CFOs Turn to AI Harnesses as Agentic Capabilities Scale

The office of the CFO is swimming in a sea of AI innovation. And as earnings calls from players like Visa and marketplace announcements from firms like Square and Ramp this week alone reveal, agentic artificial intelligence is moving from frontier technology to operational table stakes.

Agentic AI represents a shift from tools that inform decisions to systems that execute them. For CFOs, this changes the calculus. The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence can improve finance operations, but whether it can do so within a framework of control and accountability.

Enter the “agentic AI harness.” While the term may sound technical, its implications are deeply operational. The harness is not the model itself, but the system that governs how models act in the real world. It defines what an AI agent can access, what it is allowed to do, how it is monitored and when it must defer to a human. For chief financial officers, understanding this layer is becoming as important as understanding internal controls or capital allocation.

See also: Agentic B2B Is Here. Are Your Contracts and Invoices Ready?

How CFOs Are Governing Agentic AI Before It Governs Them

Traditional enterprise AI has largely been advisory. Models analyzed data, generated forecasts or recommended actions, leaving humans to decide what to do next. Agentic AI collapses that gap. These systems can initiate workflows, interact with enterprise software, trigger transactions and iterate toward goals with minimal human intervention.

In finance, the implications are immediate. An agent can reconcile accounts across systems, flag anomalies, draft disclosures and even propose adjustments. More advanced deployments allow agents to interact directly with ERP systems, vendor platforms or treasury tools. The productivity gains are real, but so is the shift in control dynamics. When systems move from suggesting to executing, governance becomes the central question.

As FIS Head of Product Management, Payment Networks Mladen Vladic wrote in a new PYMNTS eBook, “AI Runs Payments. Governance Decides What Happens Next,” integration is key to ensuring effective AI governance.

This is where the harness comes in. Without it, an AI agent is simply a powerful but unbounded actor. With it, the organization defines the rules of engagement.

For a CFO, the most useful way to think about an agentic AI harness is as an extension of financial controls. It is the mechanism that enforces permissions, logs actions and ensures accountability. In many ways, it plays a role analogous to internal control frameworks, but applied to machine-driven processes.

A robust harness manages identity and access at a granular level, determining what data an agent can see and what systems it can interact with. It governs tool use, ensuring that an agent cannot, for example, initiate a payment without explicit authorization. It maintains an audit trail, capturing not only what actions were taken but why — linking decisions to underlying data and model reasoning. It also defines escalation paths, specifying when a human must review or approve a decision.

A recurring lesson from early adopters is that governance cannot be retrofitted. It must be designed into the system from the outset. This requires a shift in mindset. Rather than starting with what an agent can do, organizations need to start with what it should be allowed to do.

See also: What Agentic Commerce Can Learn From B2B Payments

Rethinking ROI in an Autonomous Context

The promise of agentic AI is often framed in terms of efficiency. Finance leaders are told that agents can accelerate the close, improve forecasting accuracy, and reduce manual workloads. While these benefits are plausible, experienced CFOs are approaching them with measured skepticism.

The most credible returns are emerging in well-defined workflows. Financial planning and analysis is a natural candidate, where agents can synthesize large volumes of data and generate scenario analyses. Reporting processes also benefit, particularly in assembling narratives around financial performance. Reconciliation and anomaly detection are similarly well suited, as they involve repetitive tasks with clear rules and high data volumes.

Agentic systems perform best when objectives are well defined, inputs are structured, and success criteria are measurable. Vague ambitions of “AI transformation” tend to produce less reliable outcomes.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Investment Impact of GenAI Operating Standards on Enterprise Adoption” found that among U.S. firms generating at least $1 billion in annual revenue, 25% are actively using generative AI in their procure-to-pay cycle and another 48% are considering doing so.