The science fiction writer William Gibson is famous for his quote: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” Right now we’re all experiencing a sudden, emphatic distribution of the future. It’s exciting, but also a little weird.
For decades, finance professionals were trained to be skeptical of shortcuts. Check the formula. Reconcile the discrepancy. Now along comes AI, happily offering to summarize contracts, flag anomalies, and reconcile accounts before your second cup of coffee. But we’ve seen that most finance leaders still say there are gaps between AI’s promise and reality. So we wanted to approach it differently: with the controls and permissions built in for the accuracy finance needs.
A couple of months since launch, more than half of our customers have already adopted Zuora AI workflows, and the stories of amazement and wonder are pouring in. One of them generated a 119,667-row service contract report in about 13 seconds. Our own finance team has cut reporting time by about 70%. Everyone is trading notes on which new prompts to explore.
Welcome to the new normal. And we’ve only been really living in it for a few months. What has been the norm for engineering is now becoming a reality for finance, which is especially amazing considering all the controls and compliance issues that finance teams manage.
As my colleague Mike Chu, a product lead at Zuora who also has a CPA, told me: “In the past few months, Finance and Accounting have actively participated in experimenting with AI, and more importantly understanding AI. The trust conversation is still lurking in the background, but acceptance that AI is changing the way Finance and Accounting works is real.”
Here are a few odd phenomena of the new normal:
- Year-long roadmaps collapsing into three months.
- Closing the books roughly as soon as they’re opened.
- All sorts of orphan projects rising from the dead.
Here are a few new questions of the new normal:
- If I need something – anything – by Monday, then why can’t it happen?
- After all I’ve automated all my processes, then what? What new questions can I ask? What new things can I do?
- What does it mean to be a finance engineer? What can we learn from our developer colleagues in re-imagining our jobs?
Every major technology shift starts out feeling weird. The first time companies trusted cloud software with customer data, that felt odd. The first time CFOs explained ARR, NRR, and usage-based revenue to boards trained on older models, that felt weird too. Then it became normal.
But it all goes back to first principles. The winners will combine AI speed with finance discipline. Fast answers, slower judgment. More automation, stronger controls. Better tools, sharper humans.
I’ve been exploring all these new AI use cases – some amazing, some a little unsettling – in a new LinkedIn series I’m calling “Strange Tales of the New Normal.” Join me!
