Deep Dive:

  • Workday is preparing for a broader rollout of its "Financial Testing Suite," an agentic AI tool designed to help CFOs and their teams detect fraud, errors, and other anomalies in financial transactions, according to Tim Wakeford, the company's vice president of financial management product strategy.
  • The goal is to enable continuous financial checks and controls. "In an agentic environment, the number of tests you can run is almost unlimited," Wakeford said in an interview.
  • The Financial Testing Suite, which debuted last fall, is currently being used by a small group of early customers and is expected to become generally available in the second half of 2026, a spokesperson said.

Deep Insight:

The new tool is designed to automatically identify and resolve anomalies, according to Workday. "For example, it can flag items that require immediate attention—such as duplicate invoices—and then the agent takes action to block that duplicate payment," the company said in an email.

The software "will test everything in the background, looking for anomalies, duplicate invoices, potential fraud, and any type of error," Wakeford said.

The move comes amid intensifying competition among enterprise software vendors to expand the use of AI agents in financial systems.

In October, Oracle said it was expanding its portfolio of AI agents for finance users, including a new accounts payable tool. The agents were unveiled at its annual AI World conference in Las Vegas.

A month earlier, Workday made a similar announcement at its annual conference in San Francisco. In a related move, the company said last month that it had integrated its agentic capabilities following its acquisition of Sana Labs for $1.1 billion.

Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri said during a virtual press conference on March 12 that he envisions a future for corporate finance in which agents continuously perform various manual tasks "in the background." The press conference focused on the Sana integration news and other AI updates. "We call it agentic finance, but you can think of it as 'lights-out finance,'" he said.

This shift could mean a rethink of how AI investments are evaluated. CFOs typically measure such initiatives by efficiency gains, but Wakeford said that as agentic systems become more deeply embedded in financial workflows, they can also enable tasks that were previously impractical or too resource-intensive.

With the Financial Testing Suite, for example, the return on investment could come from identifying anomalous transactions and correcting them "before the books are closed or before money leaves the organization," he said.

Agentic AI could generate up to $450 billion in global economic value by 2028 through revenue gains and cost savings, Paris-based technology consultancy Capgemini reported in July 2025 after analyzing survey responses from 1,500 senior executives across 14 countries.

However, the report also pointed to adoption barriers. Capgemini found that confidence in fully autonomous AI agents fell 16 percentage points year over year due to privacy and ethical concerns.

Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2027, more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls.

Wakeford said finance leaders are increasingly interested in AI's potential to reshape operations but remain cautious about implementation, particularly around validation, governance, and auditability.

"There's no doubt that there's genuine interest and excitement in the CFO community about the potential for AI and agents to have a profound impact on finance," he said. "But there's also a degree of professional skepticism."