At a Glance

  • Eric Glyman, CEO of tech startup Ramp, said in a recent blog post that with the adoption of technologies like AI agents, corporate finance departments will undergo significant changes within three years, transforming the way CFOs and their teams work.
  • Glyman predicts that by 2028, many U.S. corporate finance teams will have a fleet of autonomous AI agents, overseen by "AI agent managers," taking on responsibilities in areas such as procurement and expense management.
  • "This is not a story about replacing people," he wrote in the blog. "It's about redeploying them—moving up the value chain into work that only humans can do."

Deep Dive

New York-based Ramp provides an expense management software platform designed to help businesses optimize spending and streamline financial operations.

Last week, the company announced it raised $500 million in a Series E-2 funding round, valuing it at $22.5 billion. The announcement came on the heels of the launch of its first AI agents.

"We have a strong balance sheet and an accelerating core business," Ramp CFO Will Petrie said in the funding press release. "Both will enable us to go all-in to win as AI reshapes the future of finance."

According to the press release, Ramp's cumulative equity funding has reached $1.9 billion, and it began generating cash flow earlier this year. The company announced on June 17 that it raised $200 million in a Series E round.

Glyman said in the blog that the two consecutive funding rounds coincide with a "unique moment in finance," as more CFOs are testing AI tools.

In particular, the rise of agentic AI points to a future, just a few years away, where finance software will "think, act, and improve autonomously," the blog said.

"Picture a fleet of agents handling different tasks," Glyman wrote. "An expense agent handles over 99% of transactions without human intervention; a treasury agent optimizes cash positions; an FP&A agent runs real-time forecasts."

As AI agents take on various roles within finance functions, junior analysts will become "agent coaches," while senior leaders will make "fewer but higher-quality decisions," he said.

On June 10, Ramp launched AI agents for financial controllers to "automate company expense policies, eliminate unauthorized spending, and prevent fraud." The company said these agents are the first in a series of products planned for release this year.

The startup joins a growing number of enterprise software companies offering AI agents designed to execute work tasks with minimal human intervention.

Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024; by then, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through this technology.

"Agents represent a paradigm shift in how AI systems interact with users and their environments," Gartner analysts said in a February report.

Among other recommendations, Gartner advised enterprises to build experience with AI agents by starting with a single agent before transitioning to multi-agent systems. The report also called on leaders to measure investments and identify use cases that deliver outcomes such as productivity gains or improved decision-making.

"Don't invest in agentic AI just because it's the latest hyped technology," the report wrote.