, as its responsibilities shift past traditional finance, accounting, and reporting duties and toward a mandate of strategic, forward-thinking leadership. As financial executives balance these responsibilities, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that support finance teams must evolve as well. This is happening at the same time that artificial intelligence is transforming large-scale companies, and turning them, function by function and stack on top of stack, into automated enterprises. Finance is next.

The next generation of ERP systems—powered by AI/ML—will transform the way that future finance teams work, and here at Foundation Capital, we are excited to explore opportunities in the ERP space, especially automation solutions for the CFO and finance team. We recently made our first investment in the space and are excited to meet more entrepreneurs innovating across the ERP landscape.

Next-generation ERP systems must enable finance teams to handle increasingly complex processes with greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency. There are a number of challenges that companies must navigate in the current ERP landscape: systems that are insufficiently flexible to address business’ specific and changing processes, the necessity of bolting on a conglomeration of ERP systems under one roof, and the costly implementation process of replacing an entrenched ERP with a new one.

Entrepreneurs have a great opportunity to solve these and other challenges with AI-enabled ERP. There are multitude of paths to explore, and we are particularly optimistic about a few areas of opportunity:

These are only a few of the ways that the next wave of AI/ML-based ERP can transform a finance team’s work, based on my on-the-ground conversations.

At Foundation Capital, we are always looking to partner with early stage founders who are passionate about addressing enterprise challenges and are looking to build next-generation ERP. If you are building an ERP solution, especially in the financial automation space, we would love to hear from you.