Discover how AI is revolutionizing finance by enabling deeper data insights, fostering innovation in planning, and streamlining operations to empower CFOs and their teams.
Andrew Kershaw
Senior Vice President, Financials and Spend Products
Workday
AI is opening a new chapter for finance, moving beyond automation to unlock deeper insights, faster planning, and more time for high-impact work. Finance teams have long used technology to improve efficiency, automating tasks like reconciliations, managing general ledger entries, and financial reporting. These tools helped us move faster but mostly within the limits of how we’ve always worked. Now, agentic AI is changing the game. It’s not just about speeding things up—it’s about rethinking what finance can do.
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Planning has always been at the heart of finance, but it’s historically been limited by how much data a human analyst could process. AI changes that. With the ability to evaluate a wider range of inputs—economic trends, market signals, social sentiment—AI expands our view of what’s possible.
Finance teams can now explore more dynamic scenarios, updated in real time as conditions evolve. Instead of a few “what-if” models, teams can identify hidden risks and emerging opportunities with greater clarity. By finding unusual connections and even black swan events, AI can push us to think about scenarios we wouldn’t have considered before. Beyond that, finance leaders can develop AI agents that can act with little to no human involvement.
With AI as a thinking partner, planning becomes less reactive and more creative. It brings together raw data, fresh insight, and human intuition to help teams move faster, think bigger, and plan smarter.
AI helps finance and accounting professionals get a deeper and more detailed understanding of the economics of their business.
Traditional data analysis is often constrained by known questions and fixed processes. But agentic AI can explore complex data on its own, find relationships that aren’t obvious, and point out anomalies that would otherwise stay hidden.
That means finance professionals can move beyond validating assumptions and toward discovering unexpected insights. For example, agentic AI might detect a shift in customer behavior before it shows up in revenue, prompting the business to pivot more quickly. Or it might connect changes in supplier lead times with regional economic signals to anticipate disruptions.
This kind of insight doesn’t just sharpen decision-making, it also fuels creativity. AI helps surface new possibilities, prompting analysts to ask better questions, explore alternative strategies, and think beyond the obvious.
When AI’s analytical power meets our human curiosity, it can lead to breakthroughs in understanding financial complexity.
One of AI’s most immediate benefits is in streamlining operational work. Automating time-consuming tasks like data entry, reconciliations, invoice processing, and report generation frees up finance teams to focus on strategic priorities. AI agents in finance can take on a variety of tasks, from proactively flagging anomalies in transactions to updating forecasts autonomously.
The shift from just doing things by hand to exploring ideas allows human creativity to blossom, leading to new products, services, and strategies that can give a big competitive edge in our ever-changing industry. With routine work handled, teams can spend more time on forecasting, risk analysis, scenario planning, and business partnering. It also creates space for more collaboration and experimentation, working cross-functionally to explore insights and test solutions, rather than just assembling data.
Agentic AI can also help optimize how and where resources are deployed. By identifying inefficiencies, predicting future needs, and monitoring spend in real time, AI enables finance to make smarter, faster decisions about where to invest and where to cut back, unlocking capacity and freeing up cash for innovation.
When you lighten the load of essential jobs like data entry, reconciliation, and report generation, it frees up finance and accounting teams to focus on big-picture strategic and creative work.
As AI continues to evolve, it will play an even larger role in guiding strategy. Generative AI can help structure unorganized data, generate draft reports, and simplify complex analysis; all while giving human experts more time to focus on high-impact thinking. Meanwhile, agentic AI can make informed decisions and take action, allowing human finance teams to focus on higher-level work.
The future of finance will be defined by this partnership: AI delivering scale and speed, and humans applying judgment and creativity to turn insight into action. This will open up new ways to create value and gain a competitive advantage.
For finance leaders, that means adopting a growth mindset and rethinking what finance can be. With AI tools, the role of the CFO is moving from guardians of the past to catalysts responsible for shaping strategy, fueling innovation, and unlocking competitive advantage.
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