How AI agents are transforming finance
AI agents make a new finance operating model possible because they can act intelligently, autonomously and in teams. As you would with your human workforce, you typically give each AI agent a different role. One might be a financial accountant, another an FP&A analyst, and a third a compliance specialist. Every agent has the skills and data sets to match its role.
Next, you orchestrate the different agents into a workflow and give them instructions, like “reconcile invoices with purchase orders (POs)” or “consolidate cash positions and forecast inflows/outflows”. They’ll work together to get the job done. Every AI agent can recall what it did before and what the outcomes were. It learns from your inputs, reviews and exception-handling how to better manage the next set of data and tasks. Like a human gaining experience, an AI agent can keep getting better at its job and create new solutions.
Given our network-wide expertise with implementing AI agents and transforming work, PwC Global conducted a detailed analysis of the finance function. Our colleagues looked across more than 40 processes spanning procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, record-to-report, financial planning and analysis, and treasury. Their analysis shows that finance tasks tend to fall into three categories: human-led, agent-assisted or fully agent-driven.
The takeaway? AI agents can independently operate, with the right deployment and governance model, nearly every aspect of shared service centres operations. In centres of excellence (CoE), they can assist people with nearly all of their work. For corporate and business finance teams, AI agents can augment strategic guidance, customer-facing finance functions and more. Whatever the task, AI agents can free your people from structured, repetitive work, providing capacity to create insights that help fuel higher-value contributions.