We are witnessing an unprecedented technological turning point, and the internet revolution seems almost modest in comparison.
While previous technologies were deployed over several decades, artificial intelligence is progressing at dizzying speed.
The turning point in AI
Early adopters of AI are not only getting a head start, they are redrawing the rules of the game. The gap between the pioneers and those who are still hesitant is growing rapidly and the numbers speak for themselves. According to the Boston Consulting Group, so-called future-built companies, those that have integrated AI into their core functions at scale, are seeing five times more revenue growth and three times more cost reduction than others.
Waiting for AI to stabilize would be a strategic mistake. The AI industry is evolving at a breakneck pace, as illustrated by Mistral AI, which has just raised 1.7 billion euros after having multiplied innovations in 2025 with Voxtral (speech understanding), Devstral (agentic coding) and Codestral 25.08. And some companies have already taken the plunge into experimentation, deploying AI assistants that comply with data security and are adapted to the roles of each employee; BNP Paribas has 750 AI use cases already in production across the bank.
The keys to AI transformation
Beyond technology, successful AI transformation involves rethinking corporate culture, the way of working and creating value. Three prerequisites determine success: being ready, being willing and being capable.
Being ready means accepting disruption as an opportunity. As Olivier Babeau from Institut Sapiens reminds us: “You will not be replaced by AI, but by someone who knows how to use it effectively. » The real issue therefore lies in organizational inertia. Experimenting with AI is becoming as essential as mastering IT twenty years ago; a key factor in competitive survival.
Being a volunteer involves enthusiasm. Faced with the evolution of their role with AI, finance professionals oscillate between curiosity and anxiety. The best talents see it as a lever for development rather than a threat. This cultural change cannot be decreed, it is cultivated through the implementation of “collective artificial intelligence”, aiming to democratize access to AI solutions in a secure framework, and making each employee an actor of change, supported by champions of innovation.
Being capable requires systematic experimentation because traditional training is now quickly becoming obsolete. Time for learning by doing: create, fail, iterate, succeed, start again. For French companies, a successful transformation requires suitable infrastructure, time dedicated to experimentation and the courage to fail quickly to learn faster.
From vision to reality: AI, the driving force behind the transformation of financial departments
AI transformation began where its value was most evident: the marketing and sales sectors. Finance, on the other hand, was lagging behind, citing issues of data security and reliability. But this reluctance is fading. According to a recent CFO Connect study, 56% of CFOs now use AI; sign of a major turning point. Finance teams today prioritize AI for planning and forecasting; areas ripe for AI due to fragmented data, risk of errors and time-consuming processes.
One sector particularly illustrates this evolution: expense management. These solutions have decisive advantages: access to detailed spending data, rich contextual information, and presence at the time of decisions rather than retrospective analysis. Thus, the AI agents developed in this area are paving the way for a new approach: SP&A (Spend Management & Analysis), enabling smarter financial decision-making based on insights generated by AI provided at the critical moment.
The urgency is becoming clearer: AI is no longer a promise for the future, it is already transforming businesses. As pointed out by Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the computing capacities of AI systems will be multiplied by a million within ten years. The human brain is not designed to handle exponential growth. For finance departments, the window for action is limited: we must act now to build a competitive advantage before operations integrating AI by default become the norm.
