Tools & Platforms

AI opens door for new finance skillsets: insightsoftware

Published

4 days ago

August 28, 2025

The steady forward creep of artificial intelligence is “pushing for a different skillset in the finance function,” accelerating the ongoing evolution of CFOs to strategic advisors, said Jennifer Warawa, general manager of controllership at insightsoftware.

The technology is changing the role of the finance chief, enabling access to insights in a way that puts accounting or finance leaders in a “great place to be more of an advisor inside the company and be more futuristic,” Warawa said in a interview. Additionally, as finance leaders integrate AI into some of the more routine, lower value processes inside of the function, such as automating accounts payable or receivable, that frees up more time for the individuals who were previously in charge of such processes.

However, that “does then put a spotlight on, what do you do with that time now?” Warawa said. “The idea is that people become more advisory in nature and become more of an integrated part of the go-forward story of the business, and working with the business leaders,” but that represents different capabilities and skills that need to utilized, and honed, by those professionals, she said.

Managing the AI inflection point

As the spotlight continues to shine on AI’s potential, finance chiefs feel the pressure to integrate it into their businesses operations, including the finance function, CFO Dive previously reported. Many are eying the technology as a way to bridge ongoing talent shortages in areas like accounting, or to help more effectively manage costs amid a murky macroeconomic environment.

Oftentimes, finance is viewed as a cost center that is being pushed to deliver results with a smaller team — while the workload remains the same, and in some cases, increases, Warawa said. “So even if they don’t want to embrace AI, they feel like they need to, because it’s the only way that the work is going to get done with a smaller team,” she said.

On the one hand, that forces further innovation and adoption inside of the finance function, but “it’s also causing people to go into a territory that they’re not especially comfortable in or excited about,” she said.

A veteran of the accounting industry, Warawa has spent most of her career working around the office of the CFO space, she said. Warawa founded and operated an accounting and consulting firm, Dreamscape Business Services, for 12 years, before moving to take a number of top executive roles during an 11-year tenure at business software provider Sage. She joined the Raleigh, North Carolina-based insightsoftware in May as part of a strategic realignment by the financial reporting software firm, taking ownership of its newly-minted controllership business unit, according to a press release at the time.

For CFOs to not only be able to utilize AI effectively, but to prepare for the future of the finance function as a driver of strategy, they need to pay close attention to how their teams think about and interact with the technology.

Presently, “we’re almost at this inflection point where you’ve got the talent that’s excited about technology and what it means for them in the future, and then the talent that’s like, ‘I think that technology is going to take my job,’” Warawa said. Being able to respond to both perceptions in a way that allows space for growth — on both a technology and talent level — is critical for CFOs.

Putting tech in the right places

Warawa likens AI’s forward march in finance to her early days in accounting, working with individuals who had just gained their certified public accounting licenses and spent their days photocopying documents.

“When automation came in and they went paperless, they weren’t like, ‘Oh, I hope that paperless doesn’t take my job…[because] I didn’t want to do that job in the first place,’” she said. “So I think about it as, the talent that can leverage technology to do their job better and faster will be the winners in this equation. So how do you empower your best people to leverage technology in new and different ways and not be afraid of it?”

As well as examining the team’s use of AI, it’s also important for CFOs to take a tactical approach to where and why they apply the technology — with the clear understanding that if “a process that is broken will not get fixed by AI,” Warawa said. “It will still be broken. It’s just AI might do it faster, in a broken way.”

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Tools & Platforms

Will GenAI Companies Ever Make Money?

Published

42 minutes ago

September 1, 2025

Andrea Nepori

According to a recent MIT report, 95% of organizations are seeing no (or very limited) returns from their internal generative AI pilot programs, despite large investments in their implementation. The study has its limitations, especially given the limited sample size of professionals and executives surveyed. But it offers a stark counterargument to the optimistic narratives promoted by OpenAI, Anthropic, and other prominent genAI companies.

Skepticism around their products’ ability to help companies increase revenue and profit, even in the medium to long term, is becoming more common, and not just among AI optimists anymore. This shift has intensified after GPT-5, OpenAI’s latest LLM, failed to live up to the heightened expectations set by Sam Altman himself.

While the use case and profitability of genAI applications is still very much to be proven, the IT industry’s bet on genAI and the companies developing it is already massive. From 2013 to 2020, cloud infrastructure capital expenditure grew from $32 billion to $119 billion, driven mostly by the rise of social media platforms and video content.

Post-Covid, the curve goes wild: in 2024, spending reached $285 billion, and in 2025, the top 11 cloud providers are forecasted to invest almost $400 billion. That’s more than they’ve committed in the past two years combined and the figure mostly stems from the massive compute needs for training and inferring LLM models.

A Complex Answer

The fundamental disconnect between the money companies are spending to compete in the AI race and the potential return on investment is widening as fast as their capex. A growing cadre of experts is asking the same fundamental question: with this uncertainty around the effectiveness of its real-world business application, will gen AI as a market ever be able to make money?

In a moment of profound change, the answer is complex and open to interpretation. On one side, we need to take the “inevitabilism” of Altman, Amodei, and other AI maximalists with a sizable grain of salt. It’s simply not true that a future where their particular flavor of genAI dominates the workplace and integrates into our lives at all levels is “inevitable”, despite what they’d like us to take at face value as they scour for even more funding dollars.

On the other hand, it’s undeniable that, despite the debate about its applicability, genAI represents a technological revolution. The technology itself is formidable, and its positive impact on at least personal productivity is undeniable. Yet it remains vastly unclear, as the MIT study demonstrates, whether it will ever be able to justify its technological costs.

A Bubble?

These two sides of the same coin can be true at the same time: genAI is one of the most important technologies of all time, and we’re in a bubble regarding its potential and applications. Remarkably, this admission comes from Sam Altman himself. OpenAI’s CEO, in a recent interview with US reporters, tried to deflate expectations he helped set up in the past:

“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.”

To make matters worse, all generative AI services we’re currently using personally and at work (including ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini) are heavily subsidized by either investors’ or companies’ money. While the combined number of their active users already exceeds one billion, both OpenAI and Anthropic will close 2025 reporting billions in revenue and even more in losses.

Like Uber?

The playbook we’re seeing unfold isn’t far removed from that of other hyperscale platforms like Uber. A moment will come when prices must rise to start returning capital to the large number of investors. Uber delayed that moment for years, collecting eager investors’ money with the far-fetched promise of autonomous driving—until that didn’t work anymore.

OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same, dangling the promise of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial super intelligence) to collect billions in funding while waiting long enough for the technology to become indispensable. But while ride-hailing had immediate benefits in disrupting an established industry with lower cost solutions, the AI startups’ bet is far bolder and definitely way more expensive to maintain.

A Skeptic at Goldman Sachs

Jim Covello, the Head of Global Equity Research at Goldman Sachs, is among the genAI skeptics. He says that to earn a relevant return on investment, gen AI should be able to solve extremely complex problems that justify its immense cost.

In a Goldman Sachs report published in 2024, Covello explains:

“We estimate that the AI infrastructure buildout will cost over $1tn in the next several years alone, which includes spending on data centers, utilities, and applications. So, the crucial question is: What $1tn problem will AI solve? Replacing low- wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed in my thirty years of closely following the tech industry. While the question of whether AI technology will ever deliver on the promise many people are excited about today is certainly debatable, the less debatable point is that AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do.”

One year after Goldman Sach’s report, we are still very much hearing the same narrative, with AI companies swearing by the scaling myth, saying all they need is just a bit more data, just a bit more training, and just a bit more investor money to get all that.

A $1 Trillion Question

It’s a $1 trillion question: what happens when the financial realities can no longer be delayed, with investors and companies realizing that the chasm between costs and applications can’t be filled?

History suggests that bubbles burst when the gap between investment and practical returns becomes unsustainable. The dot-com crash of 2001 offers a sobering reminder of what occurs when investor enthusiasm dramatically outpaces actual utility, even though the fundamental technology (the Internet) was so important that it would later become ubiquitous.

If businesses begin demanding concrete returns on their AI investment and find them lacking a significant market correction could follow. Companies that have built their valuations on AI promises may face a harsh reckoning with reality, negatively affecting the global economy as a consequence.

Tools & Platforms

CP AXTRA Unveils Digital Transformation Vision and Partners with Tencent Cloud to Power AI-Driven Retail Tech

Published

2 hours ago

September 1, 2025

Advertorial Desk

BANGKOK, Sept. 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — CP AXTRA, the operator of Asia’s leading wholesale and retail businesses — Makro and Lotus’s — based in Thailand, is accelerating its digital transformation journey as part of its commitment to shaping the future of smart retail. At the core of this vision is a commitment to leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) to significantly increase manpower efficiency, enabling team members to focus on higher-value, strategic tasks while driving online sales and aligning with the evolving needs of today’s consumers.

The delegation of CP AXTRA visiting Tencent Headquarter in Shenzhen

This transformation is supported by CP AXTRA’s strategic partnership with Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global leading technology company Tencent. The collaboration, formalized earlier this year through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), combines CP AXTRA’s retail expertise with Tencent Cloud’s advanced technology solutions — setting a new benchmark for innovation in retail across Asia and beyond.

Under this partnership, CP AXTRA is deploying Tencent Cloud’s comprehensive suite of services, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), AI powered big data and database solutions, as well as advanced container management solutions such as Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE). These tools are instrumental in optimizing operations across more than 2,600 stores in Thailand, enabling scalable digital innovation and significant cost efficiencies.

A cornerstone of this transformation is Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE), which help CP AXTRA achieve elastic scaling, enabling IT infrastructure to adapt dynamically to fluctuating business demands. Complementing this, AI-driven innovations are revolutionizing inventory management and sales forecasting, laying the foundation for a more intelligent, responsive retail ecosystem.

As part of its digital expansion, CP AXTRA has also officially launched its Weixin/WeChat Mini Program, offering a seamless shopping experience for Chinese-speaking consumers across Asia. The Mini Program allows customers to explore and purchase a curated selection of Thai products directly from their smartphones, without needing to travel — making “Thailand to your hands” a reality. From everyday essentials to local favorites, all products are delivered with CP AXTRA’s trusted quality and service.

This initiative underscores CP AXTRA’s ambition to provide a cross-border lifestyle shopping experience that blends reliable Thai sourcing with the speed and convenience expected by modern consumers in China and across the region.

Chen Rui, Vice President of International Business and Managing Director for Southeast Asia at Tencent Cloud, said, “We are honored to partner with CP AXTRA on their transformative journey toward smart retail. By combining Tencent Cloud’s advanced AI and cloud infrastructure with CP AXTRA’s deep industry expertise, we are helping to solve complex challenges and unlock new opportunities for growth. Our solutions, such as the Tencent Kubernetes Engine, are enabling CP AXTRA to scale dynamically, optimize operations, and achieve significant cost efficiencies across thousands of stores. Together, we are setting a new standard for digital innovation in the retail sector and demonstrating the immense potential of cloud technology to drive sustainable business success.”

Tarin Thaniyavarn, Group Chief Technology & Data Officers and Group Chief E-Commerce Officer, CP AXTRA Public Company Limited, added, “At CP AXTRA, we are committed to redefining the future of retail in Southeast Asia through bold innovation and strategic partnerships. Our digital transformation roadmap is not just about adopting new technologies—it’s about empowering our people and creating smarter, more agile operations that benefit both our customers and our teams. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and working closely with Tencent Cloud, we are reducing repetitive workloads, enabling our employees to focus on higher-value tasks, and setting ambitious targets for online growth. This partnership is a testament to our dedication to sustainable, technology-driven progress and our vision to lead the region into a new era of smart retail.”

This partnership is more than a technological upgrade — it represents a transformative redefinition of customer experiences and retail innovation. By addressing key challenges in scalability, AI integration, and infrastructure optimization, CP AXTRA is strengthening its position as a retail tech leader in Asia. With Tencent Cloud’s proven global footprint, serving over 10,000 clients across over 80 countries, this alliance also further cements Tencent Cloud’s position as the trusted cloud partner for enterprises driving digital innovations worldwide.

About Tencent Cloud

Tencent Cloud, one of the world’s leading cloud companies, is committed to creating innovative solutions to resolve real-world issues and enabling digital transformation for smart industries. Through our extensive global infrastructure, Tencent Cloud provides businesses across the globe with stable and secure industry-leading cloud products and services, leveraging technological advancements such as cloud computing, Big Data analytics, AI, IoT, and network security. It is our constant mission to meet the needs of industries across the board, including the fields of gaming, media and entertainment, finance, healthcare, property, retail, travel, and transportation.

About CP AXTRA

CP AXTRA Public Company Limited, is an operator of Asia’s leading wholesaler and retailer, Makro and Lotus’s. The Company is based in Thailand, with operation across 10 countries. CP AXTRA is committed to fulfilling people’s lives with good health, love, joy, and well-being, by providing solutions and meeting customers’ daily needs with technology, innovation, and operational excellence.

With over 30 years of retail experience, CP AXTRA is a trusted partner for both B2B and B2C customers, offering a comprehensive range of products and services. Today, it manages over 2,600 offline stores in Thailand and Asia, with strong online presence.

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Tools & Platforms

Alibaba’s AI Cloud Surge Challenges Tech Giants’ Dominance

Published

2 hours ago

September 1, 2025

Coin World

Alibaba’s China Hong Kong-listed shares surged 15% following its recent quarterly earnings report, driven largely by robust performance in its cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) divisions. The company’s Cloud Intelligence Group reported a 26% year-on-year increase in revenue, with AI-related product sales maintaining triple-digit growth for eight consecutive quarters [2]. This has positioned Alibaba’s cloud services as a critical pillar for monetizing AI, mirroring the strategies of global tech giants such as Microsoft and Google [2].

Alibaba’s CEO, Eddie Wu, highlighted the strong demand for AI, stating that AI-related product revenue now constitutes a significant share of external customer revenue [2]. The company has continued to expand its AI capabilities, including the development of a new AI chip to support its cloud division and reduce reliance on foreign GPU suppliers [2]. This move aims to enhance performance and reduce costs in Chinese data centers, aligning with broader efforts to control more of the AI stack domestically [1].

Despite the strong cloud performance, Alibaba’s overall financial results showed mixed outcomes. Group revenue for the quarter totaled approximately 247.7 billion yuan, a modest increase that fell slightly below some forecasts [1]. While the cloud segment contributed to improved operating profits, other divisions such as China’s e-commerce and local services were affected by rising operating costs and aggressive price competition in the food delivery market [1]. Ele.me, Alibaba’s food delivery unit, reported margin pressures due to heavy subsidies and fierce competition, a challenge shared by other players in the sector [1].

The company’s financial strategy has shifted toward prioritizing high-value AI and cloud investments while reducing spending on lower-return projects [1]. Management signaled a potential pullback from aggressive subsidy tactics in food delivery and is exploring premium services and asset sales to improve unit economics. Alibaba is also considering an initial public offering (IPO) for its cloud unit, a move that could elevate the segment’s profile and attract independent valuation for its AI assets [1].

Investor reaction has been positive, particularly regarding the cloud and AI growth trajectory, though short-term concerns remain over margin pressures in local services and instant commerce. Analysts are divided on whether the AI and cloud segments can fully offset near-term profit challenges or if continued competition will keep margins depressed for several quarters [1]. However, the share price jump suggests that the market is optimistic about Alibaba’s long-term AI monetization potential.

Alibaba’s advancements in AI and cloud computing have global implications, increasing competition with major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft [1]. If the company’s AI tools and in-house chips scale effectively, it could offer a compelling alternative in regions such as Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. However, geopolitical factors and trade restrictions will require Alibaba to balance global ambitions with local supply chain and regulatory constraints.

Source: [1] Alibaba AI Revenue Rises While China Food War Hits Profit (https://meyka.com/blog/alibaba-ai-revenue-rises-while-china-food-war-hits-profit/) [2] Alibaba (BABA) June quarter 2025 earnings report (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/alibaba-baba-june-quarter-2025-earnings-report.html) [3] Alibaba’s cloud-computing business is thriving, and it has a … (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alibabas-stock-rises-as-cloud-computing-business-shines-and-with-a-new-ai-chip-in-the-works-6bb26ce5)

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