The Finance Function in the Age of Agentic AI
Summary: Finance is the function every business depends on to validate performance, allocate capital, and guide strategic decisions. As agentic AI accelerates the pace of work across organizations, finance leaders face a critical opportunity: evolve alongside the business or risk becoming its bottleneck. In this article, Turning Point CEO Alan Chaffee explains where agentic AI delivers the greatest value and how Turning Point has integrated agentic AI into its own CFO advisory workflows to help clients move faster without sacrificing judgment.
Every function in business today is moving faster with AI except finance, yet finance sits at the center of every major business decision, validating performance, allocating capital, and guiding strategy. Recent research put finance AI adoption at 59 percent in 2025, up from 37% just two years prior1. While adoption is accelerating, many finance teams remain stuck in limited pilot mode, and only a small slice have moved AI into their core workflows. Sales, marketing, and engineering have already found their footing. So why is finance still circling the runway?
The honest answer has less to do with willingness and more to do with bandwidth. Close cycles do not leave room for experimentation. The people who would test new tools are the same people racing to get the books closed, the reconciliations tied out, the financials to leadership, and the board deck completed. There is no protected hour in that calendar for trying something new, so the new thing never gets tried. Add to that the fact that finance handles the most sensitive data in the business - compensation, forecasts, financials, board materials - and the caution starts to make sense. Nobody wants to be the one who fed confidential numbers into the wrong tool.
But caution and paralysis are not the same thing, and leaders who treat them as interchangeable are leaving value on the table. The organizations pulling ahead right now are not the ones with the most sophisticated AI strategy. They are the ones who gave their finance team the one thing every other department has already received.
Time.
If you lead an organization and you want finance to catch up, the ask is simple, even if it is not easy. Protect a few hours a month that are not eaten by the close. Pick one workflow, maybe reconciliations or FP&A, and let the team learn it in the open rather than expecting a polished rollout on day one.
The bigger opportunity sitting just past that first step is agentic AI. These tools don’t simply answer a question but actually carry out the work, automating accounts payable, chasing down reconciling items, updating the forecast the moment a number moves. Only a small fraction of finance leaders have put agents like this into production today, but the ones who have are seeing returns that are hard to ignore.
That gap, between how few teams have made the move and how strong the payoff is for the ones who have, is exactly where the advantage lives right now. Getting there does not require a moonshot. It starts with assessing what makes sense to automate and the gains from taking those steps. For example, aim first at the most repetitive, rules-heavy corner of the close - the invoice that needs matching, the account that needs reconciling, the forecast that needs revising.
This is the gap Turning Point has spent the last two years working to close, inside our own walls first. We built out a full library of AI skills for the work that eats the most hours in a CFO engagement: quality of earnings analysis, financial modeling, and month-end reporting, and we trained every new consultant to use them before they touch a live client file. Agentic AI stopped being a slide in a deck and became a normal part of how we tie out a balance sheet or roll a debt schedule forward, with a person still making every judgment call that matters. We built that muscle so we could bring it into a CFO advisory engagement instead of pointing at a vendor and hoping it works.
The fact of the matter is that AI is not replacing the finance function, but the finance teams that adopt agentic AI will be the ones setting the pace in the next eighteen months. As the rest of the organization begins performing at AI speed, finance risks becoming the bottleneck if it remains buried in manual work. The business will move faster than the function that sits at the center of its most important decisions. Finance leaders have a narrow window to ensure they are helping set that pace rather than struggling to keep up.
1 Gartner, Current State of AI in Finance, 2025, based on the Gartner AI in Finance Survey of 183 CFOs and senior finance leaders, November 2025.
