Dive Brief:
- Corporate finance departments will look very different in three years, as technologies such as artificial intelligence agents transform how CFOs and their teams operate, Eric Glyman, CEO of tech startup Ramp, said in a recent blog post.
- By 2028, many U.S. corporate finance teams will include a fleet of autonomous AI agents supervised by an “AI agent manager” and performing roles in a variety of areas ranging from procurement to expense management, Glyman predicted.
- “This isn’t a story about replacing people,” he said in the blog post. “It’s about redeploying them — up the value chain, into the work only humans can do.”
Dive Insight:
New York-based Ramp offers an expense management software platform designed to help businesses optimize their spending and streamline finance operations.
Last week, the company announced that it raised $500 million at a $22.5 billion valuation in a Series E-2 funding round. This came on the heels of the startup launching its first AI agents.
“We have a fortress balance sheet and an accelerating core business,” Ramp CFO Will Petrie said in a press release on the funding round. “Both will allow us to play to win as AI reshapes the future of finance.”
Ramp has raised $1.9 billion in total equity financing and began generating cash flow earlier this year, according to the release. The software company announced on June 17 that it raised $200 million in a Series E funding round.
In his blog post, Glyman said the back-to-back funding rounds come “at a unique moment in finance” in which more and more CFOs are testing AI tools.
The rise of agentic AI in particular heralds a future just a few years from now in which finance software “thinks, acts, and improves by itself,” according to the post.
“Picture a fleet for different tasks,” Glyman wrote. “Expense agents clearing 99%+ of transactions without human touch. Treasury agents optimizing cash positioning. FP&A agents running real-time forecasts.”
As AI agents take on various roles in the finance function, junior analysts will become “agent coaches” and senior leaders will make a “smaller number of higher quality decisions,” he said.
On June 10, Ramp unveiled AI agents for controllers “to automatically enforce company expense policies, eliminate unauthorized spending, and prevent fraud.” The company said the agents are the first in a series that it is releasing this year.
The startup joins a rapidly growing list of enterprise software companies that are offering AI agents designed to perform workplace tasks with little human intervention.
Gartner predicts that 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, up from less than 1% in 2024, with at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions being made autonomously through the technology.
“Agents represent a paradigm shift in how AI systems interact with users and environments,” Gartner analysts said in a February report.
Among other recommendations, Gartner advised companies to gain experience with AI agents by starting with single agents before jumping to multiagent systems. The report also called on leaders to measure their investments and identify use cases that can result in outcomes such as increased productivity or improved decision making.
“Don’t invest in agentic AI simply because it is the latest innovation to be hyped,” the report said.
