Leading U.S. enterprise software providers including Microsoft and SAP have kicked off a fresh wave of artificial intelligence-driven innovation in recent months, rolling out a flurry of new “AI agents” designed to perform tasks in corporate finance and other business functions.
The industry’s recent moves come as many C-suite leaders face growing pressure to make the type of AI investments that can deliver optimal value for their organization after experiments in the last two years, according to analysts. It also comes, they say, as some of the initial hype around generative AI — spurred in large part by the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 — has begun to fade.
“There was this phase where people were enamored” with the technology, Mark McDonald, a senior director analyst at Gartner, said in an interview. “They kind of took that first step into the water to try it out and got varying levels of results, most of them kind of ho-hum.”
McDonald said he has been talking lately with clients who are “done with the experimenting and imagining what we can do phase” of AI adoption. “It’s now about turning these AI ambitions into concrete plans,” he said.
The year ahead brings an opportunity to scale and advance AI capabilities across the enterprise, and a majority of organizations are looking to AI agents — tools that can work independently to perform tasks and adapt in real time — to help do so, KPMG said in a Jan. 9 release announcing survey findings.
Over half (51%) of organizations are exploring the use of AI agents and another 37% are piloting them, according to the research.
Agentic AI technology is poised to revolutionize industries, handling complex tasks with human-like decision-making, but it also poses risks such as hallucinations, where a tool asserts errors as if they were true, according to Shomit Ghose, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mitigating risks from agentic AI will require transparent design, strong safety measures and governance to maximize benefits while minimizing harm, Ghose said in an article published last month by the UC Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.
“Ultimately, perhaps no agentic AI will be fully autonomous — humans may always need to be involved… especially when material actions are required,” he added.
The following is a list of some of the biggest players in the tech world that are developing or offering AI agents to streamline finance and other business functions:
SAP
During its annual TechEd conference in October, SAP announced the launch of new innovations, including AI agents, to complement its generative AI copilot known as “Joule.”
The rollout included agents designed to “streamline key financial processes by automating bill payments, invoice processing, and ledger updates while quickly addressing inconsistencies or errors,” according to a press release.
“We’ll certainly have many, many more [AI rollouts] in the next year,” Walter Sun, global head of AI at SAP, said in an interview.
As part of its approach to AI risk mitigation, the company supports the policy that a “human should always be in the loop,” according to Sun. “Joule and SAP AI agents provide recommendations to the user, which the user then verifies and decides how to act on,” he said.
The company said it was not ready to disclose whether the agents have been fully rolled out to the public or how pricing is being handled. “We’ll be announcing news at our Business Unleashed event on Feb. 13, which will provide more detail on these,” a spokesperson said.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow announced in September that it was planning to integrate agentic AI into its platform with the potential for “massive scale across use cases.”
Since the announcement, the company has delivered its first two agentic AI use cases, one for customer service management and another for IT service management.
The software provider is now focused on scaling AI agents to more use cases across functions, including finance, procurement and human resources, Kirsten Loegering, ServiceNow’s vice president of product management, finance and supply chain workflows, said in an email.
A host of potential finance-related agentic AI use cases are being evaluated for the coming year, according to Loegering. This includes tools for assessing potential risks such as market volatility, credit defaults, or fraud as well as automating the entire process of invoice management.
On pricing, Loegering said: “We are announcing updates to the pricing and packaging for our AI Agents very soon, but early customers have been metered through our Assists — the consumption piece of our GenAI SKUs. The final model will scale with the number of AI Agent interactions.”
As part of its approach to AI risk mitigation, the company supports the principle that users should always be in control. “ServiceNow AI Agents evolve from the more familiar prompt-based activity to deep contextual comprehension, keeping people in the loop for oversight and governance,” Loegering said.
Oracle
During its annual CloudWorld conference in September, Oracle announced that it was releasing more than 50 role-based AI agents within its Fusion Cloud applications suite. The agents are designed to help “achieve new levels of productivity across finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, and service,” according to a press release.
Among other tools, the company rolled out a “ledger agent designed to help organizations monitor and analyze account balances, exceptions, and anomalies as well as detect if revenue for a specific line-of-business is off forecast before the quarter end. It also announced an “advanced prediction agent” capable of delivering revenue forecasts by leveraging internal and external data factors.
Many of the agents announced in September are already available to customers, including use cases in customer experience, supply chain, and HR, Hari Sankar, group vice president of product management at Oracle, said in an email, adding that finance use cases in Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM are being rolled out this year.
“In 2025 we are laser-focused on broadening and deepening the capabilities of the agents throughout the Oracle Fusion Applications Suite, as well as introducing new agents to help finance leaders enhance processes such as account reconciliation and supplier payments,” Sankar said.
He said Oracle AI agents “work within Oracle Fusion Applications and use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to help reduce hallucinations and deliver more accurate responses and stronger performing solutions.”
Workday
During its annual Workday Rising conference in September, Workday announced the release of new AI agents as part of a broader “Illuminate” framework aimed at transforming corporate finance and HR functions.
The effort is intended to “assist and augment humans, not to replace them,” Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach said during a keynote speech for the conference, which was held in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The AI agents that were unveiled “are the first of many to come from Workday as the company seeks to radically simplify business processes for end users and elevate humans at work,” according to a release at the time.
The rollout included a recruiter agent designed to automate tasks such as creating job descriptions, sourcing candidates, and scheduling interviews; an expenses agent capable of matching receipts with credit card transactions and creating the expense line automatically; and a “succession agent” aimed at helping managers identify and develop future leaders within their organizations.
The release said the recruiter agent was being made immediately available in the company’s HiredScore platform and “will become even more integrated with Workday in spring 2025.” The expenses and succession agents are expected to become available in early 2025.
Andy Kershaw, group general manager for the office of the CFO at Workday, told CFO Dive the company currently doesn’t charge customers an additional cost for its AI features, unless “we fully transform a business process.”
“That’s where there is likely going to be an additional cost,” Kershaw said in an email.
The company supports “responsible development of AI technologies” and regulation as part of its risk mitigation approach, he said.
Microsoft
In late October, Microsoft announced that it was introducing 10 new autonomous agents, including two designed for finance professionals, in its Microsoft Dynamics 365 enterprise resource planning platform.
A new account reconciliation agent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance automates “the matching and clearing of transactions between subledgers and the general ledger, helping them speed up the financial close process,” according to a blog post penned by Bryan Goode, corporate vice president at Microsoft. The company also introduced a new financial reconciliation agent designed to help teams prepare and cleanse data sets.
The software giant said it was not ready to disclose whether the agents have been fully rolled out to the public or how pricing is being handled. “We look forward to sharing more details as these agents reach public preview in the coming weeks,” Georg Glantschnig, Microsoft vice president of Dynamics 365 AI ERP, said in an email.
Salesforce
Salesforce in September unveiled “Agentforce,” a suite of AI agents designed to handle tasks in service, sales, marketing and commerce, with the goal of “driving unprecedented efficiency and customer satisfaction,” according to a press release at the time.
“Our vision is bold: to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in the release. “This is what AI is meant to be.”
The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for further details.
