One of the biggest issues we’ve seen at Serrala when it comes to the adoption of AI in finance teams (and the development of strategies around it) is people going in without a clear understanding of what they’re adopting.
Let’s recap what we mean by “autonomous finance”.
“Autonomous finance” means an office of the CFO equipped with total visibility and control over organizational working capital. It’s only through complete working capital control that your teams can both champion efficiency in operations, spend, and cash flow, and make available the resources every part of the business needs to invest in growth, new business models, new product development, and talent acquisition.
There’s not a single CFO working today who wouldn’t want this—but making a case for all of this isn’t necessarily simple. Especially when many CEOs still view the CFO as primarily a source of efficiency or of prudent and risk averse governance rather than as a provider of strategic working capital intelligence.
But from an external point of view, the timing has never been better.
CFOs must embrace tech trends to achieve their own ends
Autonomous finance is well positioned to take advantage of multiple ongoing trends, and to help CFOs finally solve some of their departments’ most persistent challenges:
- Achieving full visibility and control of working capital flows.
- Enabling autonomous operations in key areas like collections management, cash application, invoice processing and approval, and payment execution—effectively eliminating manual labor in most of the O2C and P2P workflows.
- Creating advanced working capital intelligence in areas like cash flow forecasting and liquidity management and making possible the orchestration of complex treasury environments.
In a period in which cross-industry margins are up only thanks to recent cuts (and not sustainable in the long term), almost every business will be able to see a need for greater visibility and control in their finance functions.
But above and beyond this, the macroeconomic picture is one that demands an autonomous finance strategy.
Autonomous finance in context: an extension of ongoing trends in global enterprise tech evolution and digital transformation
Global commerce is growing, and cross-border commerce is growing too. This means that businesses looking to fuel their growth will continue to look further afield.
There are many opportunities in international expansion. But international expansion means your organization’s finance landscape will get more complex, transaction volumes will likely rise, and you’ll be forced to manage greater compliance overheads.
And, at some point, your current approach to managing your operations will reach breaking point.
Manual processes scale badly already. Scaling them as demands become more complex and volumes increase only makes them break faster. What’s more, the pressure isn’t just coming from your own ambitions.
Governments are increasingly demanding real-time digital compliance via e-invoicing mandates and any-time audit regulations.
Regulatory demands are paired with increasing demands from your customers and vendors. Businesses and consumers alike now expect real-time transactions and full transparency in terms of data handling and financial approaches.
We can no longer deal with modern commercial challenges with traditional “computer-assisted” operating principles.
Increased scale and demand only makes these processes break faster. New international standards for financial institutions (like ISO 20022) make all of this much easier to handle—but pose their own set of challenges.
Most organizations are working with enterprise technology and operating principles that aren’t configured to take advantage or to embrace the strategic opportunities afforded by the new global business landscape.
At the same time as all of this, we’re approaching an inflection point in the world of enterprise resource planning.
ERP evolution creates the perfect opportunity for autonomous finance transformation
ERP systems are traditionally monolithic installations, implemented and maintained on premises by larger organizations. But the rise of cloud and edge computing over the past ten years has allowed for a revolution in the way organizations consume ERP technology—and making ERP integrations a much simpler and more sustainable model for automation.
The benefits are clear, and companies worldwide are voting with their feet—according to Gartner, cloud adoption was a major driver of the ERP market’s phenomenal 13% growth in 2024.
In the next few years, cloud system purchases, upgrades, and extensions will account for 60% of ERP spending.
And 90% or more of organizations will already have a hybrid cloud strategy for their ERP (and IT more generally) by 2026.
Why? There are both operational and strategic reasons. Operationally speaking, cloud ERPs are easier to scale to fit current business requirements, require less upfront and ongoing work from IT teams, and make upgrade cycles simpler for the whole organization.
On the strategic side, cloud deployments offer greater flexibility for future growth and capacity needs, provide a powerful tool for risk management with improved enterprise security, and provide the infrastructure and integrations necessary to call upon compute and storage “on demand”.
This model of computing resources on tap is going to be vital to future hypergrowth—especially as more businesses move into different markets. It’s also vital to deploy and leverage AI, in finance, and all other functions. This means that for smart CFOs, there’s an opportunity to push for autonomous finance as part of your organization’s overall cloud-first strategy.
On top of all that, there’s an ERP migration crisis brewing for SAP customers specifically.
The SAP case: why adopting autonomous finance goals helps accelerate migrations and dovetails competing tech priorities
Here’s some troubling figures for finance leaders who depend on SAP for their operational backbone:
- Only ~39% of SAP’s 35,000 ERP customers had moved to S/4HANA at the end of 2024, leaving ~21,000 on legacy ECC.
- SAP has announced it will end support for ECC in December 2027, leaving many organizations at the mercy of third-party support and increasingly expensive customizations and workarounds to keep their ERP solutions alive.
- Gartner projects that nearly 50% of SAP’s core ERP customers (roughly 17,000 organizations) may still not have moved from ECC to S/4HANA by the 2027 deadline.
- 57% of SAP customers were not on track to complete migration by 2027—even if their migration strategies are already well underway.
This represents a huge opportunity for organizations looking to strategically align their migrations with other technology changes and upgrades. The shift toward cloud provides the architecture on which autonomous finance will rest.
This means you’re not demanding a step change in your organization’s technology strategy; you’re simply aligning your own needs as a CFO to the existing strategy.
And, by doing so, creating a scenario in which integrations between smart finance systems and huge new ERP investments are a simpler prospect that require much less in terms of in-house customization and maintenance and “owned” IT load and technical debt.
With the right positioning and the right questions, you’ll be able to ensure your needs are adopted as a core part of the overall transformation journey.
How can Serrala help you create a rock-solid business and technical case for AI integration and autonomous finance?
At Serrala, we’ve been helping CFOs and their teams automate finance operations for over 40 years. It’s our job to help you integrate new technologies within your organization in a way that makes sense both for your challenges and their capabilities.
We’ve developed our newly released Serrala Finance Platform with AI-readiness and autonomous finance principles in mind.
A single working capital intelligence hub that provides the foundation to bring AR, AP, payments, and treasury workflows together in a flexible system that adapts to individual organizations’ digital transformation roadmaps while enabling AI integration in every single process.
Most importantly, the Platform is designed to make the kind of data clarity and quality necessary to leverage AI for autonomous processes simpler for organizations to achieve. We leave storage to your ERP—after all, that’s what it’s designed for—and allow every part of the finance department to access it to automate workflows, accelerate decisions, and deliver measurable ROI.
This allows us to provide the integrated architecture to deploy all AI use cases in a way that ensures total and seamless operational efficiency while still providing complete choice and flexibility as to which parts of the offering your organization uses (and pays for) at every stage of your transformation journey.
This means our solutions empower your organization to start with the workflows you need today, then expand as your needs grow and your transformation plans mature.
If you’re ready to learn more, check out our full report on the Road to Autonomous Finance here, or get in touch with a Serrala expert today to book a demo.
