The Power of AI Agents: Insights on Transforming Finance Through Task Automation

What if your finance team could spend less time chasing invoices, answering the same questions, and manually approving expenses — without adding headcount?

As a finance leader, you know efficiency is everything. But between complex systems, disconnected processes, and growing demands, your team spends too much time on manual work instead of focusing on strategic initiatives.

That’s where AI agents come in. 

These intelligent automation tools are changing the game for finance teams by taking on repetitive tasks, reducing errors, and speeding up processes across procurement, expense management, and payroll.

This isn’t just hype — the global AI agent market in finance is set to triple in size, from $14.79 billion in 2024 to $43.04 billion by 2029. Forward-thinking companies are already using AI agents to help: 

• Cut operational costs
• Boost team productivity
• Reduce approval bottlenecks

So, what could your finance team accomplish if AI agents handled the busywork? This article explores how AI agents are making finance operations faster, smarter, and more efficient — and how that helps your organization save time and money.

Three main types of AI agents in finance

AI agents are already transforming finance operations, and adopting them could be a game-changer for your organization. Here are the three types of AI agents that you and your finance team should be familiar with:

• Knowledge base agents access, manage, and deliver information stored in your company’s knowledge base
• Lookup agents quickly retrieve specific information from finance systems
• Action agents automate tasks and processes by interacting with various systems, executing workflows, and completing multi-step tasks end to end

To help you understand how these AI agents work — and why they’re so valuable for finance teams — let’s break down the three key types and the specific problems they solve.

1. Knowledge base agents: Your 24/7 finance help desk

Your team spends a lot of time answering repetitive questions, like: ”When will I receive my paycheck?”, ”How do I check the status of a payment?”, or “How do I create a purchase order (PO)?” 

To find these answers, employees typically have to: 

1. Log into the internal portal or intranet

2. Search for the knowledge base (which isn’t always easy to find)

3. Sift through outdated or hard-to-find documents — like payroll guidelines, time tracking policies, or tax information — to locate the right answer 

This process can be challenging for employees and may require additional support from your finance team.

With a knowledge base agent, employees can simply ask a question, and within seconds are able to locate the suitable answer — this means less need for back-and-forth on the emails, wasted time digging through documentation, and higher productivity.

Key benefits

• Time savings: Greatly reduces manual search efforts
• Increased accuracy: Retrieves the latest, most relevant information
• Scalability: Able to handle thousands of inquiries without adding headcount

2. Lookup agents: Say goodbye to manual searches

 When you or your team need to locate a PO, an invoice, or a supplier record, how much time do you spend navigating multiple systems?

The traditional process may look something like this:

1. Log into your finance system

2. Click through a maze of menus

3. Search by PO number, vendor name, or invoice ID

4. If you hit a dead end, switch to email or Slack to chase someone for help

5. Repeat every time a new request comes in

That may be a lot of steps just to find basic information. Now, imagine replacing all that with a simple message to your AI assistant: "Show me the invoice linked to our last PO from Evergreen Industries."

The AI lookup agent (which involves an agentic reasoning engine), in real time, is able to break down this request into a series of logical steps:

1. It first locates the vendor record for Evergreen Industries in the database

2. Using Evergreen's vendor ID, it searches for all purchase order records associated with that vendor

3. It determines the most recent purchase order based on date

4. Finally, it locates the invoice linked to that specific purchase order

All of these steps can be executed in mere seconds, seamlessly retrieving the invoice you need without you having to navigate multiple systems or remembering specific PO numbers. 

The internal Moveworks data proves the value: In Q4, over 60% of all finance agent usage among Moveworks customers came from lookup agents. 

What's noteworthy is that lookup agents are not limited to finance power users who spend most of their day navigating these systems. They also greatly benefit light users — employees who only occasionally need to access vendor records or retrieve invoices — by providing them with instant access. Our data shows a notable 70% of weekly active users are light users across teams.

3. Action agents: Faster approvals, less friction

While knowledge base agents and lookup agents make instant information retrievals, the action agents get tasks done — and the majority of that is tied directly to approvals. That’s no surprise. 

 Approvals have traditionally been a point where finance workflows can become less efficient.— and AI agents are changing the game by helping eliminate manual steps, reduce back-and-forth, and keep everything moving smoothly.

Ask anyone in finance and they’ll tell you — expense approvals can be tricky. Employees submit expenses, invoices, or travel requests, and then generally: 

1. Approvers have to log into the system and review each request

2. They manually check receipts, justifications, and policy compliance 

3. If something’s wrong or missing, they send it back — leading to a frustrating game of email tag 

4. Delays pile up, leaving employees wondering when they’ll get reimbursed and leaving finance teams with a backlog of pending approvals 

With an AI action agent, this entire process can be streamlined:

• The agent collects the request, verifies compliance, and flags any missing details upfront.
• Approvers can review and approve directly in their chat tool, without ever logging into SAP Concur.

The result? Faster approvals, fewer errors, and happier employees — without adding work for your team.

Expense approvals represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Action agents' impact on finance operations. Action agents excel at handling a diverse array of tasks, from streamlining sales contract approvals to managing timecard notifications and automating expense report creation.  By offloading these repetitive processes to AI, your finance team is able to become faster, leaner, and liberated to focus on strategic, high-value work. When routine tasks no longer bog down productivity, this helps to enable a more efficient organization.

Collaborative AI agents: Automating complex finance workflows with precision and efficiency

Beyond working independently on atomic tasks, knowledge base agents, lookup agents, and action agents are capable of collaborating seamlessly to handle complex tasks with minimal human intervention. This is illustrated in the example below:

• An employee submits a simple purchase request to the AI agent using an action agent
• The AI agent invokes knowledge base agents to retrieve relevant knowledge from the procurement knowledge base, and a lookup agent to pull historical purchase requisitions from Ariba
• The AI agent gathers additional input from the user and uses an LLM-powered action agent to determine whether the request is classified as OpEx or CapEx
• The AI agent then reaches out to the user for confirmation before submitting the request to the procurement system.

The AI agent automation system acts as a smart coordinator, determining the right type of agent for each step of a task. It interprets user requests, retrieves relevant data, and automates approvals — enabling smooth workflows, helping reduce manual errors, and improving efficiency.

Business value of AI agents in finance

When you think about the sheer volume of questions, lookups, and approvals your finance team handles every day, it’s clear that manual processes could be slowing you down. 

Let’s break down exactly how much time (and money) you could save by introducing AI agents into your finance workflows.

Knowledge base agents: Your always-on finance FAQ

Think about how many routine finance questions your team answers every day. Questions like:

• “When will I receive my paycheck?”
• “How do I submit a purchase order?”
• “Where can I check the status of a payment?”

Answering each of these individually seems harmless — but when you add them all up, they can multiply into a productivity drain for your finance team. 

Potential real-world savings

Our internal data shows the median number of knowledge base questions that are asked in a quarter is 1 per employee. In an organization of 100,000 employees, finance teams handle about 400,000 questions a year — most of them simple, repetitive requests that could easily be answered by a well-trained AI agent.

Without automation, each of these questions takes about 3 minutes to handle. That might not sound like much, but across all those questions, it adds up to about 20,000 hours per year. 

If your average finance operations professional earns $93,000 per year, that can end up being nearly $1 million in salary spent answering routine questions — time that could be reclaimed and reinvested into higher-value strategic work. 

The math behind it:

400,000 questions/year × 3 minutes/question = 20,000 hours/year

20,000 hours/year × $93,000 ÷ (40 hours/week × 48 weeks/year) = $968,750 annual cost

With a knowledge base agent handling those questions automatically, you could potentially reclaim nearly $1 million per year — and improve response times for employees.

Lookup agents: Stop hunting for invoices and vendor records

How often do you or your team need to track down a specific purchase order, invoice, or supplier record? It’s one of those necessary but painful processes — especially when your data lives across multiple systems, and you need to dig through confusing interfaces just to find basic information.

The process typically looks something like this:

• Log into the finance system
• Navigate through layers of menus
• Enter the PO number or vendor name
• Wait for results
• If you can’t find what you need, check another system — or worse, scroll through old emails

Now imagine this instead: 

You simply ask your AI agent: “Show me the invoice linked to PO 12345.”

The agent instantly retrieves what you need — saving you time and frustration.

Potential real-world savings 

Based on our internal data, we estimate approximately 10,000 invoice lookup requests per quarter for a 100K-employee company , adding up to 40,000 per year. 

Assuming it takes about 5 minutes per request without an AI agent (manually) versus 30 seconds with an AI agent, we see it can save 90% of the total time to perform tasks, and is able to free up approximately 3,000 hours annually.

The math behind it: 

Here is a table that summarizes the time saved for the top lookup agent use cases:

Beyond the hours saved, there’s also other potential benefits: fewer errors, less frustration, and faster decision-making — because when your data is instantly accessible, everything can move faster.

Action agents: Faster approvals, happier teams

Approvals are a classic bottleneck in finance. Whether it’s expense reports, invoices, or travel requests, the process is typically slow, manual, and frustrating for both employees submitting requests and approvers reviewing them.

Here’s what a manual approval process generally looks like:

• Approvers log into SAP Concur (or another system)
• They review the request details and check for policy compliance
• They open attachments to review receipts and documentation
• If anything is missing or unclear, they email back and forth with employees
• Finally, they approve or reject — often after days of back-and-forth

With an action agent, this entire flow gets condensed into a few clicks inside a chat interface. The agent is able to pre-checks compliance, highlight potential issues, and let the approver take action immediately — no system-hopping required.

Potential real-world savings

In a 100,000-employee organization, we can assume there are around 100,000 approvals per quarter, totaling 400,000 per year. 

Assuming that it takes about 5 minutes per request if done manually and nearly 30 seconds if done through an AI agent. It would save the organization 30,000 hours annually.

The math behind it:

It’s not just about speeding up approvals. AI agents are also able to help reduce compliance risk by automatically checking for missing receipts, policy violations, or incorrect amounts before anything reaches the approver’s desk. That can mean fewer reworks, fewer errors, and faster, cleaner financial processes.

How AI agents streamline cross-system finance tasks

AI agents aren’t just powerful in isolation — they can become even more valuable when you connect them across your full finance tech stack. By acting as the glue between systems, they can automate entire workflows, help to reduce human error, and keep your teams aligned in real time.

Financial close: Faster, cleaner, and fully automated

Closing the books is one of the most time-intensive processes in finance, requiring input from multiple systems and teams. AI agents are able to streamline steps from beginning to end by:

• Automatically retrieving transaction data from your accounting system 
• Reconciling accounts across ERP, CRM, and other financial platforms
• Consolidating financial statements and updating the general ledger in real time
• Notifying key stakeholders as soon as critical tasks are complete, keeping everyone informed and accelerating decision-making

With AI agents handling the heavy lifting, your team is able to shift their focus to analysis and strategic insights, instead of chasing down data or correcting errors.

Accounts payable: Less chasing, more paying 

When it comes to accounts payable (AP), manual processes can be loaded with inefficiencies — from tracking down invoices to matching them to purchase orders and routing approvals.

AI agents are able to change the game by:

• Extracting invoice data directly from email or your document management system 
• Automatically matching invoices to purchase orders in your ERP 
• Routing invoices for approval through your existing workflow management system — with little to no human intervention 
• Scheduling payments via your banking system and updating the general ledger in one seamless flow

The result? Potentially faster payments, fewer errors, and a clear audit trail — with far less manual effort from your team.

Expense management: Automate from submission to reimbursement 

Expense management is another prime candidate for AI automation — especially when you consider the volume of submissions and compliance checks involved. AI agents help to handle the full lifecycle by:

• Collecting expense submissions directly from your expense management system 
• Validating each expense against company policies stored in your compliance system 
• Routing compliant expenses for approval and flagging exceptions for review
• Syncing approved expenses with your payroll system to enable timely reimbursements 
• Updating the general ledger automatically and surfacing spending insights through your business intelligence system

With AI agents acting as your first line of defense, finance teams don’t have to micromanage each step — which can help free up time for policy refinement, vendor negotiation, and financial analysis.

Why now? AI agents are a competitive advantage

By integrating AI agents into their daily workflows, finance teams are able to streamline operations, reduce costs, and make more informed financial decisions — helping drive business growth. With AI agents handling repetitive tasks, your team gains the opportunity to:

• Close financial books faster
• Automate manual work across procurement, expense management, and payroll
• Focus on driving profitability and innovation

Ready to design your AI agent roadmap? We’ll help you identify the biggest automation opportunities for your finance team and create a step-by-step plan to get there.

Start building your AI agent roadmap today.