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AI has made a considerable impact on how finance teams operate, automating time-consuming manual tasks, but leading CFOs remain cautious about its adoption and uncertain about how far automation should go.
CFOs, finance directors and senior finance leaders across the UK and Ireland believe in AI’s potential to improve efficiency and support decision-making, but have significant concerns about risk, compliance and governance, which are shaping how organizations integrate AI.
Chief Technology Officer at AccountsIQ.
Recent research from Nexas.AI found that 43% of large financial firms lack AI risk frameworks despite widespread adoption. Most finance teams are struggling to keep pace as their organizations integrate AI faster than they can govern it, leaving them open to risks.
At present, most finance professionals are using AI for low-risk, manual processes such as time-consuming administrative tasks, while leaving important financial decisions to humans. Augmented finance is becoming a reality, but concerns over trust and governance are slowing things down.
How is AI benefiting the finance industry?
Leading CFOs and finance leaders are embracing AI by integrating it across their teams and operations to automate routine tasks, accelerate data processing and provide additional insights, enabling teams to focus on more strategic work.
Finance leaders are comfortable using AI within finance processes with the majority allowing AI to handle routine administrative tasks, such as reconciliations.
Teams are using automations and agents to complete jobs that need to be done by month-end, allowing them to focus on more value-added tasks. Automations help with reconciliations, data extraction from documents, coding for smart transactions and automating the linkage between related finance processes.
Automation examples include:
- AR auto-allocation, which allocates outstanding invoices and payments across all debtors automatically.
- Fixed asset creation that detects potential fixed assets during invoice posting and prefills asset forms.
- AI-generated prepayment journals.
- Smart notification agents.
AI governance has become a board-level priority
Despite clear interest from many, leading CFOs and finance teams are still selective about AI adoption.
CFOs and finance leaders are open to AI and its capabilities but are not yet ready to deploy it at scale, particularly given the emerging governance frameworks. CFOs should ensure that any new AI tools adhere to requirements around transparency, auditability, data governance, risk management and regulatory compliance.
Governance is one of the biggest concerns for most finance leaders when considering AI. Those seen to be adopting AI tools lacking governance could expose themselves to compliance failures, operational risk and reputational damage.
To stay ahead, many are turning to screening tools to identify and prioritize compliant finance systems specifically designed for AI regulation.
As AI becomes more embedded, the role of finance professionals will shift, with many moving towards more strategic tasks as automated tools free up time.
Why are governance, risk and compliance front of mind?
AI holds enormous potential across the finance industry, with its ability to vastly reduce manual tasks and provide deeper financial insight. But it’s clear that finance leaders still require confidence that the AI systems they are investing in are transparent, compliant and fully auditable.
Many consider compliance with accounting standards important when implementing AI and are concerned that AI adoption could introduce new financial or operational risks.
The finance industry operates under constant regulatory pressure, distinguishing it from other business functions. CFOs must therefore ensure regulatory compliance, auditability and accountability at every stage.
Finance leaders need AI systems that are transparent to enable their teams to understand outputs and maintain strong oversight of automated processes.
AI’s impact on finance professionals
The adoption of AI across financial services is not only inevitable but already underway, although its use is limited. The finance industry has historically moved cautiously and for good reason: trust, control and audibility must remain a non-negotiable.
Yet, some implementations risk utilizing data in ways that lack oversight and finance teams should not rely on any AI tool they cannot fully trace.
Looking to the future, AI will not be replacing finance professionals, but it will raise the bar. Routine, low risk tasks will be increasingly automated, and the role will shift to interpretation, judgement and influence and freeing up more time for strategic work and decision-making.
As adoption continues at a measured pace, augmented finance will gradually become the norm.
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