INDUSTRY FIN. TECH

NTELLIGEN

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The report, Agents of Change: How the Race to Deploy AI Agents is Outrunning Financial Governance, surveyed more than 1,500 CFOs and senior finance leaders across the US, UK, India and Australia who have deployed, piloted or actively evaluated AI agents in financial processes during the past year.

Key findings • Ninety-two percent of respondents feel moderate or significant career pressure to demonstrate that AI agent investments are delivering ROI, with half calling that pressure significant

• Half say their AI agent initiatives have delivered only limited measurable ROI to date

• Seventy-one percent say the pressure to deploy agents is focused primarily on deployment speed

Governance is falling behind the Agentic AI rush

• Only 7 % say their organisation prioritises governance over speed

• Thirty percent have not updated internal controls within the last year to reflect AI agents taking or recommending actions

• Forty-four percent are only somewhat confident they could explain an AI agent’ s actions to an auditor or regulator

The findings reveal a finance function caught between executive pressure to accelerate AI agent adoption and the operational reality that those AI agents need to be managed with care, particularly in tax and compliance, where decisions must withstand regulatory scrutiny.

“ Finance leaders are right to move quickly to capitalise on Agentic AI opportunities, but speed without accountability creates new forms of risk and speed without rethinking workflows limits ROI,” said Hugo Sarrazin, Chief Executive Officer at Avalara.“ The organisations that realise the greatest value from AI won’ t simply deploy more agents. They’ ll leverage agents with trusted data, governed workflows and clear controls that enable automation with confidence.”

Pinpointing accountability

The research highlights questions about who is responsible for significant AI agent errors. For example, nearly one in four( 23 %) say accountability for a significant

AI agent error would be unclear or sit with no one, while 16 % believe the executive who approved the AI investment would ultimately be held personally accountable.

One of the challenges is a lack of available knowledge: 76 % lack dedicated in-house expertise to understand how their AI agents work, relying on IT or vendors.

“ Finance leaders are being asked to move quickly with AI, but governing agents requires a new combination of domain, AI, IT and data governance expertise,” said Frank Cirone, VP Commercial Strategy at Snowflake, a cloud data platform company.“ As AI agents gain access to financial and compliance workflows, organisations need to know what those agents can see, what they can do and when human approval is required. That kind of control must be built into the architecture, not added after the fact.” • www. intelligentcio. com

INTELLIGENT CIO MIDDLE EAST

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