The world is changing. Technology is changing, politics is changing. Fintech and AI are taking charge. What is going to happen?
Over the last decade, fintech solutions swept through the organizational needs of small businesses. Card payments are cheap online and offline, innovative financing solutions are at your fingertips and your accountant can create a graph of cash flows in 15 minutes or less in a spreadsheet.
In addition to streamlining payments, fintech is revolutionizing how small businesses make data-driven decisions.
Data-based decisions are on the rise thanks to solutions like Power BI or Tableau available even to small companies. Online-available and cloud-based accounting software interconnects with CRM and other needed tools to provide instant data to analyze.
Generative AI is on the rise. And just as well, because more and more reports (ESG and others) are required by regulators and a well-trained AI can write reports from data even better than people.
AI and computer vision also help with processing documents. Summaries of contracts are created for human review, and bookkeeping data is automatically populated to reduce manual errors. Bookkeeping in general will be in decline as bookkeepers will transition from actually doing the bookkeeping work to supervising AI agents.
Not only that, but financial planning is going to shift significantly towards automated tools and not rely so much on Excel. And Excel alone will incorporate more AI capabilities (and so will Google's Sheets) and rely less on cumbersome and complicated formulas.
All of this is on a brink of revolutionizing small business finances, and it will eventually result in a speed and immediate access to information to decision makers. However, whether these new tools and information will improve productivity will depend on how effectively decision-makers use them to drive growth and innovation.
In the meantime, even more tools will be made for financial management and its aspects and try to disrupt the system.