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

AI agents aren’t inherently “better,” they’re just designed to operate with more independence.

But in 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.

How to measure AI autonomy in finance

Think of AI autonomy as a dial. On one end is full manual control. On the other is a fully independent AI agent.

Most teams tell us they want intelligent support with the right level of human involvement.

That’s where Planful comes in. Our AI assistants are built for balance — powerful enough to automate repetitive work, but keeping Finance in control. We support modern protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) orchestration, but with human review and approval built in by design.

The result: faster, smarter, more confident decisions without sacrificing human oversight or trust.

Planful’s approach is rooted in what finance leaders need and want, not AI buzzwords. Our survey shows what’s top of mind for finance leaders:

• 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 right now.

Planful AI is built around a set of intelligent assistants, each designed as a persona with a clear role to play in Finance.

These assistants take on the repetitive, time-consuming work that slows teams down, so FP&A, controllers, and analysts can focus on strategy and decision-making.

• Help Assistant – Answers “how-to” questions about using Planful, from creating reports to changing user settings to navigating features.
• Coming soon: Analyst – An assistant trained on your financial data that can answer finance questions, find variances, analyze trends, and generate reports all through natural language.

Together, these assistants act like specialized partners. Each has a focused role, but all are designed to amplify Finance’s capabilities, speed up workflows, and give teams more confidence in their decisions.

“Is Planful AI sophisticated enough without an AI agent?”

Considering the flood of agentic AI headlines and hype, it’s a fair question. The answer is a resounding “Yes.”

Planful’s AI stack is built on the same modern infrastructure used by agentic vendors, but also includes:

• 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.

Powered by advanced AI capabilities — including 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.

The difference is in our philosophy: we prioritize human judgment over automation and transparency over black-box answers. In other words, Planful isn’t chasing hype — we’re focused on empowerment, clarity, and trust.

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.

An AI agent, by contrast, is more like an autonomous robot. It might accomplish tasks, but it operates without the human insight, context, and judgment that complex financial decisions require.

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

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 assistance, 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 assistance, 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 assistance over autonomy to ensure trust, transparency, and accountability.

Why does Planful prioritize assistants over fully autonomous agents?

Planful intentionally avoids AI agents because finance leaders need explainable, auditable insights. Fully autonomous AI agents can make decisions without human context, which can increase risk. Planful’s AI assistants keep finance professionals in the loop to guide decisions, reduce errors, and maintain compliance.

How can Finance teams safely adopt AI without losing control?

The safest approach is to use AI assistants, not autonomous agents. 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 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.