Artificial intelligence applications in corporate finance

Abstract

Generally speaking, this master thesis discusses Artificial Intelligence inside the corporate finance with the current usage and its prospect in a near future. Even though the topic has worldwide impacts, there is a real lack of knowledge about its situational analysis and future. This thesis is bringing the gap through information retrieved from papers, reports and experts and an evolving survey using qualitative and quantitative analysis. Above all, AI in corporate finance is clearly a hot topic which is impacting everyone for two reasons. Firstly, the corporate finance is something which touches everyone as most decisions inside organisations have financial consequences. Secondly, Artificial Intelligence impacts or will impact the life of everybody. People are using AI without even knowing it. Moreover, the exponential growth of AI researches are helping people and organizations from the agriculture to the finance with an expected market value counted in trillions of dollars. Before going into the details, AI including past achievements and human differences is screened in order to have a clear vision of AI development and technologies currently available. It also demonstrates the reasons why AI will work in symbiosis with the humans in most jobs. This is obviously completed by the economic challenges. The governmental AI war between the China and the United States is enhancing the global growth mainly through the private sector funding. This growth is leading to huge private and public disparities according to the level of enablers previously leveraged inside organizations. More importantly, this master thesis realizes a comparison of AI in corporate finance with the overall fields and the financial domain through a survey and the information retrieved from papers, reports and experts. Therefore, the progresses and expectations within the corporate finance are balanced and permit to stand out a fair mind about the research topic. It is thus proven that the current usages of AI within the corporate finance are not extensive compared to the finance and other fields. However, AI is expected to play a key role as a big part of the corporate finance job is repetitive. At a social point of view, people will have more responsibility by focusing on higher added-value missions even though jobs will be destroyed. Nevertheless, It should lead to shareholder value creation through higher productivity and effectiveness while reducing the costs and improving the stakeholders’ satisfaction.