By: Paula Festas, CEO and Co-Founder of huumans
A seasoned and highly experienced business leader, Paula brings over 25 years of proven track record of success in driving global and high-performing brands and organizations towards new success and strong, profitable partnerships.
Festas’s extensive resume enables her to bring innovative and rejuvenated ideas to the table. She builds a solid foundation focusing on people, process and integrated platforms. Paula’s focus is to help organizations & marketers increase ROI, engagement and brand awareness.
While balancing an exceptionally disciplined approach to technology, data, digital strategy and revenue leadership, Festas continuously demonstrates a knack for developing revolutionary solutions to unique monetization strategies. Under Paula’s guidance, Huumans will focus on delivering end-to-end solutions, from strategy and system architecture, to deployment and integration.
As one of the co-founders of Huumans, a fintech company focused on SMEs, her mission is to make small businesses accessible to as many people as possible by reducing small business risk through scalable financial services on-demand. Empowering SMEs to focus on the growth of their businesses by outsourcing critical financial services to a data-lead, comprehensive ecosystem.
In previous roles as the Chief Revenue Officer for Alibi Technologies and Postmedia, she led and developed long-term business strategies across cross-functional teams while pivoting and transforming the organization. Her focus was to ensure smooth integration and automation to deliver enterprise-level MarTech and AdTech solutions.
Paula spends time giving back sitting on numerous industry boards as well as non for profit boards. She currently holds a seat as a board director at Good Deeds, while previously having sat on the Responsible Gambling Council Check, IAB Canada Board of Directors, Broadcast Executive Society board and the National Advertising Benevolent Society board. She is also recognized as being a leader in mentorship of aspiring professionals and women entrepreneurs.
It feels like every time you log onto LinkedIn, watch the news, or read an article in the business section, there’s buzz about artificial intelligence and how it’s rapidly reshaping our work and lifestyles. These people aren’t wrong, but there’s a less-discussed, more optimistic angle to AI’s rise: it’s not here to steal our jobs, but rather to create a brand-new breed of experts, trained to use these AI tools as partners in their day-to-day. While this shift is happening across various industries, it’s especially relevant to accountants, bookkeepers, and those dedicated to supporting small business owners.
As CEO and co-founder of huumans, a tech-forward financial services firm specializing in accounting, bookkeeping, and other financial services geared towards small businesses, my team has been on the forefront of the AI revolution, building financial dashboards that work magic using AI and machine learning. Forecasting and reporting on important business health metrics like burn rate, cash flow, and profit margins has never been easier with this new technology.
With that said, as AI becomes more accessible in everyday tools and software, we’ve observed that the excitement surrounding these technological advances often overshadows the professionals—the humans—who use this technology. We recognize that it’s these skilled individuals who use these new tools to decipher, strategize, and take action upon the treasure trove of data these innovations offer, not the standalone technology.
Transforming Financial Services With Augmented Intelligence
Augmented intelligence, a term that we don’t hear nearly as often as artificial intelligence, isn’t about replacing accountants and bookkeepers with soulless machines. It’s about creating a partnership between unique human ability and the speed and accuracy of a machine. In the accounting and bookkeeping space, augmented intelligence is transforming how financial data is processed, analyzed, and used, making it an indispensable tool for professionals in the industry.
For instance, we recently launched Quota at huumans, an AI-powered financial insights dashboard. It’s a one-stop shop for assessing your small business’ overall health, and it seamlessly integrates competitive data from various industries and regions, allowing small business owners to, for the first time, gauge their business’s health against similar industries and services. The benefits of artificial intelligence are clear: no human would be able to analyze that volume of data that quickly, and come up with detailed, bespoke advice and strategies to action the data. At that point, a small business owner would need to spend time digesting and interpreting the data before they could action it. I don’t know about you, but a lot of the small business owners I know wouldn’t find that level of analysis very exciting!
In fact, back in the 1990s, my parents owned a restaurant, and it’s so interesting to think about the tools we have at our fingertips that support small business owners in their day-to-day operations. That’s one of the many reasons I’m passionate about serving our small business community. I believe they should have the freedom to focus on what truly matters, and AI unquestionably has the potential to help SMBs save valuable time and resources, which can then be reinvested into activities that help them scale.
Embracing AI in Financial Services: Enhancing Human Expertise
If you’ve ever tried using ChatGPT to write an article or essay, you probably noticed that some AI types aren’t quite ready to replace humans just yet. That’s because they need a lot of human input to function effectively. Surprisingly, this need for human involvement is often seen as a drawback, rather than an opportunity to make our work even better.
Imagine an accountant teaming up with AI to cut down on errors, boost accuracy, and free up time from mind-numbing data entry. This gives them more room to offer personalized, top-notch advice to their clients – something AI can’t quite pull off. And when tax season rolls around, think about how much an AI tool could save a bookkeeper’s time by analyzing business risks and vulnerabilities. It means they can focus on finding solutions rather than worrying about human error.
Of course we should be cautious of the new ways financial service professionals are using artificial intelligence and machine learning—there is a lot we don’t know about its capabilities. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to embrace it, while acknowledging the important role licensed advisors have in our industry. These professionals possess the expertise and qualifications needed to interpret and act upon the insights derived from AI-driven tools, ensuring that we harness the full potential of these technologies while maintaining the human touch that is critical for small business success.
If you’re a small business owner and you’re curious how huumans combines the best of art and science to help your small business succeed, get in touch with us and we’ll show you how our AI-powered financial services will help future proof your business.
