According to Georg Glantschnig, Microsoft’s vice president of Dynamics 365 AI ERP, artificial intelligence agents could fundamentally reshape the corporate finance function in coming years, rendering some jobs obsolete while creating new ones. The technology is still in the early stages of development, and some analysts say it may be too soon for rapid adoption in functions such as corporate finance. Eventually, however, according to a McKinsey report published last year, AI agents could act as “skilled virtual coworkers, working with humans in a seamless and natural manner.”
Glantschnig says Microsoft envisions AI agents impacting every business process in an organization. Such agents can help finance teams automate labor-intensive processes like financial close.
Is AI a game-changer for business automation?
“An agent uses AI to execute tasks and take action on your behalf. Agents work alongside or on behalf of a person, team, or organization and range from simple, prompt-and-response agents that carry out a simple query or a single task like invoice approval to more advanced, fully autonomous agents that orchestrate end-to-end processes such as order to cash,” Glantschnig says.
“Ensuring accuracy and compliance of financial operations and reporting is a fundamental responsibility of every finance department. With financial data dispersed across multiple data sources and financial transactions flowing in and recorded from internal and external sources, maintaining financial data accuracy is a daunting task, often done manually and prone to human errors. By leveraging agents to automate key financial processes, finance professionals can benefit from time-saved searching across systems without sacrificing, or even increasing accuracy and compliance.”
Are fully autonomous AI agents a reality already?
“Our customers’ trust and confidence in AI is top of mind for us. Therefore, we started with assistive capabilities in 2024 across our full ERP portfolio. Today, 50% of our users are using Copilots in Dynamics 365 apps. In the same responsible way, we’re introducing agents, gradually increasing their autonomy at a pace suitable for each individual customer. Different customers and teams differ in their AI journey and how quickly they adopt new technologies, but we already see many examples of customers moving quickly,” Glantschnig says.
“Customers are already building their own agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio. For example, Pets at Home, the UK’s biggest pet care company, created an agent for its profit protection team to more efficiently compile cases for skilled human review, which could have the potential to drive a seven-figure annual savings.”
How important is the human element when it comes to the use of AI agents?
Glantschnig says, “Agents automate business processes and can vary in complexity, scope, and autonomy—from generating insights on request to running discrete tasks, to dynamically planning, managing, and orchestrating complete processes independently. Agents won’t interact with end users directly but with those users’ copilots. In AI-first companies, we anticipate that every employee will have their own copilot, and they will be supported by tens of thousands of agents. Our objective is to have a copilot for every worker and an agent for every business process. We anticipate that with time, humans will take a more supervisory role, overseeing the work done by the agents and the agent’s learning processes.”
Could certain roles within the corporate finance function be displaced by AI agents in the future?
“We see the AI revolution as one that is fundamentally reshaping work and how work gets done. While it’s too soon to determine the exact impact on the finance workforce, it’s likely that some jobs will disappear, and some new ones will emerge. As mentioned above, administrative jobs might turn into supervisory roles, and we’re seeing a new role of ‘agent business administrators’ emerging — with responsibility for setting up and continuously improving the agents,” Glantschnig concludes.
