Julie Swinney on Why AI Won’t Replace Your Team – It’ll Supercharge It!

Once tasked primarily with reporting and risk, CFOs are now expected to drive strategy, enable innovation, and help shape the entire employee and customer experience.

At Zendesk, CFO, Julie Swinney is doing just that—leveraging AI and automation to free up her team’s time and refocus their energy where it most counts.

If you ask Julie Swinney what excites her most about AI, she won’t mention dashboards or cost savings. She’ll talk about people.

“Tasks that used to take us eight hours now take us five minutes,” she says. “And I am personally really excited about the energy I see that unlocking within my own organisation—and the ripple effect that has on customer value.”

This philosophy is core to Swinney’s leadership. At a time when CFOs are expected to be tech strategists as much as financial stewards, she’s betting that empowering people—not just adopting platforms—is the real key to transformation.

EX factor: The Next AI Frontier

Zendesk is perhaps best known for its customer service software, but Swinney and her team are also focused on a different, often overlooked area: employee service.

“There’s been a lot of investment in customer-facing innovation,” she says. “But the internal employee experience—how your teams access support, systems, policies—is often outdated, and that’s a missed opportunity.”

This isn’t just a gut feeling. According to the 2024 Zendesk Employee Experience Trends Report, 58% of HR and IT professionals said their internal support software was outdated, and nearly half of employees felt their tools made it harder to do their jobs. Reading those stats, you can practically feel the friction, frustration and disengagement threatening to boil over.

For Swinney, the issue isn’t just with HR or IT. Functions like finance, procurement, and compliance are also primed for transformation, but often suffer from chronic underinvestment.

“G&A functions support your employees, who support your customers,” she says. “So if those internal systems aren’t efficient, your customer experience suffers.”

And here is where the opportunity lies for business leaders, with Swinney adamant that improving internal systems efficiency makes for more empowered employees—who in turn deliver better outcomes for customers.

“It becomes a virtuous cycle: the more engaged your people are, the more resilient and customer-focused your business becomes,” she says.

Sure enough, that same Zendesk report found that the majority of executives say better employee service tech improves not only productivity, but also retention, and morale.

Amplify, Don’t Replace: AI and the Human Edge

Despite her optimism, Swinney is no evangelist. As CFO herself, she understands why finance leaders might hesitate to embrace AI too quickly.

“There’s healthy scepticism,” she says. “Oftentimes in the CFO landscape, you might hear reticence, because ‘AI hallucinates’—and that’s true, it does hallucinate. But people make mistakes, too. So the key with AI is to operate off of a well-constructed, well-trained, well-understood set of variables, and to make sure that we leverage its capability in smart ways.”

What does that look like in practice? Well, inside Zendesk, Swinney’s team uses their own platform to triage internal finance queries, automate policy access, and surface key resources. All through a self-serve model.

This strategy reflects a broader trend: in the Zendesk report, 83% of IT and HR leaders said they have invested in HR platforms to facilitate employee self-service.

The aim here is not to replace people, Swinney stresses—it’s to automate the repetitive tasks, which in turn “allows you to use your very expensive human capital wisely and to maximum effect.”

“There are times where—based on the complexity of the issue, the tone, the intent—you need the human involved,” she explains. “But you don’t always want the human involved. And we envision that 80% of the time, the human doesn’t need to be involved.”

That figure is echoed in the real-world results at MYOB, which after deploying Zendesk’s internal service desk, was able to cut its HR and IT service backlogs by 77%. It also reduced its new employee onboarding time by a third.

“It’s not just about saving time—it’s about giving people the capacity and mindshare to focus on high-value work,” Swinney says. “And where you get supercharged productivity, you also get supercharged motivation.”

Principles to Practice: Zendesk Walks the Walk

Zendesk has made a substantial AI investment with its recently launched Resolution Platform, which powers both customer and employee service experiences, and is designed to scale up or down based on business need.

Crucially, it’s also priced on outcomes, charging customers only for successful resolutions, rather than per seat or interaction. That’s a real game-changer.

“CFOs love flexibility—but more than anything, they love ROI,” Swinney says. “And this is a model that aligns value with outcomes.”

Once again, the Zendesk data support this claim, with 83% of IT and HR leaders agreeing AI tools help employees make better, data-driven decisions, and 79% saying AI enhances the overall quality of work.

The Human Factor in Tech-Driven Change

If the old CFO role was about control and caution, the new one, in Swinney’s eyes, is defined by possibility. It’s about scaling smarter, and giving people the space to think, lead, and solve.

Still, she’s quick to point out that transformation isn’t just about tools. It’s about culture. That means leading with empathy, bringing people with you, and helping them see the opportunity—because that’s what creates lasting change.

“There’s always a bit of anxiety when you start a journey like this,” Swinney admits. “People wonder, ‘Is this going to take away my job?’ But what they’ve found is: ‘No, this enriches my job.’ And there’s nothing better than an employee realising that they just spent five minutes doing something that used to take all day—which frees them up to go and work on the top needle-movers for the company.”

An added benefit of this approach is that it helps to build resiliency through economic turmoil by reducing turnover and improving your customer experience.

“You don’t want to lose your high-value employees, and that means you have to engage them effectively,” Swinney says. “You have to be proactive, responsive, and make the most of the tools at your fingertips.

“That’s what AI does—it allows you to create supercharged productivity in an uncertain world.”

3 Things Every CFO Should Keep in Mind About AI

1. Start Small, But Start Now

“You don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. Begin with targeted, high-impact use cases—contract review, internal help desks, onboarding—and scale from there.”

2. Focus on ROI Over Hype

“Ask the tough questions: Is it outcome-based? Is it easy to implement? Will it help us grow smarter, not just faster? The business case needs to be real, measurable, and CFO-worthy.”

3. Use AI to Amplify, Not Replace

“AI isn’t a substitute for human insight—it’s a force multiplier. Let automation handle the repetitive work so your people can focus on judgment, strategy, and delivering value.”