How AI can drive a proactive approach to corporate finance

Roger Kenyanya, vice president of finance at home improvement store Lowe’s, took part in the inaugural AICPA and CPA.com AI Symposium about three months ago in New York. Why did he refer to the event as a “humbling, full-circle moment” in a LinkedIn post? Find out on this episode of the JofA podcast.

Kenyanya, a member of the Future of Finance Leadership Advisory Group, shares how both the finance function and overall business are harnessing the power of AI. He also details his career journey and notes how the skill sets of next-generation finance employees will change.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The “significant milestone” in Kenyanya’s career — in his junior year of college.
• Kenyanya’s path to his current role as a finance leader at Lowe’s.
• His takeaways from a January symposium about AI.
• Some of the ways AI is being harnessed at Lowe’s.
• How the skill set for tomorrow’s finance employees is changing and the three-pronged focus of that shift for Kenyanya and Lowe’s.
• The peer “platform to collaborate” that Kenyanya said is valuable.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome back to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is your host, Neil Amato. Joining me for this episode is Roger Kenyanya of Lowe’s, the home improvement store. He is VP of corporate finance at Lowe’s. We’re going to talk some about his background, about AI, some of the ways AI is being deployed in finance, and also about the future of finance roles. Roger, first, welcome to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. We’re happy to have you.

Roger Kenyanya: Thank you so much, Neil. It’s great to be here, and I’m looking forward to our discussion.

Amato: Well, great, so am I. I want to ask you first about a LinkedIn post from a few months back. It was from the January AI symposium, an event that you described as a “humbling, full-circle moment.” Now, tell me what you mean by that and maybe a little bit about the symposium where that happened, that full-circle moment.

Kenyanya: Sure thing. That LinkedIn post marked a significant milestone in my career. When I was in college, in my junior year, I received a scholarship from the AICPA, and that went a long way in helping me pay for my college and pay for my education. From receiving that scholarship as a student to returning as a speaker and really a contributor to the AICPA’s AI symposium, that really encapsulates a profound journey in my career.

The humbling moment for me was really a reflection on the power of education and the perils of also paying it forward. Someone invested in me back then when I was a college student, and here I was almost 17 years later contributing in shaping how finance is evolving and how AI is changing our industry and providing thought leadership on how can we as leaders not only be ready for that future but also bring our people along so that we can continue to add value for our organizations.

Amato: So, you’re a college student; it’s a few years back. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more maybe about the path before that, or also from that, to your current role at Lowe’s.

Kenyanya: Sure thing. I grew up in Kenya and moved to the U.S. in search of a better opportunity. Ended up in New Jersey and went to New Jersey City University. Right after graduation, I joined Johnson & Johnson as part of its Finance Leadership Development Program. At J&J, I had opportunities across strategy and finance roles and spent about six years at J&J and then really began to specialize more on technology finance and so transitioned to a company called Fiserv, which is a financial technology company, and spent about five years there in more of a traditional technology finance role, FP&A role.

I joined Lowe’s in 2020, and at the time, Lowe’s had begun to significantly invest in technology to improve the customer experience and to really help modernize our operations, so I was brought in to help stand up the technology finance practice here at Lowe’s. I’ve been here about four years, and it’s been a great opportunity not only to help manage and inform how we allocate investments into technology but also understand from a finance standpoint what are the skill sets that we need to develop to be able to optimize our investments and leverage technology in our decision-making.

Amato: About the event in January, the AI symposium, what are some of the things you took away from attending that?

Kenyanya: Sure. Good question, Neil. One of the key things that I took away was one, just an eye-opener into the evolving capabilities that AI has and the profound impact that it will have in just the way we work, the way we operate. Some of the things not only from a capability standpoint that I think are particularly intriguing was the discussions around the ethical AI use and balancing that with the need and really capability that AI can do to improve or enhance accuracy in our financial processes, and also what potential opportunities it has to automate a lot of the routine tasks that we do and our people do.

When that happens, it really frees up a lot of capacity that can be reallocated towards more strategic, value-added work. Not only understanding what the potential that the technology has, but also the impact it has to really free up capacity, that gets me excited because we can reallocate that capacity to add a lot more value to the organization.

Amato: It’s interesting, you mentioned AI ethics. Probably about half an hour before we got on this call, I was editing in a different podcast episode with a speaker, Danielle Supkis Cheek, about AI ethics.

Kenyanya: I know Danielle very well.

Amato: She knows her stuff, and we hope that episode is coming soon. Regarding AI, obviously, it is the hot topic, not just in finance but in business everywhere. But specifically in finance departments, financial decision-making at Lowe’s, what is the role of AI at this point?

Kenyanya: At Lowe’s, we’re looking into ways we can integrate AI to streamline our financial operations, all the way from, as an example, automating invoice processing to using predictive analytics in financial planning. The way we look at it is helping us transition more from being a reactive analytics organization or shop to more of a proactive decision engine.

AI is helping us to, one, help understand where’s the smoke, if you will. When you think about the scale that Lowe’s is, across 1,700-plus stores across the country, impacted very differently by weather or a lot of other factors. AI can be able to help inform not only how is the business performing, but why is it performing the way it is, and what should we anticipate forward-looking as we start to overlay factors such as weather, interest rates, macro factors to help us just scenario model and scenario plan differently. Ultimately, that helps us to just make better choices in terms of how we’re allocating our inventory and sales planning down to a store and regional level.

Amato: Yes, so this is not just finance-specific, this is about the business as a whole.

Kenyanya: Absolutely. AI has the potential to really transform the way we operate and run the whole business. As an organization, we have deployed quite a bit of AI tools across the business outside of finance. We are now starting to really leverage the capability within finance itself. Particularly in finance, it’s more around sales forecasting, sales planning, expense, anomaly detection, and really that proactive decision and insight generation.

Amato: Yes. A personal example for me: It was a good weather weekend last weekend. I was in the market for mulch, and when I needed some mulch, the nearest home improvement store to me is Lowe’s. When I went on the website and went to search things, the first thing that it said was “trending” was indeed mulch. People were thinking like me, and apparently the Lowe’s site was aware of that. I think that’s a good example of AI at work.

As AI becomes more prevalent, I guess maybe the skill set that’s essential for finance professionals maybe changes. How is Lowe’s addressing that with its finance department?

Kenyanya: Really, with digital transformation and, to your point around as AI becomes more prevalent, it’s mandating a shift in terms of the skill sets that we emphasize are the skill sets that will be critical for our finance professionals in the future. At Lowe’s, we are focusing on digital literacy as well as data analytics and strategic thinking as really core areas or the key areas of development. With digital literacy, it’s helping finance and accounting professionals understand the potential that these tools have and how to interact with them.

Then, from an analytics standpoint, it’s geared towards helping position our teams to tap into these tools to full, proactive insights and analytics as opposed to reactive, where we had to wait to see the results and then trying to find out what happened, but make that shift towards proactiveness.

And then strategic thinking, it’s all about being able to think critically about the responses that we are seeing, the outcomes of all these computational machine models. And ask the next three, five, 10 questions and really challenge the outputs of the machine, not taking it at face value. That’s a way by which we can help to detect if the machine is hallucinating or if it’s making stuff up versus if it’s helping to really craft, helping us address a problem, or broaden our understanding of the business.

Those are the three areas that we’re focusing on around digital literacy, analytics, as well as strategic thinking.

Amato: Along those same lines, regarding how the future of finance is progressing, and maybe the roles are evolving, what do you see on that front with increasing use of AI and automation?

Kenyanya: The way I like to think about it is, it’s helping us automate some of the routine, mundane tasks. What that does is it frees up capacity. The way I see it, and we see it here, is that the role of the finance professional is becoming increasingly strategic due to AI and automation taking over those routine tasks. In the future, I do believe that the finance roles will require a blend of those technical skills, but really the soft skills — the soft skills around critical thinking, numbers storytelling, and having a strong emphasis on analytics and strategic insight.

Those are the elements that I think as we’re thinking about for the future of finance. What we’re really seeking to emphasize is less on one person or one team trying to really build up the Excel data models themselves and go deep more from a technical standpoint. But it does require someone to have an understanding of the concepts. But really stretch out the critical-thinking aspect of it. That’s how you’re able to really use that additional capacity to add more value to the business and drive more strategic impact. It’s that shift from more transactional to strategic that I’m excited about AI really helping us to unlock.

Amato: This is something that just popped into my head. But you’re the VP of finance at Lowe’s — how big is your department?

Kenyanya: Lowe’s is about a 1,000-person finance organization — finance and accounting, including strategic sourcing and audit. But within FP&A, financial planning and analysis, it’s about a 300-person organization, of which my team is around 100 or so, more around the core corporate finance functions, which include product and technology, HR, legal, strategy, as well as the lowes.com business.

Amato: You just mentioned lowes.com. Related to it on the technology front, though I guess more customer-facing than finance-centric, is the Lowe’s partnership with DoorDash. Tell me more about that development, which I guess, was announced earlier in April.

Kenyanya: Sure thing. That partnership is part of an overarching strategy to enhance our customer experience and meeting customers where they are. We call that our everywhere commerce strategy. It’s really about improving accessibility of our products to our customers and providing convenience. A partnership with DoorDash really came about from within that context.

It’s enabled us to meet a different set of customers that would historically not either shop on lowes.com or come into our stores, especially as more and more of our customers seek that convenience from a shopping experience standpoint. It’s been really positive from that standpoint. It builds upon a partnership that we have with Instacart, which we’ve had with Instacart from about a year now. DoorDash was another platform. But it’s really all about expanding our reach as a brand, as an organization, as a company, and meeting customers where they are and removing friction from that shopping experience by eliminating the need for them to come into our stores or even show up as directly because they are so accustomed and attuned to shopping on some of these marketplaces.

Amato: So, it’s as simple as a DoorDash delivery person can send an air filter or something from Lowe’s to the house?

Kenyanya: It is very much so. You can be on DoorDash, you can be working on your yard, especially right now during spring season. You can be in your yard trying to get your flower bed ready. But you realize, I need this brand of soil, or I need these plants, and you just go on DoorDash and select them, and you keep working on your flower bed, and within really two hours or less, those products are right there on your door.

Or you could be hosting a party, and you’re running out of some supplies, or you need something from home improvement to really augment your home, and you then go on DoorDash and just make the order and within really one to two hours the product is right there. It’s enabling customers to still do life the way they want to do life and have the convenience of getting their home improvement needs met.

Amato: Now, let’s talk about the Future of Finance Leadership Advisory Group. It’s a group that I’ve been around a little bit at some of the summits in the past. Tell me some about that group, how you came to hear about it, and what it is you like being part of the group.

Kenyanya: I first heard of the group from Barry Payne, who was with the AICPA. Being a part of that group, and one of the things that I really like about it is that it provides me a platform to collaborate with my peers in other industries, other organizations, to tackle a lot of the common challenges that are facing us as a finance professional or as finance leaders. All the way from how do we address critical skills gap? How do we help continue to position the business for growth, as an example.

That group has been incredibly valuable because it’s a platform for sharing insights and strategies around driving the business and ensuring that we’re all staying at the forefront of finance innovation. I do not necessarily have to figure out myself. I have the ability to “phone a friend.” It’s a platform that really enables us to come together to exchange ideas and learn from each other. It’s been incredibly valuable from that standpoint.

Amato: Roger, this has been a great discussion. Anything else that maybe you’d like to discuss?

Kenyanya: No, I don’t think so. I think this has been such a wonderful discussion. I really appreciate the opportunity to get together, share a bit of my perspective, and provide a little bit of insight about Lowe’s and how we are doing to help position our company and, really, our finance professionals for success in the future.