Agentic accounting the next frontier for CFOs
Australian CFOs and their teams are now caught in a perfect storm as they navigate global and local economic uncertainties, mounting pressure to adopt AI-driven solutions across the enterprise, ESG compliance and finance reforms.
These challenges highlight the urgent need for sustained business efficiencies throughout organisations by ensuring streamlined finance and accounting processes from procurement, invoicing and expense management through to tax compliance and financial reporting.
Ironically, even though AI is a challenge for Australian CFOs as illustrated in a recent ADAPT survey, fast tracking its adoption is likely to be the silver bullet to resolving many of the issues that finance teams are facing, with the next generation of agentic automation technology providing a new frontier for finance operations.
What is agentic automation?
Agentic automation brings together proven robotic process automation, AI models and human expertise into cohesive workflows where people, robots and AI agents work synergistically to optimise processes and drive enterprise efficiency. These agentic workflows are intelligent, adaptive and governed — enabling automation that is not only powerful but trusted.
More simply, AI agents think with human-like reasoning and learning, the robots conduct tasks with precision and tireless consistency, and people provide the strategic direction, creativity and human judgement that machines can't match.
For finance teams, an agentic automation platform creates reliable workflows whereby AI agents operate within clearly defined guardrails to ensure security, predictability, and performance. The platform should deliver robust governance, real-time vulnerability assessments, and stringent data access controls to protect enterprise environments, while at the same time enhancing efficiencies and streamlining operations on a cycle of continuous sustained improvement.
This provides significant benefits for day-to-day finance processes, while also helping to ensure compliance is maintained even in a dynamic regulatory environment.
The shift to agentic automation in finance processes
Mirvac is among many Australian enterprises that are already reaping the benefits of agentic automation across core finance and operations processes, from procurement to employee support.
Currently, Mirvac is using agentic automation to route invoices for complex and changing utilities needs, which are beyond the capabilities of robotic processes that require a strict script of instructions. Instead, agentic automation directs utilities invoices to the right Mirvac development or construction site with high accuracy.
Mirvac's procurement teams have also realised significant advantages in the company's request for proposal process, which involves stripping out data and conducting side-by-side comparisons of responses from vendors. To address a time-consuming manual process, Mirvac has been using agentic automaton to read a Request for Proposal response, extract key data, and pre-populate evaluation sheets so that employees spend less time copying and pasting and more time on decision-making.
Fiserv is another early adopter and is already achieving 98 percent end-to-end process automation for its merchant category codes process through agentic automation.
The future of the finance team in an AI world
While most financial processes can now be done by agentic automation, it still requires human intelligence and oversight to ensure the data fed into the AI model is clean and fit for purpose, and the results are analysed in a way that drives a sustained positive return on investment for businesses.
One significant benefit that comes from agentic automation is the ability to quickly upskill and reskill finance teams in the use of AI tools to drive faster decision making, compliant and accurate reporting, and a much stronger focus on strategic planning that truly shifts the needle for an organisation.
In these turbulent times, it is clear that finance teams take the brunt of the impact when it comes to financial and regulatory changes. While it can be tricky to continually anticipate market shifts and their business impact, agentic automation enables finance teams to get ahead of the game by alleviating them from the burden of processes to focus more on corporate strategy. Even a small step toward agentic automation is likely to deliver big gains for CFOs and their teams.
UiPath is hosting Agentic Automation Summit events in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland this month. To register visit: https://engage.uipath.com/anz-
