For midsize enterprises (MSEs), the finance function is undergoing a quiet revolution. The shift isn’t just about automation, it’s about intelligence. Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a force multiplier, enabling finance systems to monitor, decide, and act with minimal human input.
Two capabilities are leading this transformation: continuous assurance and the autonomous financial close. Once aspirational, the technology fueling these capabilities is now within reach, and it’s changing how finance teams operate, scale, and lead.
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Continuous Assurance: Real-Time Confidence, Not Just Compliance
Continuous assurance refers to the use of AI and automation to continuously monitor financial data, internal controls, and transactional integrity, not just at month-end but as activity occurs. It replaces the traditional model of periodic checks with a real-time, always-on approach to validation.
This functionality can be especially valuable for MSEs managing growing transaction volumes, multientity structures, or evolving compliance requirements. Instead of waiting for issues to surface during audits or close cycles, finance teams can detect and address anomalies as they happen.
Why leading finance teams are paying attention:
- Continuous assurance identifies risks early, potentially before they escalate into costly problems.
- It reduces audit prep and manual controls testing.
- The process unlocks capacity for higher-value, strategic work.
Think of it as a digital control tower: always on, always watching.
Continuous assurance can also support stronger governance. Embedding controls into daily workflows can help organizations maintain compliance with internal policies and external regulations without slowing down operations. As regulatory scrutiny increases and stakeholder expectations rise, this proactive oversight becomes a strategic advantage.
Autonomous Close: From Manual to Managed
The autonomous financial close uses AI agents to orchestrate and execute the close process from journal entries and reconciliations to variance analysis and reporting. The agents work continually in the background, flagging exceptions, resolving routine discrepancies, and surfacing insights for human review.
For MSEs, an autonomous close can provide a path to faster, more accurate, and less resource-intensive close cycles. It can reduce reliance on spreadsheets, manual reconciliations, and late-night fire drills, freeing finance teams to focus on analysis and decision support.
Why leading finance teams are paying attention:
- Autonomous close speeds up close cycles.
- The process improves accuracy and consistency.
- It provides real-time visibility into financial health.
The potential result? Finance teams shift from doing the work to managing the outcomes.
Autonomous close also supports scalability. As organizations grow—whether through expansion, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), or new revenue streams—AI-driven close processes can adapt without requiring proportional increases in headcount or complexity. This can help finance leaders maintain control, even as the business evolves.
Why Finance Leaders Are Listening Closely to the Quiet Shift
For MSEs, these capabilities aren’t just operational upgrades; they can be strategic enablers. They can help lean finance teams:
- React faster to market shifts.
- Scale without adding headcount.
- Focus on insight, not input.
With continuous assurance and autonomous close, finance teams can do more than report the past; they can shape what happens next.
ERP Updates: Where Innovation Is Happening
Here’s how some leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms are embedding AI and agentic AI to support continuous assurance and autonomous close:
Sage Intacct
Sage is setting the pace with:
- Close Workspace: Centralizes close tasks, flags bottlenecks, and recommends next steps.
- Continuous Assurance: Automates data entry and orchestrates workflows with real-time visibility.
- Enhanced AP Automation: Covers the full lifecycle—from purchasing to payment—reducing manual effort.
- Cash Flow AI: Predicts liquidity needs and recommends payment strategies based on behavioral trends.
- Sage Copilot: A generative AI assistant that can simplify complex tasks and deliver contextual insights.
- Copilot Close: Automates reconciliations, flags anomalies, and can guide users through the close.
- Upcoming Wave Release Features: A long-term road map focused on autonomous systems that reason, decide, and act independently.
- AI Trust Label: A first-of-its-kind initiative that provides transparency into how Sage’s AI tools work, covering privacy, bias mitigation, data usage, and ethical safeguards.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance
Microsoft is expanding its use of embedded AI agents to streamline reconciliation, compliance, and global close processes. Some of the latest tools include:
- An Account Reconciliation Agent identifies mismatches between subledgers and the general ledger, recommending corrective actions in real time.
- Copilot-driven reconciliation replaces static reports with dynamic exception handling and resolution tracking.
- Multiledger automation supports global compliance with shared hierarchies and transparent audit trails.
Oracle NetSuite
NetSuite is steadily expanding its agentic AI capabilities across planning, analytics, and financial operations, including:
- SuiteAnalytics: A core NetSuite reporting and dashboard module now augmented with a generative AI assistant that can build dashboards and deliver insights from natural language queries.
- Autonomous Close Enhancements: Exception management tools flag anomalies and suggest fixes across journal entries and transactions.
- Embedded Oracle AI: This helps enhance planning, budgeting, and reporting with automated narrative generation, variance analysis, and predictive insights.
Implementing agentic AI often doesn’t require a full system overhaul. Many ERP platforms now offer modular capabilities that can be activated gradually. Finance leaders should consider identifying high-friction processes—such as reconciliations, AP workflows, or close cycles—and exploring where embedded AI can reduce manual effort. Success comes from uniting technology and business strategy while safeguarding data integrity and building trust in AI outcomes.
The Bottom Line
As agentic AI moves from pilot projects to practical deployment, it becomes a catalyst for finance transformation. MSEs that embrace continuous assurance and autonomous close are strengthening their ability to manage complexity, navigate risk, and lead with clarity in a digital-first economy.
Want to explore what this could look like for your business? Connect with a professional at Forvis Mazars to start building your AI-enabled finance road map.
The Business Technology Services team at Forvis Mazars has certified partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle NetSuite, and Sage.
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