Strategic finance is the future
Agentic finance has almost nothing to do with the back-office work it is replacing.
CFOs have spent the last year getting bombarded with AI hype. Everyone keeps telling them "AI will change everything," but nobody explains how. Here is what I see: the finance role is shifting from transactional execution to strategic orchestration.
In the future Causa Prima is building for, it is not just agents inside one company’s systems. Agents talk to each other across company borders — AR agent on one side, AP agent on the other. That is the agent-to-agent economy. Meanwhile the transactional layer — matching, reconciling, data entry, chasing, escalating — gets eaten by agents.
For 25 years I watched finance teams buried in work that added zero strategic value. They were operational practitioners. Agentic finance will make them strategic orchestrators, and the finance mandate gets much bigger — from managing headcount to managing agents and people across AP, treasury, planning and compliance.
They will finally have the space to focus on what actually requires human judgment, as the low-value work that used to consume the day disappears.