FINANCIAL STRATEGY
The lesson is that AI needs reliable data, business context and clear controls. Without those foundations, employees can end up checking one tool against another. With them, AI can help finance shift from reporting and reacting towards earlier intervention and better-informed action.
Could AI form part of a central strategy during the M & A process in the next five years? Yes. I expect AI to become a core part of M & A integration strategy, rather than a side project or a set of productivity experiments. There is still a significant gap between ambition and adoption. Only 20 % of UK finance respondents say AI is deeply embedded in their organisation’ s core systems for managing people, money and plans. The most valuable applications will be practical and tied to business outcomes. AI agents can help bring together financial and operational data, monitor integration milestones, identify potential control gaps, accelerate close activities and track whether the expected value of a deal is being realised. In other words, AI can help make integration more visible, more disciplined and more responsive. The teams that lead the way will be those that have AI embedded in the trusted systems where finance decisions are made and governed. Organisations that combine AI with reliable data, clear workflows, security and human oversight will be better placed to integrate faster
CFOs should prioritise a small number of high-value workflows
Tim Wakeford VP of Product Management Workday
while maintaining confidence in their numbers. That’ s the promise of agentic finance: AI as a governed teammate that helps finance deliver outcomes.
What should a CFO do first to prepare for AI-enabled M & A? The first step is to identify where integration depends on people manually connecting systems, reconciling data, or chasing information. Those are often the places where the business is losing the most time and where controls are most likely to be strained. CFOs should then prioritise a small number of high-value workflows, such as financial close, reconciliation, audit preparation, scenario planning or synergy tracking. For each workflow, define the business outcome, the trusted data source, the control requirements and where human judgment must remain in the loop. Organisations should not try to automate everything overnight. The goal is to build a connected, governed foundation and apply AI first where it can safely reduce repetitive work. That gives finance teams more capacity to focus on judgement, accountability and value creation.
72 September 2026