Dive Brief:
- Workday is preparing for a broader rollout of “Financial Test Suite,” an agentic artificial intelligence tool designed to help CFOs and their teams detect fraud, errors and other anomalies in financial transactions, according to Tim Wakeford, the company’s vice president of financial management product strategy.
- The goal is to enable continuous financial checks and controls. “In an agentic world, the number of times you can test is almost infinite,” Wakeford said in an interview.
- Financial Test Suite, first unveiled last fall, is currently being used by a limited set of early customers and is expected to become generally available in the second half of 2026, a spokesperson said.
Dive Insight:
The new tool is designed to automatically identify and resolve anomalies, according to Workday. “For example, it can flag items that need immediate attention — like a duplicate invoice — and the agent takes action to stop that duplicate payment,” the company said in an email.
The software “will be testing everything in the background, looking for anomalies, looking for duplicate invoices, looking for potential fraud, looking for any kind of error that exists,” Wakeford said.
The push comes amid intensifying competition among enterprise software vendors to scale the use of AI agents across financial systems.
In October, Oracle said it was expanding its portfolio of AI agents for finance users, with the rollout including a new accounts payable tool. The agents were unveiled at its annual AI World conference in Las Vegas.
This followed a similar announcement from Workday a month earlier at its annual conference in San Francisco. In a related move last month, the company said it had integrated agentic capabilities from Sana Labs after acquiring the firm for $1.1 billion.
Workday sees a future in corporate finance where agents perform a wide range of manual tasks “in the background” on a continual basis, CEO Aneel Bhusri said during a March 12 virtual press conference highlighting the Sana integration news and other AI updates. “We call it agentic finance, but you can think about it as lights-out finance,” he said.
The shift could mean a rethinking of how AI investments are evaluated. CFOs often measure such initiatives in terms of efficiency gains, but Wakeford said agentic systems, as they become more deeply embedded into finance workflows, can also enable tasks that were previously impractical or too resource-intensive to perform.
With Financial Test Suite, for example, ROI could come from identifying anomalous transactions and correcting them “before the books and records are closed or before payments have left the organization,” he said.
Agentic AI could generate up to $450 billion in economic value through revenue uplift and cost savings globally by 2028, Paris-based technology consulting firm Capgemini reported in July 2025 after analyzing survey responses from 1,500 senior executives across 14 countries.
However, the report also flagged adoption hurdles. Confidence in fully autonomous AI agents fell 16 percentage points from the prior year amid concerns over privacy and ethics, Capgemini found.
Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls.
Wakeford said finance leaders are increasingly interested in AI’s potential to reshape operations, but remain cautious about implementation, particularly around validation, governance and auditability.
“There is without any shadow of a doubt genuine interest and excitement in the CFO community about the potential of AI and agents to have a profound impact on finance,” he said. “But there is also a degree of professional skepticism.”
