In this special Trouble Shooter episode of CFO Thought Leader, we speak with Tal Kirschenbaum, CEO and founder of Ledge. Together, we delve into his career journey and the foresight that led him to identify a significant opportunity in finance automation. Tal’s path, starting from his finance education at the University of Chicago and Tel Aviv University, through various roles at Intel Capital, BCG, Facebook, and Milio, provided him with a broad perspective on financial operations and corporate development.
At the core of Tal’s entrepreneurial vision is a keen awareness of the inefficiencies in traditional finance operations. He identified a common challenge faced by finance teams: the reliance on manual processes and siloed systems, which often lead to increased workloads and errors. This insight spurred the creation of Ledge, a platform designed to automate repetitive tasks and streamline financial data management
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Tal’s experiences highlighted the critical role of AI in transforming finance functions. He emphasized that AI can address the high volume of unstructured data finance teams deal with daily. For instance, AI-driven solutions can resolve discrepancies in transaction data, such as mismatched names between bank transfers and invoices, significantly reducing manual intervention.
Moreover, Tal sees AI as a powerful tool for financial forecasting. By using AI to predict outcomes based on historical data and user inputs, finance teams can move away from time-consuming manual data manipulation and focus on strategic decision-making. This shift not only enhances efficiency but also addresses the acute shortage of skilled accountants by automating routine tasks and allowing finance professionals to engage in more valuable work.
In today’s challenging economic environment, Tal advises finance leaders to prioritize sustainable and profitable growth. He believes that integrating AI into finance operations is crucial for achieving increased efficiency and supporting complex business operations. As the market demands more from finance teams, leveraging AI can be the key to maintaining competitiveness and ensuring long-term success.
Jack Sweeney: We want to want to touch on AI with you. And we’re wondering, from your viewpoint, how you believe it’ll impact the role of finance leaders, what’s going to happen here, what’s happening now?
Tal Kirschenbaum: So obviously, there’s there’s a lot of hype and attention and focus being given to AI. I think rightfully so. And there’s a few different opportunities. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for AI to bring value to finance teams, who are drowning in this tsunami of financial data and to and then need to make sense of it all. And again, freeing them from the manual data work and enabling a much more strategic oversight capability. And there are two main use cases that I think will surface as ones that are much more viable and feasible in the immediate future, at least, and that will help transform finance teams, I think the first one has to do with operating with a very high volume of unstructured data. I’ll give you an example. That’s something that we use AI for.
Read MoreIf there’s a broken string, and a bank statement, or a company that has changed its name, AI can then be used to solve this gap by being able to connect the dots and fill in the blanks. And at ledge we use AI for smart matching, for those exact instances name mismatches between a bank transfer and invoices, which are unbelievably common, but quite brutal when you operate at a massive scale. And the second use case that I think is quite relevant in the immediate future has to do with AI being I think, quite well suited for forecasting. And using things like linear regression together with user inputs, to actually able to, to actually help predict various types of outcomes. Now, this, again, is another one of those tasks that can quite easily help free up the finance team’s time, from the manual side of data entry, data manipulation, and enable them to really think about the so what what do we now do with these insights that we have. The other thing I’ll quickly mention on AI, is that we need AI and robust technology to help compensate I think, specifically for the shortage that we’re seeing in finance in general. But I think even more specifically, within the accounting space. Obviously, accountants are quite often the backbone of a finance team and as a byproduct of many businesses. And there’s been this acute shortage of them in the market. And so there’s this desperate need for technology to start to step in and help fill that gap really. And it’s not just about the labor gap, but it’s actually also about being able to increase the retention of accountants of finance operators, by again, moving them away from the repetitive, tiresome, low value tasks and towards a much more interesting and strategic work that the could be doing.