CFOs and key members of the finance organization are continuously asking and fielding questions spanning various facets of the business, all with direct financial impact. These strategic questions might be focused on specific lines of businesses, such as operations, marketing or sales, or they may be cross-company questions aimed at creating the big picture to underpin the future direction of the company.
Some questions are part of known finance cycles like annual budgeting or quarterly earnings prep, and others, more often these days in a dynamic environment, are ad-hoc, urgent and unexpected. Whether it’s an urgent question within a known review cycle (why are our costs 30% higher than budgeted for this quarter?), or an urgent question within an unknown cycle (what is the impact of our largest customer ending their contract unexpectedly?), finance teams need to ask, and answer, questions with urgency and accuracy.
What’s Available Today
Traditional BI tools have been the norm for many years. Finance teams understand the lengthy cycle times, the specialists that need to be involved (IT, visualization experts, others), and the numerous layers between question and answer. There will be an answer at the end of this lengthy process, but there’s no flexibility for adhoc or additional questions that pop up along the way. The long process just simply starts again, along with the wait time.
On the other hand, the more recent introduction of generative AI leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to tap into unprecedently large amounts of data, while promising in terms of lowering time-to-an-answer, has proven to fall short as well. Large public LLMs lack domain expertise. They are expensive to run. They hallucinate. They haven’t cracked the challenge of structured data. They lack guardrails on sensitive, proprietary or copyrighted data.
As a result, we have two impossible extremes. One offers a complete lack of flexibility, and incredibly slow and cumbersome timelines. The other lacks the credibility, security, domain-expertise, and structured data needed for finance to meaningfully adopt.
A better approach is needed: AI purpose-built for finance.
Conversational Finance powered by hila™
Enter hila Conversational Finance (hCF) to unlock the potential of real-time, finance-specific generative AI.
Finance users can ask more questions, ask systems of record directly, and get robust, data-driven, accurate answers in return, in real-time.
Answers and insights come back via hCF instantly as charts, graphs, or summary text on the fly without specialists.
We ensure accuracy with our unique anti-hallucination techniques, to prevent inaccurate or erroneous answers from reaching the user. Read more about how we ensure accuracy and intervene on LLM hallucinations here.
And we are lowering the cost by tapping into models that fit the purpose – when a trillion parameters aren’t needed to get to the right answer, why pay the infrastructure cost to support it.
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Ask Any Question of Financial Data
Our only limit is our imagination. Get up and running in 60-90 days with our fast start program for finance.
Get in touch here.