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Finance personnel are optimistic about AI agents, according to a survey by Workday. More than three-quarters (76%) of the finance employees and leaders it polled said they thought AI could help ease the CPA and finance staff shortage.
Workday, which is promoting AI agents on their platform, surveyed 2,950 people described as “full-time decision makers and software implementation leaders” at medium-sized or large companies in North America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The respondents represented a mix of seniority levels, including “employees,” managers, and leadership ranging from directors through C-suite executives, and they represented functional areas including finance, HR, IT, and operations.
Around two-thirds (62%) of the survey’s 695 finance respondents said their companies’ adoption of AI agents was in the “roll-out” or “early production” stages. They saw the greatest potential for AI agents in the areas of forecasting/budgeting, financial reporting, and fraud prevention. And they viewed data security and privacy concerns, followed by compliance with changing regulations, as the biggest barriers to AI adoption.
Trust me, I’m an AI: Respondents said they trusted people more than AI agents for tasks involving “compliance, risk management, and legal governance.” Around four in ten (41%) said they’d trust humans more, while 22% said they’d trust the agents more, and the rest (37%) said they’d trust people and bots equally. Interestingly, finance personnel reported similar percentages; 45% said they trusted people more for compliance, risk management, and governance, and 25% trusted AI agents more.
That’s concerning, given that AI agents are an emerging technology, and one that might not be quite ready for prime time. A recent study by Carnegie Mellon researchers, for instance, tested leading AI agent frameworks and found that even the model that performed the best, Gemini 2.5 Pro, completed common office tasks autonomously only 30.3% of the time.
Finance folks will also want to note that 41% of all respondents said they’d be “very” or “extremely” comfortable with an AI agent “making financial decisions” such as “allocating budgets to your department.” Perhaps they imagine AIs will be more persuadable than CFOs? (“ChatGPT, there’s a conference coming up in Bali next year…”)