How AI agents help drive a new finance operating model: What CFOs need to know

 Finance is at a turning point. As a finance leader, you may be approaching “terminal value” — where cost efficiencies are peaking, capacity is stretched and expectations are accelerating. The demand for timely, actionable insights from the business, leadership and regulators continues to rise. CFOs are embedding intelligence and insights across the enterprise to boost both operational and financial performance — and AI is a powerful lever to make it happen.

We’re helping clients meet this moment with a reimagined finance operating model that positions AI agents not just as tools, but also as enablers of the future of work. This approach brings together strategy, workforce and technology in a way that enables your team to shift from processing to performance. With AI agents supporting the function from end to end, your people can focus on the insights that drive smarter, faster decisions.

This shift isn’t theoretical — it’s already happening. Forward-looking finance teams are embedding AI agents into day-to-day workflows, redesigning roles and redefining how work is done. In PwC’s AI Agent Survey, 79% of executives say that AI agents are already being adopted in their companies. But so far, only 34% are using them in accounting and finance.

You’ve been working to get here for 15+ years

If your finance function is like most, over the last decade a key benchmark, finance cost as a percentage of revenue, has driven your strategy:

• Using technology to reduce transaction and processing costs
• Deploying global and onshore business services models using that technology
• Connecting that technology to user-driven tools at the edge to generate insights

According to PwC’s 2024 Finance Effectiveness Benchmarking Report, leading finance teams have achieved that goal. They're spending more time generating insights and less time on automatable tasks, while reducing their costs (as a percentage of revenue) by nearly 25%.

Finance has become leaner and more insight-driven, but expectations to do more with less are rising fast. In many organizations, traditional levers, such as cloud-based ERPs, integrated data platforms, automation and edge analytics, have hit their limits. You’re digital. You’re efficient. Yet you can't keep up with the increasing demand from the business, regulators and investors.

The next breakthrough for finance isn’t another system or tool — it’s a new way of working. Across the business, AI agents are helping reshape how work gets done, and finance is at the forefront of this evolution. By pairing human expertise with AI agents, finance can scale capacity, accelerate insights and stay ahead of rising demands. With a strong digital foundation already in place, the opportunity is clear. What’s required now is the leadership to move fast and capture it.

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 an 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 expertise with implementing AI agents and transforming work, we’ve conducted a detailed analysis of the finance function, enabled by PwC's workforce AI task analyzer. We looked across more than 40 processes spanning procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, record-to-report, financial planning and analysis, and treasury. Our 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 centers operations. In centers 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.