As we move into 2025, economic uncertainty — rising inflation, soaring cost of living, new tariffs — continues to pressure chief financial officers (CFOs) to cut costs. Gartner’s The CFO Report Q1 shows that CFOs are being asked to foster a culture of cost optimization across their organization. Meanwhile, investors, boards, and CEOs want cost cutting that doesn’t jeopardize growth. Gartner states that many of these cost optimization initiatives fail because they follow “a predictable cycle of unsustainable moves to meet short-term pressures.”
To build lasting cost discipline, CFOs must go beyond surface-level cuts and rethink how work gets done. Traditional cost-cutting approaches that analyze data in isolation often overlook millions in potential savings hidden within everyday business processes. Without a clear view of how tasks are performed, inefficiencies persist, and opportunities for improvement go unnoticed. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help — if done right.
AI-powered task mining gives operational excellence leaders the data they need to structure process improvement initiatives for long-term success. This proven approach, outlined in The CxO’s Guide to Data-Driven Cost Cutting, is already helping Fortune 500 companies to optimize end-to-end business processes, benchmark results for continuous improvement, and find million-dollar savings opportunities while driving transformation.
Cost Cutting the Old Way: Short-Term Gains, Long-Term Pain
Traditional cost-cutting measures often focus on immediate actions, such as workforce reduction, outsourcing, and offshoring. While these tactics might offer short-term relief, they often neglect long-term sustainability and employee morale. This approach often involves:
- Changing the size of the organization and/or the scope work rather than optimizing available resources to do more with less
- Expending significant manual effort and resources to identify inefficiencies, often still missing the root cause of the issue
- Focusing on time-consuming individual performance management instead of scaling high-performer best practices through targeted retraining
- Relying on self-service help centers and chatbots that do not address the root causes of inefficiencies and eventually loop issues back to a human
- Focusing on negotiation of better contracts and consolidating vendor spend while overlooking deeper operational issues that may be adding costs
In today's competitive landscape, a more strategic approach is needed – one that prioritizes efficiency gains and empowers the existing workforce.
The New Way: Sustainable Efficiency and Workforce Empowerment
A more strategic approach to cost-cutting prioritizes optimizing your existing resources – your workforce, systems, and processes – to maximize their value. This approach involves:
- Scaling your business so that you can increase revenue and productivity without the need for significant headcount increases
- Optimizing business processes, improving data accuracy, and reducing operational costs
- Identifying opportunities for intelligent automation such as GenAI and RPA
- Engaging and retaining your workforce by expanding their capabilities with AI and providing retraining and upskilling opportunities where needed
- Leveraging the power of Agentic AI and training autonomous agents on your specific business processes to automate tasks and improve efficiency
- Eliminating unnecessary processes and redundant systems to unlock significant efficiency gains
The key to this new approach is access to business process data and the full scope of work being done — this is where AI comes in. The right AI-powered task mining and process intelligence platform will provide those critical insights needed to implement this new approach.
Unlock Sustainable Efficiency with Task Mining
Task mining gives you an accurate, full picture of how work gets done in your organization. After observing teams’ work, AI categorizes all tasks into named processes, measures how much time is spent in which systems, determines automatability, and delivers recommendations to maximize ROI. With an end-to-end process map — showing all decision points, actions, exceptions, and variants — business leaders can identify bottlenecks, then streamline, standardize, or automate processes. By analyzing employee interactions with applications and systems, task mining:
- Uncovers bottlenecks, redundant tasks, and areas for process improvement that traditional methods may miss
- Measures the impact of process improvements on productivity, cost savings, and employee satisfaction
- Provides actionable insights to guide cost-cutting initiatives and drive continuous improvement
Our new guide, The CxO’s Guide to Data-Driven Cost Cutting, is a step-by-step guide for CxOs, finance heads, and transformation leaders on how to use your own business process data to uncover hidden savings. This guide shows you how to outline your cost cutting initiative, then use Mimica’s AI-powered task mining to identify hidden inefficiencies, quantify the impact of change, empower data-driven decision-making, and build a roadmap for smarter, more sustainable growth.Ready to see what’s possible? Download the free guide today.
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