The buzz around emerging technologies artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain and more has a lot of people asking that question. There are some tasks that these new technologies will be able to do better than humans, with far fewer mistakes.

For example: suppose you want to optimize cash on hand by getting discounts from your suppliers. Even a small business has dozens of suppliers; a large enterprise might have hundreds of thousands. At that scale, trying to negotiate a discount on every invoice would be impossible for a human being.

Instead, you can use artificial intelligence to analyze supplier behavior. Some of your suppliers might be more likely to offer you a discount if you pay them ahead of schedule. AI can identify those patterns for you then make recommendations about how and when to take advantage of those discounts. This can be done continuously, as supplier behavior and market conditions change.

This is just one example of a time-consuming task that can be done better by a machine. But it's not replacing a human job; it's performing a task that no one else has the time or bandwidth to do.

Finance teams spend too much time turning data and reports into meaningful insight, when they should spend most of their time communicating that insight to the business and providing advice on strategy. Artificial intelligence has the potential to automate much of that data analysis, so finance can spend more time taking action.

The goal is not to replace finance. The goal is to offload the tasks that they spend too much time on today. Finance professionals have excellent analytical and critical thinking skills, and every CFO could benefit from putting those skills to better use.