The following is a guest post from Jatin Dalal, CFO at Cognizant. Opinions are the author’s own.

A business rarely gets to choose when its biggest decisions arrive. A client proposes a transformational artificial intelligence program requiring rapid investment in scarce talent and technology, an acquisition target becomes available or a new market proves viable earlier than expected. The CEO needs to know: Should we move? What is the opportunity worth? What must we redirect to pursue it?

Finance can of course offer judgment built on experience, pattern recognition and a deep understanding of how the enterprise creates value. But it is often working from stale or provisional numbers while reconciling signals across demand, capacity, cash and risk.

The constraint is that evidence arrives in different systems and moves at different speeds.

Going back to first principles, the finance function exists to help the enterprise allocate scarce resources against an uncertain future in ways that create value. It can do that credibly because it is responsible for establishing the trusted view of how resources have already been deployed and what they produced. That perspective gives finance a unique role in shaping what comes next.

For most of the function’s history, however, establishing what was true was expensive. Transactions had to be collected, reconciled, explained and documented before the business could rely on the resulting picture. Finance therefore did much of that work periodically, and the function organized itself around the reporting calendar.

Several generations of technology improved the economics of processing. Mainframes, enterprise resource planning, shared services and offshore delivery made transactions cheaper to process and books faster to close. But they did not change the cadence of finance: the business moved continuously while finance still established the trusted picture periodically.

Changing financial picture

AI can enable a more fundamental reimagination. For the first time, much of the cognitive work required to establish the financial picture can be supplied as digital labor. Multimodal capabilities allow AI systems to interpret contracts, emails, images and other unstructured information alongside transactional data; agents can extract, reconcile and document continuously, and people can devote more of their attention to exceptions and approval. Work that previously had to wait for scarce human attention can increasingly happen in parallel, across systems and at much lower marginal cost.

Digital labor is only part of the shift. AI can also change the quality and timeliness of the financial picture itself. It can work across a much broader set of sources, process them at speed, identify inconsistencies or questionable inputs for review and, when connected to current enterprise data, work from the latest available information rather than a periodically assembled snapshot.

And once knowing becomes continuous, finance can rethink both the boundaries and the rhythm of its work. For example, project setup, timesheet capture, billing, invoicing and collections can become one coordinated flow, eliminating handoffs between today’s sub-functions.

I think of the established work of finance in two broad categories: 

1. Core finance: Includes accounting, reporting, controls and compliance; it keeps the record and protects the enterprise. 

2. Growth finance: Handles planning, forecasting, performance management and strategic decision support, essentially applying financial intelligence to performance, risk and opportunity.

AI can increasingly execute portions of core finance, with people governing exceptions and remaining accountable for the result, and that creates capacity for more growth finance. But it also creates room for something else, something I call new finance.

Core finance establishes what is true, growth finance uses that truth to shape choices and new finance continuously updates both the truth and the choice as conditions change. This is work our function has always wanted to do but rarely had the means to do at scale.

The distinction is clearest in forecasting. Great finance functions have mastered scenario planning, but a scenario is still a map produced at a point in time. New finance works more like Google Maps. If you take a left turn when you should have taken a right, the system does not keep showing you the original route but absorbs the new information, recalculates what remains reachable and tells you in real time what the journey now requires.

Like Google Maps, new finance would offer not just speed, although it should reorient almost immediately, but it would also expand the breadth of coverage, navigating a much larger network of possible paths. And it would combine greater fidelity — continually reconciling multiple signals to establish where the business is and which paths remain viable — with greater recency, incorporating new information as conditions change.

What excites me the most, however, is what comes next: work that no previous generation of finance professionals has had the means to perform at scale. Could finance maintain a live, independent reference view of what the business can deliver, weighted through current operating signals, emerging conditions and forward-looking indicators, and use it to always pressure-test the bottom-up forecast? Could controls move from testing samples after the fact to continuously checking every transaction, spotting anomalies, assessing their significance and surfacing issues while there is still time to act? And could finance constantly reassess where the enterprise puts its scarce capital, talent and capacity, updating the expected return as demand, economics and risk change, and identifying where resources should move before the next planning cycle?

AI can give business judgment a much stronger and more independent evidence base, one that can absorb signals from across and beyond the enterprise, detect when assumptions are no longer holding and bring a different point of view while there is still time to change the outcome. That is the foundation for the new finance, and what I find most compelling.