Half of finance AI projects to be delayed or cancelled by 2024

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<strong>As the banking and financial institutions adopt artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies globally, half of current finance AI deployments will be either delayed or cancelled by 2024, a new report has forecast.</strong></p>
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At the same time, the use of business process outsourcing (BPO) for AI will rise from 6 per cent to 40 per cent within two years, according to Gartner.</p>
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CFOs face major barriers to scaling up the use of AI in-house and will increasingly turn to business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions to meet their digital transformation objectives, the report noted.</p>
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"While finance departments have made reasonable progress in laying the groundwork for AI, the challenges come when attempting to scale up solutions that can manage the complexities of function-wide use," said Sanjay Champaneri, senior director analyst in the Gartner Finance practice.</p>
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"The upfront costs of building scalable infrastructure in house, and the over-reliance on stretched citizen developers, will lead many CFOs to rethink their current strategies," he mentioned.</p>
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Digital automation in finance often fails to meet the expected benefits outlined in business cases for deploying such technologies.</p>
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Much of this is down to a lack of truly functional automated processes and a significant proportion of automation work fails and is rerouted to a human for manual input.</p>
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Without correcting for this state of "fake automation", finance departments will struggle to scale automated solutions, such as AI, effectively across the function, the report said.</p>
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Champaneri said that finance departments will face three key barriers when attempting to scale up their AI processes across the functions.</p>
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These are costly upfront infrastructure, lack of bandwidth among citizen developers and skill-gaps among citizen developers.</p>
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"CFOs need help operationalising AI, and also ensuring that their limited resources are focused on projects generating the highest return of efficiency," said Champaneri.</p>
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"This reality will drive a significant growth in the use of BPO providers for AI, which offer ready-made solutions to overcome these barriers," he added.</p>