When Rani Johnson joined Workday as chief information officer in March 2023, her appointment happened to coincide with some monumental generative artificial intelligence milestones, including the debut of Anthropic’s Claude and the rollout of OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Amid all the buzzy attention on generative AI and the hunt to produce both top- and bottom-line gains from the deployment of these fast-developing tools, Workday wanted to be thoughtful about how it would budget the business software company’s AI investments. A close partnership was forged between IT and finance, the latter led by Chief Financial Officer Zane Rowe, who joined Workday just three months after Johnson.
“We created a framework for the governance to ensure that any material AI investments had a review process,” says Johnson.
This process includes a monthly IT-finance meeting where the teams discuss the various AI tools in the marketplace, which use cases have the highest feasibility for success, and which can produce the greatest impact to the business. Each month, Workday evaluates every generative AI use case that’s been in production for six months or longer to determine if these investments are delivering on key performance indicators, which may include productivity or revenue generation.
On a bimonthly basis, the company’s broader executive leadership team meets to align on Workday’s overall AI strategy. In those sessions, Johnson shares updates on the future generative AI roadmap and what benefits are expected to be achieved when making those investments. That transparency ensures accountability for all AI bets.
Business leaders say it is critical for IT and finance to nurture a close partnership as AI becomes more expansive across their operations, especially as some studies have shown that a
vast majority of AI pilots fail. Most organizations that are using generative AI today are seeing a
limited return on their investments, according to research from management consulting firm
McKinsey.
Workday pilots every new AI feature it may want to deploy, frequently with a very short contract.
“We do believe there’s going to be some enterprise-level consolidation over time,” explains Johnson. When looking back and assessing AI investments, the company may swap out vendors when a new tool proves to be easier to deploy at a lower cost. In one example, Workday swapped in
Salesforce Agentforce to replace some third-party agents that the company had deployed from another, unnamed vendor.
“I think the finance-IT partnership is terrific in enabling us to still drive value, while we recognize that there’s not only opportunity, but the cost of not changing is significantly high as well,” says Rowe.
At
Akamai Technologies, CIO Kate Prouty and CFO Ed McGowan joined the cybersecurity and cloud computing company within a year of each other more than 25 years ago. After many years as colleagues, Prouty has reported to McGowan ever since she ascended to the top IT role in 2021.
“When you have the CFO behind you, it makes life a lot easier,” says Prouty.
IT and the finance department’s procurement team are “attached at the hip,” looking closely at vendor contracts to ensure that Akamai is getting the best rates possible. Akamai’s IT team fields all inbound requests for new technology solutions across the organization, committing to responding to submissions within a day.
McGowan says leadership needs to strike a delicate balance of encouraging the use of AI tools that can help engineers code faster or make it easier for lawyers to draft legal contracts. But the company doesn’t want to see costs exploding by saying “yes” to every AI request.
“We have to make sure that we don’t get in a situation where we’re either duplicating efforts, or signing bad contracts, or just having expenses run out of control,” says McGowan.
The C-suite leaders at animal health company
Zoetis have placed fewer, bigger AI bets focused on just two core parts of the business, research and development and commercialization. Six of the company’s seven AI use cases have been deemed a “success,” including one AI tool that helps sales representatives prepare more tailored business pitches for each individual livestock customer.
Zoetis acknowledges it is a bit behind on implementing more generic AI productivity tools, including those that can speed up recruitment. But the company says it’s shifting more financial resources in that direction. And it can shop around and explore off-the-shelf products sold by various AI vendors that don’t have as much differentiation as the tools that Zoetis developed for its core use cases.
“We started out being more disciplined and focused in terms of where we were pursuing gen AI and making our bets,” says Wetteny Joseph, CFO at Zoetis.
Like his peers at Workday and Akamai, Zoetis Chief Digital and Technology Officer Keith Sarbaugh says the high costs tied to compute and licensing are an ongoing concern. “In my 25 years in this type of work, I’ve never seen another technology carry post-implementation costs as high as AI,” says Sarbaugh.
He frequently fields pitches from vendors like Salesforce and
SAP about their latest AI offerings, but firmly believes that the greatest value will come from tools that aren’t siloed.
“We’re always looking for those opportunities where we can integrate data and processes across platforms and sort of unlock new value that way,” says Sarbaugh.
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