Going backwards to look forwards: AI will not kill finance roles
Finance roles will shift from chasing money to deciding what to do with it.
Most finance teams spend their entire day dealing with the past. Did this invoice get approved? Did we pay that supplier? Why is this payment stuck? It is all backward-looking.
The strategic work — dynamic discounts, deciding which suppliers to pay early to generate direct bottom-line profit, using cash strategically instead of in 30-day batches — none of it is new. But you cannot focus on it when you are drowning in busywork.
AI agents will automate that backward-looking work. Not partially, not "with a human in the loop who gets back to you Monday." Actually automate it. And when that happens, finance teams get time to focus on forward-looking work.
We have seen this exact shift before. When SaaS automated bookkeeping 20 years ago, the task of keying into QuickBooks went away. But the bookkeepers did not get fired. They became financial analysts. We lost bookkeepers. We gained FP&A.
The same thing is going to happen with chasing payments. The backward-looking tasks get automated away with AI, not the person. The person stays and becomes more strategic.