That’s a key finding from PYMNTS Intelligence’s July CAIO Report, “The Agentic Trust Gap: Enterprise CFOs Push Pause on Agentic AI,” based on a May survey of 60 enterprise chief financial officers.
The report highlights that while familiarity with agentic AI is nearly universal among CFOs, promising to transform processes like month-end close into continuous, autonomous engines, there is hesitation regarding its deployment. Only 15% of executives surveyed are even considering putting agentic AI to work, with most remaining in the early evaluation stage.
This contrasts with the surging adoption of generative AI, which CFOs are increasingly using for tasks like content creation, customer service, coding and data analysis. The report shows generative AI’s deployment for product and service innovation up 21% and for spotting fraud and errors up 31% since March 2024.
The report underscores that the willingness to embrace agentic AI, which goes a step further than its predecessor by autonomously making decisions and carrying out tasks independently, is not uniform. Instead, it is influenced by a firm’s existing levels of automation and the tangible return on investment (ROI) already realized from generative AI.
This suggests that confidence in more advanced AI systems is built upon a foundation of successful prior AI implementation and a proven track record of automation within the enterprise.
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Here are specific data points detailing how automation and ROI are shaping future adoption plans:
- Automation as a Prerequisite: Among highly automated firms, 67% of CFOs are weighing agentic AI adoption, a contrast to just 11% of their low-automation peers. Highly automated firms, having already laid the groundwork, are three times more likely to consider agentic AI as a logical next step.
- ROI Drives Further Investment: Companies that report strong ROI from their generative AI initiatives are twice as likely to increase their spending on AI compared to low-automation CFOs. Among firms with strong ROI, half are increasing their AI budgets, whereas only 17% of firms with negligible ROI plan to do so.
- Growing Reliance on Generative AI: CFOs’ perception of generative AI’s importance for financial planning and analysis has nearly doubled, with 9 in 10 now deeming it “very or extremely important,” up from 47% in March 2024. This indicates a growing operational dependence on generative AI across core financial functions like reporting, cost management and strategic planning.
Despite the benefits of generative AI and its growing importance, CFOs remain cautious about agentic AI due to fears it could go off script, leading to cascading payment errors, sanctions screening failures and compliance fines. Challenges like infrastructure gaps, the transparency of large language models, and unsettled audit and regulatory standards further contribute to this hesitation.
The report also reveals that generative AI is reshaping workforce needs, increasing the demand for analytically skilled workers and altering the overall skill mix across teams, while reducing the need for lower-skilled labor.
Additionally, while generative AI use cases surge, overall investment in the technology is cooling, with only 27% of firms increasing budgets this year, down from 53% last year, a trend that likely impacts agentic AI adoption.
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