CFO 4.0; Ready?

Chris and I recently attended the Construction Financial Managers Association (CFMA) Annual Conference in Florida at the Gaylord Palms. According to the CFMA team, there were over 1,700 people in attendance, with over 600 of them as first-time attendees; pretty exciting. In addition to many great breakout sessions (we often choose different ones to get everything in), Chris presented (I helped) on the POWER of Power BI.

Given the audience, the breakout sessions were very heavy on Work in Progress, Insurance, Bonding, Banking, and other construction-specific topics. There were also some great Key Note presentations about the state of the CFMA, this last year’s growth and initiatives, a guest speaker on the multi-generational workforce (something we’ve presented on a few times, as well), workplace culture, and the always anticipated Economic Forecast by Dr. Basu—yes, fascinating, funny, insightful, and all with a Denzel Washington theme!

There was an underlying theme, as well—Artificial Intelligence, AI. In almost every session, something was mentioned related to AI, Machine Learning, Large Language Models, Copilot, ChatGPT, and more. The vendors even jumped on this bandwagon, telling us about their future AI integrations and current Copilot tools.

Although this generated some great discussions, some wake-up calls, and security concerns, we were FLOORED to hear so many inaccurate statements from some of the presenters, some of which were outside consultants and educators.

As Chris shared with our Santex group in Argentina and the CFMA Charlotte chapter, AI is not a hero, it’s not a villain, it’s a tool. And like any other tool put into a human’s hand, it can be used for good and for bad. We live in an amazing time! The growing use of AI-driven tools in Construction is here! Our industry is one of the slowest adopters of technology in general, but it’s happening. BIM, Project Management tools, Design, Safety, predictive maintenance, drones, uploading contracts to review contract details, and so on. In your offices, Copilot and ChatGPT are in use—whether you know about it or not, whether you have policies in place or not!

Quite a few years ago, as computers became standard in our construction environments, no one knew what to do with IT, so it often fell to the CFO or Controller. The CPA firms tried to push their way into managing our IT, often incorporating questions into their audits, requiring responses (which had nothing to do with providing our financials and tax returns). Also, IT often involves fixed assets, software to run our accounting, so it was natural for IT to fall to the Finance; but we were ill-equipped.

The overall theme at this year’s conference was a look at Tech, software and hardware, managing this landscape, security, and now AI and the cloud. These should not be considered as ‘dumped’ on the CFO or Controller any longer. The new CFO role is now ready for CFO 4.0 and this is our chance to embrace having technology under our umbrella, a chance to drive tech at our companies, helping them move forward thoughtfully and safely.

I get it—we were just at a conference where there was a LOT of confusion about these tools, managing them, keeping data safe, social engineering, bank fraud, and more. It would be natural to keep our head in the sand and just focus on the WIP reports, financials, and the CPA requests—but we got this!

If you’re buying this argument, and you’re willing to step into this, maybe you’re not sure where to start? Our newsletters are a good start; join our webinars on these topics; consider joining CFMA or an industry-specific group. I just presented to the FCIA (Firestop Contractors) at their annual meeting. Many groups invite tech-related speakers to help with education. Call us! We would welcome a call to talk about any of these topics with you—this would be a ‘no judgement’ zone!

At the conference, one of the speakers gave a nice list of things to consider regarding AI Readiness, which is one aspect of the new CFO 4.0 mindset. 1) Opportunity Discovery; 2) Data Management; 3) IT Infra-structure and Cyber Security; 4) Risk, Privacy, and Governance; 5) Adoption. Ready to talk??? – CMW