Leaders across the finance and accounting industry are facing a profound moment. Generative AI is already transforming how businesses operate, enabling teams to work faster and smarter while reducing risk and error.
Now, agentic AI promises to unlock a raft of fresh opportunities, as organisations gain access to a new digital workforce that is at their disposal 24 hours a day. But is the industry ready for such a pronounced shift?
According to some estimates, agents could outnumber human employees by 10 to one in some industries within the next few years, vastly augmenting individual workers’ capabilities.
These digital helpers will carry out swathes of undifferentiated or routine tasks on our behalf, handling multi-step tasks such as sending emails, reconciling transactions or reporting work.
It could dramatically enhance productivity, while freeing up teams to work more strategically, transforming the entire profession. The shift will be no more apparent than in the office of the chief finance officer (CFO), whose role is already evolving from one of operational overseer to strategic leader within the business.
Yet barriers to adoption remain, as firms struggle with legacy systems or outdated processes. Meanwhile, for every finance leader, a critical question remains: how do you embrace AI’s power without breaking the trust, accuracy, and control that the business demands?
Bigger, bolder decisions
Jeremy Ung is chief technology officer (CTO) at BlackLine, a leading provider of cloud software that automates and controls financial close and accounting processes, automating and managing the entire financial close process as well as consolidation, invoice-to-cash and intercompany accounting. The company has pioneered the use of AI, in generative and agentic forms, to deliver powerful productivity gains for numerous clients.
Ung believes agentic AI will radically transform the finance and accounting (F&A) function over the next few years, “empowering CFOs to unlock value and companies to make bigger, bolder decisions”.
But he says many firms aren’t prepared for a world where agents outnumber human workers and must think ahead.
“Whether finance and accounting departments are ready or not, there is a big shift happening in how work is done. But what does it mean to manage a workforce that could quintuple or become order of magnitudes larger in size overnight? How do we govern agents at scale?”
The agentic revolution comes at a time of change in the F&A world, which is contending with a range of challenges as well as opportunities.
Whether finance and accounting departments are ready or not, there is a big shift happening in how work is done
Finance teams are increasingly expected to step out of silos and act as true business partners within their organisations. That means providing actionable intelligence and analysis to other departments, that propel informed decision-making.
Yet, many still rely on outdated work processes, legacy technology and disconnected systems that make it hard to fully reap the benefits of AI.
The gap between firms that tackle these issues and those that don’t is startling, raising awkward questions in the industry. According to Gartner, the median company takes eight days to close its books while the fastest 10% use technology to achieve this in four days or fewer.
The F&A industry also faces a worsening talent shortage that is creating new operational bottlenecks. The number of CPA exam candidates has fallen by 27% over the past decade, according to Deloitte, while specialised roles are taking over 70 days to fill on average, leading to severe delays and increased compliance risks at some firms.
Overcoming the ‘trust gap’
A side effect of these challenges is that automation has moved from an efficiency enabler to an existential necessity in the industry. And yet, many CFOs looking to embrace AI face another, perhaps bigger barrier: trust and transparency.
F&A is one of the most regulated sectors on the planet, with firms subject to strict compliance, security and governance controls. The margin for error is slim.
But many generic AI solutions take a “black box” approach, which means audit teams are unable to see how the system arrived at its conclusions and cannot confidently defend its outputs.
In addition, generic large language models (LLMs) have well-documented accuracy problems, and the concern is that as AI agents execute more financial tasks independently, they could get things wrong, with serious consequences such as potential restatements, material weaknesses in internal controls and shareholder litigation.
“It can be pretty hard to figure out when AI has gone wrong until the result is there,” says Ung. “This is why the process really needs to be transparent. You need to know its chain of thought, its reasoning at every step, because an auditor needs to understand what was done.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, only 14% of CFOs completely trust AI to deliver accurate accounting data on its own, while 97% say human oversight is critical, according to Wakefield Research.
BlackLine is helping companies overcome this “trust gap” while harnessing the transformative benefits of agentic AI.
The firm, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, made its name by automating and managing the entire financial close process as well as consolidation, invoice-to-cash and intercompany accounting.
Now, it’s pioneering the use of AI – including agentic reasoning, machine learning, predictive analytics and generative AI – to offer F&A teams benefits that were impossible only a few years ago.
Take, for example, the BlackLine Agentic Financial Operations platform, an intelligent, trusted and fully orchestrated solution that embeds a digital workforce to operate alongside finance and accounting teams. It enables departments to work continuously on millions of financial transactions, 24 hours a day, while signalling actionable insights that help drive the business forward.
The platform also takes a “glass box” approach to trust and transparency: using a robust governance framework to ensure every automated action, data flow and AI decision is backed by an immutable audit trail that is fully explainable, traceable and compliant.
BlackLine’s platform is built on the firm’s proprietary accounting data, developed over 25 years. This means that, unlike generic LLMs, it makes more accurate and nuanced decisions based on patterns derived from billions of historical transactions, reconciliation decisions, invoices and collections data points.
“We’ve learned a lot of hard lessons over the last 25 years that are all about earning customer trust and helping them achieve outcomes in terms of efficiency,” explains Ung.
Augment, not replace
Ung rejects the idea that AI will be a net job destroyer in F&A, arguing it will augment human expertise rather than replace it. The types of work done by teams will change, however, as more manual or undifferentiated tasks are automated.
Accountants will be able to shift from executors of routine tasks to strategic reviewers and advisors, focusing on higher value work such as: critical exception handling, data analysis, strategic advising and integrating digital outputs with human reasoning and ethical judgment.
“It will be more about augmentation and freeing people up to do new things, thinking more creatively,” says Ung. “This will hopefully alleviate the sector’s talent shortages but also make the career more desirable.”
There’s no clear playbook for what AI is going to look like in the future. So, we act as proper strategic partners to our customers, helping them to craft this new vision
It’s a similar story for the CFO, who is moving beyond traditional compliance, audit and cost-control responsibilities. These executives have become the strategic engine of the enterprise, using real-time insights gleaned to identify growth opportunities, drive digital transformation and proactively steer business strategy.
Solutions like BlackLine’s Agentic Financial Operations Platform will further support the trend, by providing continuous insight, automated variance detection and the ability to draft financial narratives – allowing CFOs to gain foresight, not just hindsight.
Ung likens it to providing a “bird’s eye view” via a single pane of glass. “You need to know what’s happening across your organisation in a single place. I think that’s critical, because otherwise, it’s happening piecemeal or in pockets, and that’s not a strategy.”
He accepts change won’t be easy for everyone. Indeed, many companies who have experimented with AI have been burnt by botched deployments.
For this reason, BlackLine works not only as a vendor but also as a partner to businesses, helping them get the most out of AI deployments. Ung is conscious that this is a journey for many companies, as they think about the level of transformation they require and work out what works for them.
“There’s no clear playbook for what AI is going to look like in the future. So, we act as proper strategic partners to our customers, helping them to craft this new vision.”
He cautions against expecting instant results, warning that firms who rush into AI deployments without the right foundations in place often pay a price. AI systems require structured and accurate data, for example, while AI agents need to be closely monitored to prevent drift or compliance issues.
“Many firms don’t realise agents are just another form of software that needs to be maintained, tested and validated. Things break and they need to be fixed, and teams shouldn’t take for granted the complexities around that.”
Overall, he is optimistic about what can be achieved, noting that most F&A realise that AI is now a non-negotiable part of running a business. “AI is here to stay, it’s not a fly by night operation. We have to make sure the structural elements are in place because it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”
To find out more about how CFOs can get more from AI, visit BlackLine
Leaders across the finance and accounting industry are facing a profound moment. Generative AI is already transforming how businesses operate, enabling teams to work faster and smarter while reducing risk and error.
Now, agentic AI promises to unlock a raft of fresh opportunities, as organisations gain access to a new digital workforce that is at their disposal 24 hours a day. But is the industry ready for such a pronounced shift?
According to some estimates, agents could outnumber human employees by 10 to one in some industries within the next few years, vastly augmenting individual workers’ capabilities.
These digital helpers will carry out swathes of undifferentiated or routine tasks on our behalf, handling multi-step tasks such as sending emails, reconciling transactions or reporting work.
