GenAI and the finance operations landscape in 2025

GenAI and the finance operations landscape in 2025Last year was an exciting year for business, with GenAI at the center of new ways to serve customers and shareholders and improve operations and profitability. Global business services (GBS) finance functions aspired to embrace AI as a collaborator to enhance hyper personalized internal and external customer experiences, democratize insights and expertise, and bring in greater scale and automation—leading to operational efficiencies and process standardization.

In the current climate, GenAI is still receiving significant attention. With GenAI introducing a paradigm shift to accelerating transformation, finance leaders have been more engaged and excited—likely driving a willingness to fund implementations. However, this excitement could outperform the impact of AI in the finance and accounting space. Therefore, the willingness, or perceived willingness, to fund AI tools may focus on more long-term or future investments until the impact aligns with the hype or offers more assurance for a return on investment.

The clock is ticking for organizations to create significant and sustained value through their GenAI initiatives. Promising pilots have led to more investments, escalating expectations and new challenges. Amid this pivotal phase, many C-suites and boards are starting to look for returns on investment. Their interest in GenAI could wane if initiatives don’t pay off as much—or as soon—as expected.

Boards are increasingly eager to see AI in action, prompting chief financial officers (CFOs) to demonstrate its tangible value. Organizations are deploying GenAI across dozens of use cases in every industry. Some are buying off-the-shelf tools and tapping public language learning models (LLMs). Others are choosing to build from the ground up. Regardless, as far as scaling GenAI is concerned, many leaders remain uncertain about talent capabilities, platform decisions, data risk and model governance.

This is where service providers, including Deloitte, can help. Service providers aren’t just investing in and developing GenAI-enabled products and services. They’re embedding GenAI in multiple ways across their solution offerings.

Why Deloitte?

We’ve been at the forefront of the GenAI revolution, harnessing its capabilities for transformation in finance operations. Our finance and accounting Operate services have helped clients enhance operations by accelerating efficiencies, controls and cost savings. By integrating advanced GenAI technologies, we’ve enabled organizations to automate complex financial processes, enhance decision-making and improve overall efficiency. Our GenAI solutions can help you streamline tasks such as financial forecasting, invoice processing, and automation and acceleration of collections processes—empowering you to achieve a more touchless close.

Harnessing GenAI in finance operations with your service provider

Maximizing the benefits of GenAI in outsourcing services is a collaborative endeavor. It requires foundational streamlining and addressing the following:

• Understanding complexity: While GenAI is promising, implementing it at scale in finance can be more complicated and potentially more costly than many CFOs think. It’s important to remain objective when making these decisions.
• Thinking beyond a stand-alone solution: Recognize that AI is important to a larger solution set and not a cure-all.
• Implementing capabilities beyond narratives: GenAI’s utility can extend to multiple finance processes. Examples include smart reconciliation, improved variance analysis, perceptive task management, dynamic risk assessment (audit and controls), etc.

Here are eight guiding principles to help CFOs and GBS leaders reap the benefits of GenAI when working with service providers:

1. Collaborate early and effectively.
   
   Engage with your service provider’s technology teams to understand their AI policy, capability and organizational priorities.
   
   
2. Assess your current finance technology road map.
   
   Where is it backlogged? Can your current infrastructure support GenAI solutions? What capabilities can AI accelerate? Consider engaging actively and regularly with platform providers to understand existing investments and future road maps for core finance technology systems. Then map those capabilities against your actual needs.
   
   
3. Determine whether GenAI is genuinely needed.
   
   Do you have a problem that necessitates a GenAI solution—or could it be addressed with other technologies, such as AI-driven platforms or robotic process automation (RPA) for rule-based scenarios? For example, invoice data extraction and entry can be efficiently automated using RPA. However, detecting fraudulent invoices requires the advanced capabilities of a GenAI solution.
   
   
4. Ready your data for the age of AI.
   
   The output quality of an LLM is directly related to the data used to train and fine-tune the model. Service providers will need to assess the maturity of the data landscape (governance, security, quality and volume) and provide the road map to their GBS vendors. They must evaluate how data governance, management and analytics service providers can assist the organization. Additionally, consider how hyperscalers that offer LLM solutions supported by their extensive data and tools can facilitate scalable and consistent AI implementation.
   
   
5. Create a joint road map of opportunities based on ROI.
   
   While evaluating GenAI solutions, seeing a significant return on investment is important given the high costs associated with implementation and maintenance, especially when training a new model. These returns should be assessed over different time frames: short term (zero to two years) and long term (more than three years). Another consideration is whether the GenAI solution can establish foundational capabilities to drive further innovations in finance operations.
   
   
6. Conduct a risk assessment
   
   It is also necessary to conduct a risk assessment for GenAI solutions. Asking questions such as the following can help:
   Are we reducing—or adding—more risks with a given solution? What’s the probability of achieving the desired business benefits (full potential versus less optimistic scenarios)? What are the key risks, and are there risk mitigation plans in place?
   
   
7. Create a proof of concept.
   
   Start with a pilot project and gradually scale up. Dedicate some of the budget to explore AI through practical use cases. Then scale up enterprisewide.
   
   
8. Stronger governance can help to scale capabilities and drive value.
   
   Governance, risk and compliance are fundamental pillars of any initiative. In the context of GenAI, service providers should demonstrate that formalized processes, policies and procedures are in place to manage the GenAI agenda. They must also ensure that actions are being taken to manage GenAI regulatory and compliance risks. Finally, they need to provide the right skill sets and people support for GenAI solutions (those who validate and test the design, maintenance, etc.).
    

Accelerate your GenAI journey in finance operations with Deloitte

Where GenAI at scale is concerned, many CFOs and GBS owners remain uncertain about talent capabilities, platform decisions, data risk and model governance. How can they respond with agility, stand up the right teams—and hire for the specialized skill sets required to harness the power of GenAI and apply it successfully to their business?

Working with the appropriate service provider and implementing the right tools and technologies, along with a strong data and governance framework, should enable GBS owners to better realize the potential of GenAI.

Deloitte’s experience and capabilities across domains, industries and platforms can help clients implement GenAI at an enterprise level for transformative outcomes. Learn more:

We operate at the intersection of executing world-class finance and accounting outsourcing services and GenAI solutions—offering chief financial officers a unique path toward business transformation. We look forward to discussing how we can help your organization. Reach out today.