Agentic AI in Finance: Automate Finance-IT Workflows

Finance and IT teams lose half their day to coordination overhead. A single software purchase triggers days of back-and-forth: Finance checks budgets, IT reviews technical requirements, managers approve spend, and IT provisions access. Both teams know the other is essential, but constant interruptions prevent strategic work.

Agentic AI handles this coordination automatically—checking budgets, routing approvals, coordinating provisioning, and updating systems without manual handoffs. 

This article covers what agentic AI means across finance operations and how it eliminates Finance-IT coordination overhead.

What Is Agentic AI in Finance?

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that autonomously execute tasks and make decisions rather than just analyzing data. Unlike traditional AI that surfaces insights for humans to act on, agentic AI completes entire workflows from start to finish without human intervention at each step.

Finance teams deploy agentic AI where speed and consistency matter more than human judgment:

Fraud Detection and Risk Management

• Analyze millions of transactions simultaneously for suspicious patterns
• Automatically freeze accounts and block transactions when fraud is detected
• Adjust portfolio positions and hedging strategies when risk thresholds are breached
• Response time in milliseconds vs. hours for manual review

Algorithmic Trading

• Execute trades when specific market conditions align with strategies
• Capture arbitrage opportunities existing for microseconds
• Automatically rebalance portfolios when allocations drift from targets
• Process thousands of trades per second faster than human traders

Financial Planning and Forecasting

• Monitor spending against budgets and reallocate funds based on predefined rules
• Automatically draw on credit facilities or move excess cash to higher-yielding accounts
• Auto-approve expense reports within policy while flagging exceptions

Accounts Payable and Receivable

• Match invoices against purchase orders and automatically approve payments
• Send payment reminders and escalate collection methods for overdue accounts
• Process thousands of transactions daily with consistent accuracy

Where Finance Teams Actually Spend Their Time

The applications above represent high-value strategic work. This is what finance leaders think about when they hear "agentic AI in finance."

But most finance teams spend the majority of their day coordinating internal service requests; software approvals, budget inquiries, vendor access, and expense policy questions. Each request requires Finance to check budgets, coordinate with IT for technical review, route for manager approval, coordinate with IT again for provisioning, update tracking systems, and follow up.

Simple software requests take multiple days. When executives ask "What's our software spend by department?" Finance exports data from ERP while IT pulls license counts from admin panels, then someone reconciles everything in spreadsheets.

This coordination overhead is where Finance and IT lose most of their time—not to strategic work, but to manual handoffs.

Why Finance and IT Teams Need AI-Powered Service Management

Traditional ITSM tools fail because they were built for single-department IT tickets, not cross-departmental Finance-IT workflows. Every software request creates problems for both teams:

Finance navigates:

• Checking budget availability in ERP
• Coordinating with IT through email for technical review
• Routing to a manager for approval and waiting for responses
• Coordinating with IT again for provisioning
• Updating spend tracking manually
• Following up with employees

IT gets pulled into:

• Stopping project work to review technical requirements
• Checking existing licenses across multiple admin panels
• Waiting for Finance budget confirmation
• Provisioning access across multiple systems
• Updating asset tracking manually

Traditional ITSM tools don’t offer integrations for budget data, workflows that include context both teams need, or orchestration capabilities. 

The cost: Finance capacity goes to coordinating approvals instead of financial analysis. IT capacity goes to provisioning software instead of infrastructure projects. Manual coordination creates compliance gaps, duplicate licenses, shadow IT, and burnout for both teams.

Why IT Leaders Should Care About Finance Service Management

Finance-related requests consume substantial IT service desk capacity at growing companies. Every software purchase, license addition, and vendor access request requires IT involvement—but IT gets pulled in without business context.

• IT becomes the bottleneck in workflows they don't control. 

Finance decides what to approve based on budget, but IT must provision it. When requests sit in IT queues, Finance escalates. When Finance expedites something, IT doesn't know if it's truly urgent. IT makes technical decisions without understanding budget constraints, leading to recommendations Finance can't afford.

• Standard ITSM tools treat Finance requests like IT tickets. 

An IT ticket says "provision Salesforce for Jane Smith," but IT needs to know: Does she have a license that can be reassigned? What's the business justification? Who approved the spend? Is this within budget?

Agentic AI eliminates IT as the coordination layer:

• Validates budget before IT sees requests
• Routes requests with full business context (employee role, budget status, manager approval)
• Automatically provisions routine access through Okta and identity management
• Shows IT only requests requiring technical review

The result: Reduced Finance-related service desk volume, resolution time drops from days to hours, and IT spends less time being Finance's help desk.

5 Ways Agentic AI Transforms Finance Service Management

Finance service management is where Finance and IT handle internal employee requests for software approvals, budget questions, and vendor access. Here's how agentic AI automates these operations:

1. Software Procurement and IT Spend Approvals

AI automates software procurement by checking budgets before Finance sees requests, routing approvals with full business context visible to IT, coordinating automatic provisioning, and updating spend tracking—eliminating the coordination overhead that turns 15 minutes of work into 45 minutes per request.

The AI validates budget availability automatically. When budget exists, Finance approvers see employee role, budget status, and existing spend in one screen. After Finance approves, IT sees the request with full business context attached. For routine provisioning, the AI executes automatically through integrated workflows and intelligent approval workflows via Okta. 

IT only reviews requests requiring technical decisions—with business justification already visible.

2. Budget and Spend Inquiry Responses

AI answers routine budget questions automatically, eliminating Finance interruptions and premature IT escalations when employees can't get budget answers. 

The AI maintains real-time budget data across Finance systems. Routine questions get instant answers. Complex questions route to the right Finance person with employee context and spending history already loaded via AI-powered triage.

IT benefits because employees get budget answers before submitting software requests, meaning IT only sees financially viable requests—not requests Finance will decline after IT has done technical review.

3. Expense Policy Questions

AI provides instant answers to expense policy questions from Finance knowledge bases, eliminating Finance as the human FAQ and reducing IT involvement in Finance policy discussions. 

The AI indexes Finance documentation in Confluence or Notion. When employees ask policy questions, smart article suggestions surface relevant policies conversationally.

4. Vendor Access Coordination

AI orchestrates vendor access workflows across Finance, IT, Legal, and Procurement—eliminating Finance as the coordination hub while giving IT visibility into business context before provisioning vendor access. 

The AI creates a shared workspace where all teams see the same request simultaneously through cross-department collaboration.

IT provisions access with full business justification visible—knowing Legal reviewed security, Finance approved spend, and Procurement verified the vendor. Multi-day processes become hours because nobody waits for Finance to relay information between departments.

5. Service Analytics and Optimization

AI tracks all Finance service requests and identifies patterns, enabling data-driven improvements for Finance while giving IT visibility into which Finance workflows consume the most IT capacity. The AI logs every interaction into real-time analytics, surfacing patterns like where software requests fail due to missing information or which approval sequences create the longest delays.

For IT, analytics reveal what percentage of service desk volume comes from Finance requests, and software provisioning averages 4 days because Finance approval takes 3 days while IT provisioning takes 4 hours—enabling strategic resource allocation.

Software procurement creates the biggest coordination nightmare because it needs Finance, IT, HR, and Legal all coordinating constantly—which is where traditional single-department ITSM tools completely fail.

How Siit Delivers Agentic AI for Finance Service Management

Siit integrates with existing Finance and IT systems to automate coordination overhead, consuming both teams' capacity.

Built-in Integration Architecture

Siit connects Finance and IT systems through native integrations:

• HRIS (BambooHR, Hibob, Workday, Rippling) for employee context
• Identity management (Okta) for automatic provisioning
• MDM tools (Jamf, Kandji, Intune) for device and license tracking
• Knowledge bases (Confluence, Notion) for policy documentation
• Slack and Teams for service management, where employees work

The built-in CMDB tracks IT assets with cost, license, and budget data—giving both teams financial and technical data in one view.

Cross-Departmental by Design

Siit was built specifically for Finance, IT, HR, and Legal coordination. Finance approves software with budget context visible, IT provisions access with business justification visible, and systems update automatically with zero manual handoffs. Cross-department collaboration is the foundation, not a feature added later.

For IT leaders: requests arrive with complete context, routine provisioning happens automatically, and service desk volume decreases as Finance workflows eliminate premature escalations.

Streamline Finance Service Management with Agentic AI

Finance and IT lose half their day to coordination overhead when AI could handle it automatically—checking budgets, routing approvals with full context, coordinating provisioning, and updating systems without manual handoffs.

Whether you're a Finance leader drowning in software approval coordination or an IT leader watching Finance requests consume significant service desk capacity, Siit eliminates the coordination overhead, keeping both teams stuck being each other's help desk.

Book a demo to see how Siit automates Finance-IT workflows.