Opera has always built for what's next. The company behind four AI-powered browsers and more than 290 million monthly active users knows that technology only earns its place when it genuinely removes work from people's days. That same conviction now drives how Opera approaches AI inside its own finance and corporate systems.
Zoya Kostovetska, Corporate Systems Manager at Opera, has been at the center of that shift for twelve years—from the company's first HR implementation through its expansion into finance, and into the current moment: a deliberate move toward AI and agentic workflows designed to take over the routine, so her team can focus on the judgment that actually matters.
The foundation that makes AI safe to deploy.
For Zoya, conversations about AI in finance start not with the technology itself, but with what sits underneath it. When Opera listed on NASDAQ and entered the world of SOX compliance, one of the strictest audit frameworks for public companies, she saw firsthand how important it was to build robust, well-controlled processes. Only once that foundation was in place did AI become the natural next step.
“It was quite a journey. One thing that really helped was keeping as many processes as possible in one SOX-compliant system. That reduced the amount of maintenance and made governance much easier. From there, we redesigned and semi-automated many of our processes,” she explained.
Zoya continues, “One of the biggest changes was replacing our Excel-based balance sheet reconciliation with a process built entirely in Workday. We now use Worksheets, Live Reports, and transaction matching. Because Live Reports pull data directly from the system and users can't manipulate it, our auditors are comfortable relying on it.”
“What used to take three or four days per entity—downloading data, fixing it in Excel, and uploading it again—now takes just a report refresh once the underlying data has been corrected. The foundation has to come first. Reliable data, robust controls, and a complete audit trail are what allow us to introduce AI into finance without compromising governance or compliance,” she concludes.
What used to take 3 or 4 days per entity now takes a single report refresh. That's the kind of efficiency that gives you the headroom to innovate.
Corporate Systems Manager
Intelligent contract management with Evisort AI.
Among the most recent AI capabilities Opera has adopted is Workday Contract Intelligence, powered by Evisort AI. The team has subscribed and is currently testing it in production, and the potential is already visible. When a contract is uploaded into Workday, the agent will validate it against preset policy rules, flag anything that needs attention, and pre-fill the relevant fields. By the time a document reaches the legal or finance team, it is already largely clean.
The fit made sense for a company that builds its own AI. Opera wanted enterprise tooling that kept pace with its own product philosophy: modern, with strong AI capabilities built in rather than bolted on.
The use cases in view extend further still: drafting contracts from scratch, automatic renewal alerts, non-compliant clauses caught before they become a legal problem. For a company that embeds AI into its consumer products as standard, expecting the same from its enterprise systems is the natural next step.
We're a technology company developing our own AI, so we wanted tooling that aligned with that ambition. The potential to spend less time reading contracts and more time focusing on what really matters is exactly what we were looking for with Evisort.
Corporate Systems Manager
Watching an AI Agent go to work.
One of the developments that stood out most to Zoya was not a new product feature, but an experiment her team conducted themselves. A colleague tested a general-purpose AI agent by giving it access to Workday and a simple task: find a specific report, review the invoice attachments against the existing data, and highlight anything that did not match.
“Seeing a demo is one thing,” she said. “But when you see it happening on your own laptop, with the cursor moving and the system being navigated on your behalf, it suddenly feels much more real.” In this case, the AI agent performed a task that AP teams already do manually: checking invoices against system data and highlighting any mismatches.
What made this possible was the environment the agent was operating in: structured data, reliable processes, and a complete audit trail—all within Workday. Because Opera had already invested in building that foundation, the AI agent had a trusted space to work with.
The next step is to explore how far this can go. Opera plans to test an AI agent taking on the accounts payable intake process in a sandbox environment. The agent will have access to a dedicated email inbox and act as a virtual AP specialist: reviewing incoming invoices, comparing them against system data, and identifying potential mismatches before they reach an approver.
We're not there yet, where an AI Agent can handle a process end-to-end, but can you imagine where this takes us in two or three years? That's what we're working towards, always keeping human oversight and compliance with the highest standards.
Corporate Systems Manager
Solid groundwork makes a brighter future possible.
None of what Opera is now testing with AI agents would be possible without the groundwork that came first. Over successive phases, the company consolidated HR and Finance onto a single platform: accounts payable, accounts receivable, procurement, assets, and financial reporting all running in Workday, on clean data and auditable processes.
That foundation was originally built to meet the requirements of one of the most demanding financial reporting frameworks in the world. Today, it serves another purpose as well: the same data quality, controls, and auditability that give confidence to auditors are also what allow AI agents to operate reliably. What started as a compliance requirement has become a strategic advantage, giving Opera a controlled environment where the organization can explore the future of finance without compromising trust.
SOX compliance was the immediate driver for building the right foundation. The longer-term opportunity is using that foundation to enable smarter automation. As Opera looks ahead two or three years, the value of those early investments will continue to grow.