OpenAI and PwC are deepening a partnership aimed at bringing artificial intelligence into the heart of corporate finance, with both firms betting that the office of the chief financial officer is one of the clearest tests for agentic AI.
The collaboration centres on building AI agents for tasks such as planning, forecasting, reporting, procurement, payments, treasury, tax and the accounting close. Rather than treating AI as a chat interface bolted on to existing systems, the co...
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mpanies want these tools to handle repeatable work, connect information across platforms, surface risks and support decisions while remaining subject to human oversight and governance controls.
OpenAI is already using some of the concepts internally. It is testing a procurement agent inside its own finance operation and says the exercise is being used as a live environment for refining control frameworks, operating procedures and the way people and software agents work together. The company has also been deploying AI across investor relations, treasury, tax, reporting, corporate development and contract review, describing its finance team as a kind of “customer zero” for the approach.
PwC is contributing finance transformation expertise, implementation support and controls design, with the aim of moving the tools from prototype to wider enterprise use. The firms say the agents can be built with OpenAI products such as Codex, which can help create or adapt internal tools like dashboards, spend trackers and exception-management systems. They also point to workspace agents, skills and connectors as a way to run workflows across existing applications while staying within approved corporate processes.
The push reflects a broader shift in how large companies are approaching generative AI. Finance departments, with their mix of compliance, budgeting, capital allocation and reporting responsibilities, are increasingly seen as a natural home for automation because they combine large volumes of repetitive administration with work that still requires judgement.
A further theme running through the collaboration is cost discipline. As AI use expands, chief financial officers will need a clearer view of usage, token consumption and projected spending so that adoption can be managed like any other operating cost. OpenAI has also highlighted early productivity gains from its own tools, saying Codex helped its team handle five times as many contracts with the same headcount, while IR-GPT managed more than 200 investor interactions during a recent fundraise.
Tyson Cornell, PwC’s US advisory leader, said the finance function was moving from process efficiency towards a more decision-led model. Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, said the opportunity went beyond saving time, arguing that AI could help finance leaders see risks sooner and play a more strategic role across the business.
PwC has separately been positioning its Agent OS platform as an enterprise command layer for orchestrating AI agents across systems including SAP, Workday, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, Salesforce and OpenAI. That broader push underlines how aggressively the consulting group is trying to turn agentic AI into a mainstream corporate tool rather than a narrow experiment.
For finance chiefs, the appeal is clear: faster workflows, tighter controls and more timely insight. The harder task will be proving that AI agents can be trusted in one of the most sensitive parts of the enterprise, where speed matters, but so do accuracy, accountability and governance.
Source: Noah Wire Services
