Dive Brief:

• Alphabet’s finance team is using artificial intelligence agents for processing invoices as part of the tech giant’s larger push to automate daily operations across the organization, CFO Anat Ashkenazi said Wednesday on the company’s Q4 earnings call.
• About half of the company’s own software codes are written by AI agents supporting the engineering team, Ashkenazi said. Meanwhile, the finance department is leveraging agentic AI to automate how it pays and reconciles invoices while also deploying the technology within the treasury function, she said.
• The internal automation push extends “all the way from the engineering team to small teams within our back office, even with my finance team,” the finance chief said.

Dive Insight:

Alphabet is among big tech companies that are spending heavily on AI to beef up their products while also experimenting with use cases internally.

AI agents — which are designed to handle workplace tasks with little human input — have the potential to perform a “high volume of complex and adaptive judgment-based activities requiring cross-application workflows and multiple stakeholders’ involvement,” Gartner analysts said in a report last year. They added that finance teams handle many such activities, including processing of documents such as invoices, bank statements, and purchase orders; internal financial reporting and analysis; account reconciliation; fraud detection; and compliance monitoring.

Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, and at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through the technology, which is still in its early stages.

CFOs face adoption challenges such as hype around the technology that can “quickly outpace its real impact,” as well as data accuracy and security risks, according to Gartner.

“Agentic AI is a major step forward in artificial intelligence, enabling CFOs and their staff to do more with less,” the report said. “However, agentic AI also comes with the risk of error and waste, requiring careful preparation from CFOs.”