How many times have you seen it? A new technology rolls out, everyone gets excited, and six months later, it’s gathering dust. No one’s using it. Or worse, it was never even fully implemented.
Most companies treat transformation like a project. When it comes to AI in finance, especially at enterprise scale, that mindset will kill your ROI.
To get real value from your automation investments—cost savings, better compliance, faster cycles, fewer errors—you need a plan for continuous transformation. Not a one-and-done initiative. Not another band-aid on a broken process. But a real framework for execution that will help your company repeatedly adapt and improve.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Are your finance operations stuck?
Most enterprise finance teams are still doing manual sample audits, even after deploying some form of automation. That’s not transformation, it’s triage.
It’s an approach that leads to approval bottlenecks, matching errors, and process slowdowns. You risk missing compliance violations and exposing the company to penalties. Duplicate invoices and fraudulent expenses slip through the cracks. And both users and suppliers experience frustrating delays, from slow approvals to late payments. These problems create a high-cost operation that delivers mediocre controls.
Standing still has consequences. The tools may be in place, but your investment stalls without a plan to evolve and improve. The good news is, this is fixable if you treat transformation as a cycle, not a finish line.
Use this framework to stay ahead
Continuous transformation is about maintaining momentum. That means building a framework that’s repeatable, flexible, and tied to real business outcomes.
- Evaluate and analyze
Start by reviewing your current workflows, system usage, and user experience. Where are the breakdowns? Are there gaps in automation, compliance, or data integrity? - Strategize
With that foundation, you can pinpoint opportunities to add or enhance automation. Even if you’re already using AI for automation, you might consider using specialized models (like our Pre-built Apps) or advanced AI Analytics. - Execute
This is where most companies slow down. Execution doesn’t have to be complicated. Many small, high-impact deployments can go live in days, if you prioritize effectively. Focus on fast-time-to-value improvements that make a measurable difference quickly. - Iterate
Here’s where the real transformation happens. Review outcomes and feedback regularly, track your KPIs, and optimize as you go. Launched a pilot? Scale it. Found success with one fraud detection model? Set up another. That’s the cycle.
You need the right people to run this
You can’t treat continuous transformation like a side project. It takes a dedicated team with clearly defined roles and enough time to do the job right. Typically, this means a minimum of 15 to 20% of each team member’s time. Make sure that each of these team members aren’t chosen on the basis of “Who can do this right now?” but rather “Who can manage this long term?”
At the center of this team is a Transformation Lead, who owns the improvement strategy and roadmap and ensures your efforts stay aligned with broader business goals. A Business Analyst partners closely to identify inefficiencies, uncover gaps, and back recommendations with data. You’ll also need a person who understands the platform and products deeply. At AppZen, these are our Subject Matter Experts, with the technical expertise to know how and when to deploy any new features you’ve enabled, and how to make value-enhancing adjustments aligned with your business needs. Finally, an Implementation Coordinator keeps everything moving by managing deployments and timelines, and executing on the transformation strategy. They continuously monitor, tracking KPIs and optimizations, and evaluate the success of each improvement cycle.
Give this group the mandate, time, and clarity they need, and they’ll drive measurable change across your finance organization.
How to unblock your team
Chances are, you already know where the friction is. Maybe backlogged projects are waiting on resources that never come. Maybe your reporting doesn’t quite answer the right questions. Or maybe you’ve deployed a platform but never turned on half the features you’re paying for.
If you don’t have the internal bandwidth to build and maintain a dedicated transformation team, you may find it reassuring to know that you’re not out of options. It’s easy to add expert guidance in the form of additional services. This allows you to extend your team and keep your automation efforts moving, without adding to your headcount.
These experts can quickly build in logic to help you automatically flag AI-generated fraudulent receipts. They can take your new AI Agents live in days, saving you and your team 10x the amount of time and effort you might have spent trying to figure it all out. If your dashboards aren’t giving you the right insights, they’ll fix them. Best of all, they often offer training and certification support to build up your internal capability, so you won’t be reliant on outside help forever. There’s no scoping delay or question about the cost—you know exactly what’s included and what it will take to deliver it.
AppZen’s Mastermind Managed Service is an example of one such subscription-based service, offering you ongoing access to experts who help you deploy, optimize, and continually improve your Apps, AI Agents, and analytics. Whether you need custom development, better reporting, or someone to stay on top of product updates and roll out new capabilities as they’re released, these services can be invaluable.
If you’re ready to stop letting good tech go unused, let’s talk. Your next transformation doesn’t have to stall out. Instead, we’ll show you how to gain momentum and deliver results that stick.
