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Ideas, research and practical intelligence for modern finance teams.
Its treasury team connected better cash visibility to debt repayment and credit-line sizing. The case shows where financial AI can earn a return—and why the data pipeline matters as much as the prediction.
Cost control is back as the dominant executive measure of procurement — but supplier diversification, longer contracts and safety stock all cost money. The 2026 question is which premium is worth paying.
When the bill depends on tokens, API calls, credits and commitments, invoice accuracy starts inside the product. Stripe’s Metronome deal turns billing into an architecture question for AR.
Around 52% of Western European B2B sales are now made on credit, and nearly four in five companies report late payment. The receivable is financing the customer — which makes collections a working-capital discipline.
FedNow settled almost five million payments in Q2 2026, up 83%, and the network limit is now $10 million. The real prize is not faster vendor payments — it is rethinking prefunding, liquidity buffers and controls.
SAP Domain Models are trained on SAP code, data, metadata and process knowledge — and are being used to generate clean-core-compliant extensions. Clean core is no longer only about easier upgrades; it is becoming the foundation for governable enterprise AI.
The FOMC held at 3.5%–3.75% in July, but by September 4 the 30-year Treasury yield sat 133 basis points above the three-month. Cash, refinancing and hedging no longer move as one trade.
Finance Agent answers AP and AR questions and takes selected ERP actions from inside Copilot, with MCP as the plumbing. The ERP stays the system of record — but may stop being the system of engagement.
KPMG’s 2026 study of 1,013 finance leaders finds the strongest reported AI gains in decision speed, decision quality and forecast accuracy — not task elimination. Adoption is now broad; exceptional performance is not.
A vendor-sponsored survey of more than 1,500 finance leaders finds 92% under pressure to prove agentic-AI ROI, only 7% prioritizing governance over speed and 30% who have not updated controls in the past year.
Snowflake and Databricks are pushing governed business definitions into the data platform itself — turning the semantic layer into the contract that decides whether finance AI answers with the company's real definition of revenue and margin.
A Controllers Council study of 350+ finance executives shows reported talent shortages jumping to 61% in a single year, with hiring and pay rising and onsite work overtaking hybrid — a capacity risk for close, controls and transformation.
AFP’s 2026 benchmark of 332 finance professionals finds structured scenario planning is still a minority practice, while the average budgeting cycle stays near nine weeks despite years of planning-technology investment.
Deloitte’s Q1 2026 UK survey shows cost and cash priorities jumping while CapEx appetite falls. The leadership shift is toward liquidity as optionality, reversible capital commitments and governance that can move faster than the annual plan.
EY’s survey of 1,610 finance leaders finds ambition running ahead of authority: most CFOs believe they should shape value creation, but only a quarter lead the investment decisions where returns are uncertain or long term.
PwC-reported results from its own SAP Cloud ERP program — 100,000+ professionals, 19 countries, 22 systems retired, 10x faster upgrades — make an architectural point: AI multiplies the value of a simpler core.
Adoption has outrun organization design: most finance functions have deployed AI without redesigning roles, controls, service models or performance measures — and that is where transformation value is being lost.
AI agents and continuous accounting are beginning to shift the close from a monthly sprint toward a continuously managed financial process.
Replacing a general ledger is never casual. Rillet's 2026 funding and customer growth make AI-native accounting infrastructure a serious product question for finance leaders.
AFP’s 2025 benchmark found unreliable and inaccessible data are still FP&A’s biggest technology obstacles, with spreadsheets nearly universal — the next upgrade is the information supply chain, not another application.
Gartner’s December 2025 market view put integrated, intelligent and continuous planning at the center of the category — while spreadsheets stayed nearly universal. The buying question is shifting to governed planning across connected data and AI.
Record-to-report vendors pushed AI deeper into reconciliations, journals and accruals through 2025. The controller’s job is separating useful automation from automation layered onto inconsistent data and weak process design.
Controllers Council’s 2025 study found 53% of respondents reporting no finance-and-accounting talent shortage — even as controllers stayed hard to recruit. The signal is a split market: softer hiring overall, persistent scarcity in experienced roles.
Deloitte’s 2025 Global CPO Survey found top procurement organizations putting up to 24% of budgets into technology and reporting three times greater GenAI returns than peers — a gap that now looks like an operating-model choice.
AFP’s 2025 survey found 79% of organizations hit by attempted or actual payments fraud in 2024, with business email compromise still the leading avenue — pushing supplier identity out of AP and into treasury.
Stripe’s 2025 usage-based billing work shows metering, pricing logic and invoicing converging into one finance-grade pipeline — with revenue operations and billing architecture landing on AR’s desk.
Credit evaluation is going digital and AI-assisted, but the inputs that gate approvals — bank and trade references — still arrive at manual speed.
Fraud attempts stayed near record levels in AFP’s 2025 benchmark, but strong recovery became far less common — shifting treasury’s control case toward verification, response speed and recoverability.
By late 2025 finance leaders did not need another list of AI use cases. They needed a method for deciding what moves from experiment to repeatable, governed workflow.
Corporate treasury is moving toward connected bank data, continuous cash visibility and AI-assisted forecasting — but faster information makes controls more important, not less.
AI in finance is no longer one product category. Vendors are carving the finance function into jobs that agents can monitor, prepare, recommend or execute — and the control layer may become the real platform.
Accounts payable digitized the paperwork years ago. The remaining work is the decision layer — and that is exactly what agentic AP software is now aiming at.
A new generation of AI-native FP&A vendors is targeting the middle layer between source systems and spreadsheets. Aleph's Series B is a signal about what investors think is still unresolved in finance.
FP&A is moving from periodic forecasting toward a continuously updated view of the business — but spreadsheets, fragmented data and process design still stand in the way.
The financial close is full of work that is repetitive but not trivial. Agentic close software promises to prepare, reconcile and explain — as long as every action can be audited.
Tesorio's new agent tackles the manual work of submitting and tracking invoices across procurement portals — a narrow use case that says a lot about where finance AI is heading.
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