At Finnish Startup Community, we work closely with a small group of trusted partners who understand the realities of building and scaling start-ups. From time to time, we invite them to share their perspective with our community.
This time, we asked our friends at Greenstep to reflect on how automation and AI are shaping start-up operations, not only in core business development, but also in back-office functions such as finance, HR, and IT.
Automation, AI, and outsourcing back-office in start-ups
The speed of AI development has accelerated, and it is inevitable that all companies must consider the impact of AI on their business. There are a lot of startups and growth companies building their whole business in AI, and the rest are hopefully utilizing AI and automation to improve their core business. It is quite easy to imagine that AI will automize menial, repetitive tasks across the organization, allowing management and employees to focus on more value-adding work. AI advocates would say that even more complex tasks will be impacted and sped up by AI.
Whilst this has some truth to it, one can argue that for the time being, start-ups priorities implementing AI in production and operation processes, whereas automatizing back-office (finance, HR, IT etc.) comes second. Perhaps because the highest ROI is seen when automizing the core business or perhaps because back-office processes only cover a minor part of the workload within the organizations.
To give some support for this argument, a survey of 115 start-up companies, made by the Finnish Startup Community, asked how the current tools support automation/AI in financial reporting. On a scale from 1-5, the average was a mere 2,8. 73% of respondents gave an answer of 3 or below.
Simultaneously, many accounting and administration service providers are betting on AI in their own production process flow to differentiate from competitors and bring additional value to their customers.
In essence, if start-ups focus their automatization and AI efforts on their own core operational processes & products and sees value in doing it, then the same can be said for admin service providers in which automatization, AI and technology is in the core strategy. At Greenstep, automatization is at the very core of production, regardless of service lines (accounting, CFO, HR, IT, payroll, etc.). The value it brings is simple –
better accuracy, more timely reporting, and shifting focus from repetitive tasks to analysis and insights. A concrete example is Greenstep’s Business Intelligence platform BI Book. To keep the competitive edge, it no longer merely manages the whole data extraction and visualization flow automatically. It now allows the end user to talk with their company data and get comprehensive insights using their preferred language and without having to know exactly where the data resides.
In conclusion, if automatization and AI are in a start-up’s core strategy and DNA, then they should use those efforts first and foremost towards their own core operational processes and choose service providers that share the same strategical thinking in their respective fields of services.
About the author
Oliver Lindholm
Partner, Greenstep