OpenAI - Finance Use Cases
Last week OpenAI kicked off a new series of webinars focused on function-related use cases, and specifically how their own teams are using ChatGPT for their jobs.
The first session focused on Finance and was presented in part by Sowmya Ranganathan, OpenAI’s financial controller.
You can view the replay of this session at the bottom of this post.
Experience a day in the life of your business teams
I’m going to share some of my takeaways below but the biggest lesson you can learn from this session is that you need to help your AI team to deeply understand the day to day jobs that your business teams are engaged in.
Only by understanding, in this case, that the finance team are trying to consolidate two large csvs, or are having to handle high volumes of repetitive deal desk queries, can your AI team get to work coaching, experimenting and inspiring your teams to use your AI tools to improve their working experience.
If you have AI Business Partners as part of your AI core team, consider getting them to do ride-alongs with the teams they are assigned to.
Go and spend a day in the field with a salesperson.
Walk the factory floor with the production line manager
Go and meet suppliers with the supply chain director
As you spend time with them note down what you see and how they work:
What are their jobs-to-be-done?
What templates or documents are they using?
What repetitive work do they do?
What wastes their time?
If you can solve some of these niggles with a simple Claude Project or custom GPT you will open their eyes to more strategic opportunities in their business area.
AI in the Finance team
OpenAI shared that finance is one of the latest adopters of ChatGPT in their customers.
The main reason is that finance teams think that ChatGPT is for writing, when finance is about numbers.
Once they uncover how capable ChatGPT is at handling numerical tasks they start to bring it into their processes.
Uncover work that is already happening
The start of enabling the finance team was to document the work that people are already doing and to uncover inefficient or manual processes.
One specific example shared was that at the end of the month the finance team need to reconcile data from a number of different systems that gets put into CSVs that need consolidating.
As OpenAI has experienced such rapid growth they got to a point where the row limits in Excel were being broken.
They were able to use ChatGPT to write a Python script that could take the two files and consolidate them automatically.
The finance team are not developers.
They would not have been able to write the script themselves.
But just being able to tell ChatGPT in natural language “this is my problem, how do you suggest I approach it” got them the solution they needed.
Remove repetitive work
The finance team at OpenAI have a guiding principle - if the same question is asked more than three times, create a GPT!
An example the showed was a Deal Desk GPT for the sales team.
Sellers often have questions about a company’s pricing and packaging policies and will typically speak to someone in finance or RevOps.
OpenAI created a custom GPT that has knowledge of the company’s pricing and packaging policy and is then tasked with engaging the sellers in conversation and discussing different options.
Sellers and commercial teams can then access the GPT and ask their specific questions, getting immediate and policy compliant responses without having to book time with a deal desk rep and losing valuable deal time.
Give your teams new skills
We mentioned earlier about giving finance teams the ability to run a Python script.
Now if you are not a developer you probably wouldn’t know where to start.
This is where ChatGPT excels in guiding newbies step by step through what to do - and if you get confused or stuck you just say and it will help you out.
You’ll quickly find that finance learn basic development, marketing learns sales, purchasing learns R&D - every team is able to develop their skills in other areas.
Experience a day in the life
I recommend you watch the 30 minute webinar below, but then quickly build a plan to experience a day in the life of each of your teams.
You’ll quickly build a list of easy use cases to get AI embedded in your team’s daily workflow.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you introduce AI to your organisation
15 Day Free Email Course - Subscribe to the “AI for non-technical CxOs” email course to get a beginner’s guide to how to drive AI change in your company.
AI Leaders Workshop - Inspire your senior leaders with a 2-4 hour hands on workshop, kicking off your AI strategy from the top of your business
AI for Sellers Workshop - Enable your sellers to go beyond basic research and use AI to accelerate and improve every aspect of their work from prospecting to closed won