A Human-First Approach to AI in Finance

The AI conversation in finance is getting louder, especially around autonomous agents.

These tools promise to handle complex workflows without any human intervention, which certainly sounds impressive. But for finance leaders assessing AI’s potential, the real question is: Is a fully autonomous AI agent best for your team?

Short answer: Finance teams get the most value today from AI assistants that keep a human-in-the-loop.

According to Planful’s 2025 Global Finance Survey, 60% of teams already use AI in some capacity, but most haven’t embedded it deeply into their processes. Considering adopting AI or upleveling your team’s usage of it? Read on.

You can also dig deeper by watching Planful AI Labs, a video series where I share practical strategies and cutting-edge advancements to help finance teams elevate their planning and analysis.

Learn more from our AI Labs series: AI Assistants: The Future of Process Automation for Finance

For Finance, the measure of a tech solution’s value shouldn’t just be autonomy. Rather, it should be if the technology can explain its results, adapt to real-world context, and give teams confidence in the numbers. Those are the capabilities that really matter when you’re forecasting revenue, scenario planning, or ensuring compliance.

At Planful, we design AI to work with humans, not around them. Our approach puts finance professionals in control while automating the busywork that slows them down. The result is human-guided AI that speeds up analysis, surfaces insights, and keeps every decision transparent and auditable.

Planful AI is built around a suite of intelligent agentic AI assistants, each designed as a purpose-built partner for finance and accounting. Instead of a generic chatbot, Planful AI Assistants go deeper to address real pain points felt by Finance and Accounting teams, helping to accelerate work, sharpen insights, and maintain control.

Planful’s assistants automate repetitive tasks, analyze data in context, and surface insights in plain language powered by OpenAI and Planful’s patented calculation engine so teams can focus on the decisions that matter most.

Planful’s AI Assistants include:

• Help Assistant – Answers “how-to” questions about using Planful, from creating reports to managing scenarios and navigating features.
• Analyst Assistant – Analyst Assistant can run variance analysis, identify trends, answer finance questions, and provide narrative and visual answers to plain language questions.

Planful AI Assistants coming soon include:

• Planner Assistant – Builds forecasts, runs scenarios, and tests assumptions to guide growth strategies.
• Controller Assistant – Helps with close and financial consolidations and ensures compliance with comparative insights.
• Modeler Assistant – Quickly develops and manages custom applications without starting from scratch.
• Admin Assistant – Manages data loads, access controls, and audit trails to keep governance tight.
• Business Assistant – Supports everyday business tasks and operations outside core Finance.

Planful AI has been embedded in our core platform since 2021, shaped by real-world challenges felt by our customers and designed around principles of privacy, security, and transparency. From the beginning, our focus has been on practical impact, not hype.

This philosophy sets us apart. We prioritize human judgment over automation and transparency over black-box answers, ensuring teams can trust every output.

Our AI stack is built on the same modern infrastructure used by agentic vendors, but with a foundation of capabilities that are specific to Finance, including:

• Signals – Identifies unusual patterns and anomalies in financial data to flag potential issues before they become bigger problems.
• Projections – Generates intelligent, AI-assisted baselines for planning and budgeting by analyzing historical data trends and seasonality.

On top of that foundation, Planful AI incorporates advanced technologies like Model Context Protocol (MCP) for context-rich orchestration, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) collaboration for task automation, and LLM-based natural language tools for flexibility and adaptability.

Augmenting Finance with an “Iron Man Suit” approach

As Andrej Karpathy, Co-Founder at OpenAI, recently put it, it’s helpful to think about AI like Iron Man’s suit. The suit gives Tony Stark incredible capabilities, but Tony is always inside the suit, making the decisions and controlling the actions.

Finance leaders don’t want to be replaced by robots; they want AI that makes them faster, sharper, and more confident — the kind of edge that feels like a superpower.

Rocket Software uses Planful AI to help its finance team spot anomalies and identify outliers before they escalate, allowing them to move from reactive to proactive.

“Planful helps us have a meaningful dialogue with the business, know where to ask questions, or see where someone accidentally added an extra zero. Best of all, we can do that at scale, without adding finance resources.” — Luis Martinez, Sr. Manager, FP&A, Rocket Software

Aurorium uses Planful AI to uncover unexpected insights during audits and close cycles, ultimately saving time and improving data confidence.

“Our sales leaders see how these insights help us make better business decisions. You don’t need to sell Planful to your business users; just let the data talk for itself.” — Robert Franz, Senior Reporting & Systems Analyst, Aurorium

Even more, our survey shows what’s top of mind for finance leaders right now:

• 32% rank data accuracy and modeling as their top priority.
• 30% are focused on automating repetitive tasks.
• Only 20% say they’re prioritizing predictive AI at this time.

Planful’s commitment to human-centered AI in accounting and finance isn’t just a philosophical stance — it’s a practical approach that delivers measurable value. Our AI assistants enhance human intelligence by handling time-consuming analytical tasks, providing explainable insights, and enabling finance teams to focus on strategic initiatives.

The result is finance teams that are more agile, more strategic, and more confident. With AI that maintains a human-in-the-loop, finance professionals have better information, faster analysis, and complete transparency into how recommendations are generated.

Our approach recognizes that the future of finance isn’t about replacing human judgment with AI. It’s about amplifying human capabilities with intelligent support, and when technology augments human insight, everyone wins.

• AI agents sound impressive, but they aren’t necessarily better, especially in finance: Finance teams need AI that collaborates with humans to make smarter, faster decisions, not autonomous agents that can create explainability or compliance issues.
• Autonomy isn’t the goal — empowerment is: Planful AI speeds up workflows without removing human control, so your team can skip the tedious tasks and focus on strategy.
• Finance leaders aren’t prioritizing autonomy: According to Planful’s 2025 Global Finance Survey, top priorities are data accuracy (32%) and automating repetitive tasks (30%), not replacing humans with agents.

Want to learn more about how AI is empowering Finance teams?

Watch our video series, Planful AI Labs, to explore strategies and innovations to drive secure AI adoption in finance.

What’s the difference between an AI assistant and an AI agent in finance?

An AI assistant supports users by providing insights, automation, and recommendations while keeping humans in control.

An AI agent operates more autonomously, executing tasks with minimal human oversight. In high-stakes financial workflows, Planful prioritizes assistants over autonomy to ensure trust, transparency, and accountability.

How can Finance teams safely adopt AI without losing control?

The safest approach is to use agentic AI assistants. Assistants fit into existing workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and surface insights while maintaining human oversight.

This human-in-the-loop approach ensures outputs are reviewable, explainable, and auditable, reducing compliance and accuracy risks. With Planful AI, tasks such as anomaly detection, variance analysis, and forecast seeding run automatically; however, finance professionals still approve actions before they’re finalized.

How does Planful compare to other agentic approaches?

At Planful, we use the same modern stack, including LLMs, MCP, and A2A orchestration, applied with explicit oversight. By using the same modern AI infrastructure, with a design philosophy focused on human judgment, we can deliver intelligent automation without sacrificing accuracy or oversight.