Anticipate, Advise, Act – Preparing the Office of the CFO for Agentic Finance

Overview

Workload up 3.2%. Headcount down 2.1%. Budget down 1.7%. Tech spend up 5.6%. Finance is buying its way out of a problem that technology did not create.

The future is already taking shape. Close, planning, and procurement are moving from periodic, all-hands work to something continuous and near-touchless. Agents test every transaction, surface the missing accrual before the close, and run the scenario a CFO used to wait a week for. That is not a productivity story. It is a redefinition of what finance talent does.

Readiness is the gap. The Hackett Group’s 2026 Finance Agenda and Key Issues Study found that 86% of finance leaders call a talent reset critical. Only 11% are executing one. Organizational resistance to change ranks as the number one barrier to finance transformation. Technology complexity ranks seventh. The roles most exposed are the ones finance hires most: 76% expect the financial accounting analyst role to be disrupted to a large extent, 71% procure-to-pay analyst, 69% order-to-cash analyst. And 63% of finance professionals want stronger strategic thinking skills while only 16% are satisfied with the chance to build them.

That’s what this session is about. Join Workday and The Hackett Group for a working session on closing the execution gap: where agents reshape finance roles first, how leading organizations redefine those roles around judgment instead of routine processing, and why the governance layer decides which agents get to act. Workday’s agents inherit the policies, permissions, and business rules that already run the enterprise, so they anticipate the need, advise with your policy applied, and act inside your approval chains. NetApp used that model to review more than 90,000 contracts, saving over $2.5 million and thousands of hours.

You will learn:

• The first step is the hardest. Why 86% of finance leaders recognize the need for a talent reset and only 11% have started.
• Where agents land first. Which finance roles AI reaches first, and how to redesign them around exception management and business partnering.
• Continuous, not periodic. How close, planning, and procurement stop being all-hands exercises.
• The right to act. What governance an agent needs before it can execute on mission-critical finance work.