Jesus Ballesteros:
We often kind of talk about that with clients, how CFOs are evolving, have evolved now, to become the chief value creation officers at companies, because again, they have full visibility from a finance standpoint of all the operations of a company and are uniquely positioned to be able to understand how everything comes together in order to create value.
Anne-Marie Henson:
Hello, and welcome to Accounting for the Future. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Henson, and today, we're exploring how to transform your finance function from a cost center to a growth engine.
So joining the discussion today, we have Jesus Ballesteros and Charlotte Zhen. Jesus is a partner in BDO's strategy, value creation, and analytics practice, and one of the national manufacturing and distribution leaders. Throughout his career, Jesus has advised senior management, business owners, and leadership teams at clients in multiple sectors and private equity to address challenges and opportunities related to growth strategy, development, business planning, profitability enhancement, M&A value creation, and operating model transformation.
Charlotte Zhen is a senior manager in the same practice, and she works with clients across a wide range of industries to drive sustainable and profitable growth. She specializes in strategy development, performance improvement, and M&A value creation. Charlotte and Jesus, thank you so much for joining. I'm excited to speak to you both.
Jesus Ballesteros:
Thank you for having us, Anne-Marie.
Anne-Marie Henson:
So before we get started, I do want to spend a little bit of time just providing some information to our listeners about our value creation team and what we do. So could you just start off by giving us a bit of a background on the value creation team, and what are the different ways that your team can help serve clients and companies?
Jesus Ballesteros:
For sure, Anne-Marie. I think that it's a good idea to start there. So I think what we do can be summarized very simply as we help clients create value, and we do this in different ways through a wide range of services. The full name of our team is Strategy, Value Creation, & Analytics, because those three terms reflect a lot of what we do.
So first of all, we have a pillar of strategy, growth, and profitability, in which we have a series of offerings that are focused on helping clients develop their strategies, whether at the corporate level, business level, or functional level, to help them win in the market. We also conduct profitability analysis, for example, for companies, we can do pricing strategies, and in general, just help companies understand where and how they might be able to improve their profitability.
We also can help in the context of M&A. We can step in and help, for example, with synergy assessments in order to create value as a result of a transaction, or we can also help with integration, which is by and large one of the most important steps in a transaction.
And then of course, we also have analytics within our team, and this is analytics in the service of generating insights to create value as well. So we have a group of our colleagues within our team that can go in and develop dashboards, for example, for clients, to be able to better consume their data and leverage that data to make better decisions.
So in summary, we're all about creating value. We are national in scope, we cover all markets within Canada, with the majority of our team based around the GTA.
Anne-Marie Henson:
Fantastic. Thanks so much for that background. And I think probably super relevant today in the current economic content, context, sorry, to be able to rely on experts such as yourself and Charlotte to be able to help unlock value and improve margins at a time where there are a lot of other factors that are impacting businesses' profitability.
So I guess on that note, when it comes to unlocking this value, I know that you and your team consider a lot of different factors, the economy being one of them, politics, I guess the advancement of technology and innovation. How has the current environment impacted Canadian businesses specifically and their ability to be able to drive value and realize this growth and profitability that we're all looking for?
Jesus Ballesteros:
Yes, that's a good question, Anne-Marie, and because frankly, the world has changed a lot over the past several years, hasn't it? Look, context is very important for everything that we do, and I think it's fair to say that since the 2008 crisis, the world has changed in many ways.
We had, for example, the first Trump administration, which introduced this concept of using tariffs, and that certainly impacted Canada the first time around before it started impacting Canada this time around. And then of course, we had the pandemic, and that threw a wrench into a lot of things that really upset the normal course of business.
So we have certainly been operating in a more uncertain world in many ways, and it's very important to acknowledge that every time we go in and try and help a company, to think about their strategy, to understand where and how they may be making money and maybe find opportunities to make more profits. Because it really comes down to making sure that what companies are doing is fit for purpose and is fitting for this context, right?
So we definitely look at all these variables when we analyze a company's performance and provide our advice to be able to cope with these circumstances the best way possible, as much as we can, right? Given that uncertainty is becoming just more the norm in how companies operate, right?
Anne-Marie Henson:
Yeah, definitely.
Charlotte Zhen:
Yeah. To add on to that, over the last four years, as Jesus mentioned, we've just operated in an environment of ongoing uncertainty where there are unexpected disruptions that continue to challenge businesses all the time.
And in these times, I think it's really critical to ensure that your organization has strategic clarity. And what I mean by that is that your employees have a common understanding of the organization's goals, its core customers and value proposition to each of those customer groups, and key priorities.
And what this does is that it provides organizations with a framework in which to make decisions when the external environment shifts as it consistently is these days. And it provides that clear decision-making criteria that all employees can really consider on a day-to-day basis as they go about their day-to-day tasks.
But meanwhile, it's really important to remain flexible and agile, and having performance measurement and forecasting tools, for example, are critical to helping businesses quickly identify when something is not going according to plan, and adapt accordingly. And number two, assess the scale of the impact at a point in time and over the longer term.
And last but not least, I think cross-functional collaboration and clear communication are also really fundamental to adapting to any unexpected change. So having the right systems in place to be able to do that is really important as well.
Anne-Marie Henson:
Yeah. Thanks so much for sharing that. I think it's so important because these days, it could become really easy to get distracted by all the events that are happening, and they're having a real economic impact on Canadian businesses, so it's understandable. But I like having that roadmap, in terms of having that north star, the guidance to be able to help you make decisions, rather than just have to deal with sort of day-to-day reactiveness to these kinds of issues, could really help a company succeed in these times.
I'd like to move the conversation a little bit towards the finance function. After all, this is Accounting for the Future, so we love looking at current events and what's happening in the world, but also trying to find ways to tie it back to the accounting and finance function. So I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on this, because in the past, traditionally, finance has been seen more as a back-office function, more of sort of a cost center than a driver of value.
But there have been, to your point, Jesus, a lot of changes in the world, in the past 15 years, even moreso the past five, when you look at all the events that have impacted businesses globally. So how do you see today the CFO's role evolving to help be part of that value creation of businesses for the future?
Jesus Ballesteros:
Yeah. For sure, Anne-Marie. So I think I should start by saying that even though finance is considered a back-office function, it is by all means very strategic to a company's success. I think that is a reality.
And the finance function certainly has been at the center and on the receiving end of a lot of these disruptions that have been happening over the past little while. So CFOs have had to keep up with all of these things, and at the same time make sure to be good stewards for the business and good leaders for the business in terms of making sure that profitability is protected, and then ideally, that profitability grows over time.
So we actually, these days, like to think of the CFO as the chief value creation officer. We often kind of talk about that with clients, how CFOs are evolving, have evolved now, to become the chief value creation officers at companies, because again, they have full visibility from a finance standpoint of all the operations of a company, and are uniquely positioned to be able to understand how everything comes together in order to create value, so very important role.
And I would say that in addition of course to all of the responsibilities the CFO usually has always had, is this idea of understanding what strategy really means, and that's why everything that Charlotte mentioned before just moments ago is so critical for a CFO to understand. As much as the CEO is always seen as the leader that needs to drive strategy, the CFO should also be right there beside the CEO in terms of understanding how strategy works and how strategy needs to be implemented in an organization in order to be effective.
So I would say that if there's one skill that CFOs need to really learn nowadays is what is strategy, how to do strategy effectively, and how to implement strategy? Because they are, again, at the center of all of the activity that happens in a firm and uniquely positioned to be able to help with the execution of that.
And that is a tall order for CFOs. I mean, many of the CFOs at very large entities have already maybe, I would say, grown up to that level in terms of leading the strategy of firms, right?
In public entities, for example, it's well-known that CFOs always play a very key role in strategy, but I would say that has to be across every company and every size, the CFO has to really make sure that they put on the strategy hat when they're looking at problems and when they're looking at their finance function in terms of what can I do to drive value beyond just the operations that the finance team itself does? Which some of them are actually a source of value, but frankly, there are many other sources of value beyond what the finance team actually does on a day-to-day basis.
Charlotte Zhen:
Yeah. And in addition to that, I think finance is really at the core of being able to bring different functions together towards a common goal. So I think it's really important that the finance team is seen from across the rest of the business as partners to driving success.
So an example of what we often see is that our clients have really strong operations teams that are great at problem-solving and firefighting when things go wrong, and they have great intuition and institutional knowledge to really guide execution of initiatives across the organization.
However, they don't always have access to the data that they need to make the best decisions. And a common thing that we hear from operations teams is, "We grew so much last month and we were so busy. How could it be possible that our profit is flat?" Or maybe sometimes even going down?
And this is where finance teams can really add value by providing that ongoing visibility into what is going on in the business from a numbers perspective and acting as an advisor to ensure that all the operational efforts translate into positive financial results.
Jesus Ballesteros:
Indeed, Charlotte. And actually, just quickly, Anne-Marie, something that Charlotte's comments bring to my mind as well, to stress, is how CFOs, and especially at smaller firms, need to also be very knowledgeable around digital transformation and how that is important for companies, because that is becoming so key to strategy in terms of executing a successful digital transformation.
While CTOs and CIOs typically take the lead role in executing on digital transformation, CFOs are usually the sponsors of that, because the finance function is very much impacted by any changes in digital systems. So when you have a big ERP implementation, for example, finance is front and center at it, because everything comes down to how the numbers are done every month and every year and how everything is compiled.
So the voice of finance at the table is very important when doing digital transformation, so I would say that's another important responsibility that CFOs must have these days is really understanding digital transformation and how that impacts operations, and how that can of course make the finance function itself much more efficient, to be able to save time and better serve all of the other areas of the firm with their needs. So top of mind, digital transformation for CFOs these days.
Anne-Marie Henson:
Absolutely. No, thanks for sharing that. And I can shamelessly plug some of our previous episodes that we've had, one with the CEO of CPA Canada, Pamela Steer, who talked about the ever-changing role of the CFO, and another one with our colleague, Barbara Palmegiani, who does CFO services, and who talked a lot about the importance of the CFO being a chief value officer and being an active part of not just looking at historical numbers, but the future as well, right? Being part of strategy, understanding the digital transformation, being an active part of any sort of transformation within an organization, so that they can actively contribute to the needs of the organization today and in the future.
And to your point, I think CFOs have a really strong view of all of the stakeholders of an organization, whether it be the shareholders, lenders and creditors, government as well, in terms of tax authorities and stuff like that. So they really, more and more now, I see play a very important role in, to your point, digital transformation and ERP implementation. So it's great to hear. Thanks for sharing that.
I'd like to ask a bit about some of the projects you've worked on, and really how you go about starting a value creation project with a client or a company you're working with? So when you get engaged by an organization, what are some of the most common inefficiencies that you might see firsthand?
Jesus Ballesteros:
Yeah. I think I'll start by saying that every time that we are approaching an engagement, the first thing we do is just make sure that we really understand the context. And we alluded to this before: what is happening within the company itself and what context is the company operating in, in terms of industry? Have there been any significant changes, for example, in the regulatory environment that have impacted the company?
To really diagnose and understand whether the request and the ask that is coming to us from the client fits this context, right? Or at least see maybe where there needs to be more conversation to really understand any underlying issues or causes for that request to come to us to help. So it really all starts with that, so typically, we come in and do interviews and meetings with management to really understand the problem from all different angles and agree on what is the issue and what needs to be addressed.
Now, in terms of some of the more common issues that we find, Anne-Marie, I think it does come down to leveraging data to make decisions. That's one of the big ones that we often encounter, because typically what we find out when we have our first conversations around context is that the company is not quite making the best use of its data, where it doesn't necessarily have all the systems in place to be able to leverage that data, which means that they are not necessarily having all access to the data that they need on a day-to-day basis to make good decisions.
So that leads us to conversations around, well, do we need to do something about that? And maybe start by potentially looking at how you are processing and displaying information to be able to make better decisions, or is that kind of something else that needs to be looked at in addition to the underlying issue that may have prompted the request from the client? So that's a typical issue, is data management, there seems to be some gaps usually when we go in, and that of course is hampering the ability to make decisions.
The other issue that we typically find is a lot of manual work and lots of manual workarounds to make systems work. And that is typical in an environment, which is very common, in which companies have added systems over time, so what happens is that they then have to patch the communication between these systems by doing manual workarounds or manual steps.
So that's another issue that we find that usually also can lead to issues with data, errors, misinterpretation, et cetera. So always kind of poking around that is important for us, to understand what is the full environment and where some of those manual workarounds may be happening, because those immediately become opportunities to make the whole process more efficient.
As you know, nowadays, I'm sure you've had in this podcast, I know for a fact guests that have spoken about RPA, robotic process automation, and how you can automate certain tasks using bots to be able to add efficiency to processes. So I would say it's the second issue that we find, manual workarounds.
And then third, I will say, is sometimes not enough communication is happening between finance and the other areas within the company. So operations may have its priorities, for example, and they might want things in a certain way, but they're not necessarily communicating that to the finance team as clearly as they should, so there's some misalignment there and miscommunication as a result of them operating somewhat in silos.
So it's common. Companies, people get busy, people have their responsibilities, they have their mandates, and they tend to focus on their areas, so it's not uncommon for us to go in and find that there is some lack of misalignment. So those are usually issues that we try to also address when we are engaging with clients before we really go and engage in solving an issue for a customer. All right. Charlotte-
Anne-Marie Henson:
Great.
Jesus Ballesteros:
... I'm not sure if you'd like to jump in with additional comments on that?
Charlotte Zhen:
Yeah. No, I totally agree. And I think an example of clients not necessarily having access to the data in the right format, a lot of clients come to us not really quite knowing what really drives their profitability.
A lot of them do have visibility from an EBITDA perspective or a gross margin perspective, but they aren't quite able to break down the different layers of gross margin, so kind of monitoring how their freight costs are fluctuating, versus the cost of their materials, versus the cost of their direct labor, right?
And then the other part that a lot of our clients are unable to kind of factor into profitability, especially when looking at things from a customer and product level, is the cost to serve. So for example, some large customers might be generating quite a bit in terms of profitability dollars, but from a margin perspective, it's thin.
And then once they factor in the amount of time that their sales team spends on serving this customer and the time that is required for customer support, or maybe even factoring in that some customers take longer to pay or don't pay at all and then someone has to go chase them for invoices. These are the tough decisions that through data, we can provide insight into, to each of our clients, and then they might have to make some tough decisions around which customers do I really want to continue to work with and which segments do I really want to continue to grow in?
Anne-Marie Henson:
Great. That's really interesting, actually, Charlotte, because those costs that you just spoke about are almost, sometimes it's easier to determine what directly attributable costs relate to a sale of a good, especially a product, when you're making a widget and you know how much it costs to make that widget.
But these additional costs are sort of the hidden ones that we don't necessarily factor into profitability. So it is really interesting to know that your team looks at not just the directly attributable costs, but the entirety of the cost of serving a specific client, and understanding that, actually, you have someone on your customer care team that spends half their time with this one customer, and that's not factored into the profitability at the end of the day, right?
Charlotte Zhen:
Absolutely.
Jesus Ballesteros:
Yeah, indeed. We often find ourselves, right, Charlotte, in conversations with clients where we ask them, "Well, how well do you understand below the gross margin line by customer, by product?" And usually we get answers like, "Well, not really," or, "We make some assumptions, but we don't really know."
And the problem with that is that making decisions becomes harder because, to Charlotte's point, they don't really have visibility into the true cost to serve for customers or for specific product lines. So usually, when we engage in doing profitability analysis, that's one of the areas where we focus in, where we home in at the very beginning, understand how much do you really understand below your gross margin line at a per-customer, per-product level or product family level? Because really trying to parse that out goes a long way into enabling the company to make better decisions.
Anne-Marie Henson:
Absolutely.
Jesus Ballesteros:
And it's really interesting what we find. Once we start digging, and of course this may involve still making some assumptions because there are costs that, frankly, are very difficult to allocate to different customers, but there are ways of doing it. So typically, we engage in this conversation with clients on how do we allocate this or that cost?
But after going through the exercise, it is common for clients to realize that, "Wow, I didn't realize that this customer actually had such thin margins once you factor in all these costs," or, "I didn't know that this was actually more of a loss-making family for me. I thought we were making some money," right? Because they didn't factor in the monies properly.
So that is critical for companies to understand is what is really costing you to serve a specific customer or a product family? And once you know what that true cost is, do you want to continue doing the same thing? And that's where strategy comes in and really decision-making comes in. So again, it really comes down to understanding the data available and using it in ways that is more helpful for a company to improve their profitability and create value.
Anne-Marie Henson:
Yeah, absolutely. No, thanks for sharing that. Charlotte, you talked a bit a couple of minutes ago about the importance of creating performance metrics, right? Once you've determined a strategy and you know where you're moving towards and what your objectives are, you obviously have to find ways to measure your progress towards those objectives so that you can make decisions as to whether or not it's working, if you need to allocate more resources.
So could you talk a bit about the key financial and operating or operational metrics that CFOs in particular should focus on to help them continue to drive value in an organization? There are the traditional ones like EBITDA or revenue growth, those are the ones we see a lot, but I'm sure there are others that you've seen in the work that you've done. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Charlotte Zhen:
Yeah, for sure. I can jump in, and then maybe, Jesus, you can add on. So I think to your point, Anne-Marie, a bunch of traditional financial metrics that are typically monitored across organizations.
I think one thing that I typically find that's missing are tracking against strategic initiatives throughout the year. So this really starts with the assumption that an organization has a clear strategy defined, and they might have a list of operational initiatives that they need to implement in order to drive value creation.
And each one of those will come with a different way to track the progress against it. So for example, if there is an opportunity, similar to what we were just talking about in terms of rationalizing products or customers to really drive profitable growth going forward, it's working with sales, working with finance, working with operations, and really cross-functionally gathering input to really report on progress on what is happening to our client relationships, what is the impact to the bottom line, and where are we identifying new opportunities to grow in a certain segment?
Jesus Ballesteros:
Yeah. What I would add to that, is that it is important also for the finance team and CFOs to understand the operational metrics that are relevant for their business. And this may be often our KPIs that are not expressed in dollars, like EBITDA or other margins. They're more in volumes or throughput or things like that.
And I think it's definitely very important for a CFO to really know what those key KPIs are, and this can be done just discussing with the operations team. I mean, most companies know them, but they haven't necessarily established a cadence of reporting on those KPIs or those metrics for the CFO and the finance team to have better visibility.
It's interesting how we often find that once you start digging beyond the dollars, you find interesting trends on the volume side when we engage with companies that tell part of the story, and just because dollars may be going up at a company, but volumes are not going up. So that immediately starts pushing you to a territory of, "Well, it's then price, what's driving the increase. Is that what we were expecting?" If the answer is no, then what is happening with volumes, right?
So it's always important to separate price and quantity when doing analyses from a finance standpoint, to really understand what the underlying story is, because they could be going in different directions, right? Dollars could be, sales could be going up, all looking rosy there, but volumes may still be flat or going down, in which case, there needs to be more diligence there and understanding what is happening.
So having these KPIs reported on, on a regular basis, is going to be important for CFOs and finance teams to be able to maybe get ahead of things and start asking questions of the operations team. "Hey, why are we seeing all of a sudden that volumes are going down?" Can you explain that, right? And to be able to better tell a story when they pull together reporting for the CEO and for the rest of the team, to be able to really suss out what the issues are, right?
So there's always the core set of metrics that they should be keeping track of that are more the typical finance metrics, but also, there's a bucket of operational metrics that need to be understood well by the finance team to be good stewards of the business again, right?
Anne-Marie Henson:
Right. Well, Jesus, and that's a great segue into my next question, because you started answering it already. What role would you say finance should play in helping to shape corporate strategy and help with decision-making?
Jesus Ballesteros:
Well, number one is just being a very good steward of data and a good provider of data to everyone that is involved in making that decision, right? Because in many ways, even though, again, the tech department or the IT department may be responsible for the underlying systems, it is typically the finance team and the CFO that makes sure that that information can be interpreted correctly and can then be displayed correctly so that all the leaders are seeing the same things and are aligned in the interpretation of that data.
So that is the number-one way, I would say, that the CFO and his team, his or her team, should get involved in developing strategy and influencing corporate strategies. Providing the right data, so that everybody is aware of what the issue is, and there aren't any differences or misalignments there.
And you'd be surprised how many times, when a CFO brings information to the table, you get questions from the COO or the CEO, or someone else saying, "Wait a second. I thought we had an issue there, not here." So that is the number-one job is really data and making sure that is as accurate and clean as possible. And also as timely as possible, and that's usually where we find the challenge, is making sure this information is reported on a timely basis.
Second is to know what is really happening outside of the company, understanding that context, so that the CFO can provide that valuable advice to the rest of the organization. Now, typically, the COO is also, or the operations team, is a good source of information on what's happening out there in the market.
But again, because finance sits in the center of ops and sales and marketing, they should do their own diligence internally with all the departments and potentially also externally to really understand what's happening, because then they can start putting two and two together. They're looking at the numbers internally, they're looking at what's happening externally, and then they can provide their perspective on, "Well, I think this is happening because of this," right? So again, it's just interpretation of data, which in this case, is the context.
And then of course, obviously actively participating in conversations, strategic conversations, as they arise, in order to make sure that the process ultimately arrives at practical decisions or decisions that can lead to practical implementation. Now, of course, if the CFO himself or herself is tasked with developing the strategy, then they also have the responsibility to lead it, in which case, whether it's with an advisor like us or internally, they need to be shepherding the process.
They need to have ideally a project manager that helps gather all the information, structure the conversations, and really help in making sure the process goes as it should, so that at the end of it, you have a strategy and an implementation plan at the end that's a result of it, right?
Anne-Marie Henson:
Right. That makes a lot of sense.
Charlotte Zhen:
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think finance functions are uniquely positioned to have that bird's eye view of everything going on across the business, right? And in addition, having the data behind all the numbers to make sense of what's going on.
So really helping different functions understand the interdependencies between all of the different strategic initiatives that they're working on as well. And again, just providing that advisory support on a regular basis.
Jesus Ballesteros:
Yeah. I can jump in with a quick example, Anne-Marie. So we were helping a client of ours in the construction space with some strategy around their fleet, and immediately, the conversation started with, "Well, what data do you have on your fleet?"
And of course, it wasn't a surprise that the first team we went to of course was the finance team, right? "Well, can you provide us with data on the fleet?" And that was kind of almost like a mini project in itself, just to understand how they were collecting data on the fleet from the operations team, what they were tracking using automated systems, what they were tracking using manual input from people. Because then we were able to understand what was actually happening with the fleet vehicles before even starting to talk about what the strategy should be.
And at the end of the day, the strategy really relied on having good information from the finance team on the age of equipment, how much it was being utilized, and which kinds of projects, and all this stuff that frankly we didn't have, it would have been very difficult to do any kind of strategy.
So an example of how, again, it immediately, even though the ask came from the operations team, this idea that they wanted to have a strategy, it immediately became a conversation with finance on, "Well, what data are you collecting, and what are you monitoring on a regular basis? How are you making decisions on which equipment to buy or which equipment to sell?"
And that's when we got into a bit of a rabbit hole, so to speak, in terms of understanding how they were collecting that data and how they were using it. So in the end, I think we got to a great result, but it definitely involved having finance at the table in every step of the way to be able to understand how the fleet was being monitored.
And actually, as a result of the strategy, we've made some recommendations on changes that the finance team should make in terms of how they should be tracking the fleet. And we ended up helping them develop a better tool to be able to track all the equipment on more of a real-time basis or a more timely basis, because that is what they needed in order to be able to determine what they should be doing with each machine on a regular basis. So fascinating project that, again, came down to finance as a key stakeholder in the process.
Anne-Marie Henson:
Right. No, that's great. And offhand, when you talk about fleet management, I personally wouldn't have automatically said that that was something that finance would necessarily be a stakeholder in, at least not as actively as you're saying. So it's great to see these sort of real-life examples of ways that finance can be an integral part of these decisions and strategy.
I have one last question for you. I'd like to hear about one sort of real-time, actionable piece of advice that you'd like to give CFOs who are listening to this now, and who are looking to enhance their capabilities to help create value in an organization?
Jesus Ballesteros:
Yeah. I think we've already said it a few times, but I think it's important to emphasize data. Take a hard look at the data that you're generating as a company. Is that data really helping you make better decisions?
How are you housing it? How are you collecting it? How are you housing it? Who are the users of that data? And are there some easy things you can do in the short term to improve that data environment in your company? That would be mine. Charlotte?
Charlotte Zhen:
Yeah. Maybe just adding on to that, I want to speak a little bit about AI as well. I think when it comes to AI, it's important to kind of build the capabilities across your organization. I think finance has a really important role in doing that as a driver of change and value creation.
I think sometimes when the topic of AI comes up, it's often perceived as a large investment that an organization has to make, but that's not necessarily the case. I think one of my colleagues actually gave me the advice of just always turn to AI, something like ChatGPT or Copilot as your sidekick, the first place that you go to when you're about to do something. And that has transformed the way that I do work, and it has significantly improved productivity across my team, I'm seeing at least.
And I think it's a great opportunity for all organizations, potentially spearheaded by the finance function, to really get everyone used to leveraging AI on a day-to-day basis. And also, this could impact hiring decisions, training, et cetera, to really build up the competencies across your organization.
Anne-Marie Henson:
That's great. No. Really helpful, and definitely see the benefits. I know some companies out there have invested millions, and in some cases, even billions of dollars in AI tools, but there are some relatively affordable, sometimes even free tools at our disposal that we can use to help our productivity and to help us become that much more efficient in our day-to-day jobs, so thanks for sharing that.
This has been such a valuable discussion. I feel like I learned a lot. And so Jesus and Charlotte, I just want to thank you for your time and your input today. I hope our audience also appreciated this discussion.
If you liked this episode, make sure you leave a review or a comment, and click the follow or the subscribe button to stay tuned for new episodes. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in today and to all of our episodes. I'm Anne-Marie Henson, and this has been BDO's Accounting for the Future. We'll see you next time.