Finance is standing at an inflection point. Once defined by monthly closes and backward-looking reports, the office of the chief financial officer is now being reshaped by artificial intelligence systems that promise not just automation, but autonomous finance — and the competitive stakes are rising fast.
Across industries, leaders are realizing that AI is no longer a futuristic gimmick. It’s a real-time tool already in the hands of their peers and competitors, with the potential to shift who gains an advantage. That tension — between fear of replacement and the urgency to innovate — set the tone for “The Future of Finance. Revealed.” event, where AI agents, transparency and evolving leadership roles took center stage.
“At the end of the day, we should all remember that AI is really just mathematics; there’s no science fiction to this,” Alok Ajmera (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Prophix Software Inc., told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the event. “That’s very different from “Iron Man’s” Jarvis, who has a consciousness. Should people be afraid … ‘Is it going to replace jobs or not?’ I would say the real risk that people and organizations have is not that AI is going to take the job of an individual. It’s actually that an individual using AI is going to be doing your job better than you. Organizationally, it means that your competitors could be extracting strategic value from the technology, potentially leaving you behind, and that’s probably the more realistic short-term risk around AI.”
During “The Future of Finance. Revealed.” event — hosted by Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE Research — Prophix executives and industry leaders spoke with theCUBE about how autonomous finance is moving from concept to practice. Interviews explored everything from agentic AI to glass-box transparency and the evolving role of CFOs, offering a first-hand look at how organizations are using AI to elevate finance into a true driver of growth. (* Disclosure below.)
Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Alok Ajmera:
Here are three key insights you may have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of “The Future of Finance. Revealed.” event:
Insight #1: The new CFO superpower is commanding a fleet of AI agents built to think, learn and act.
The rise of autonomous finance marks a turning point for the CFO’s office. With embedded AI agents now tackling routine tasks such as budgeting and modeling, finance leaders can focus less on rote work and more on strategic outcomes, according to Ajmera.
“Even today, organizations are employing their most professional finance leaders in incredibly manual processes, repetitive tasks, and they’re spending a bunch of time just wrangling information, hunting down answers,” Ajmera said during the event. “It’s not about inefficiency; it’s actually about missed opportunity.”
The industry is reaching a remarkable inflection point as generative AI matures, shifting from merely streamlining work — reducing tasks from weeks to days or hours — toward a future defined by fully autonomous work environments, Ajmera added.
From another perspective, the shift is also redefining how CFOs spend their time, according to Aaron Levine, chief financial officer of Prophix. Finance’s traditional “always be closing” cycle is giving way to continuous modeling and scenario planning as teams adopt AI finance strategy to accelerate decision-making.
“Our time really has shifted from those old workflows and some of that manual work … to more of a strategic mindset,” Levine told theCUBE. “We’re spending more time doing advanced modeling, what-if scenarios and some more of that strategic initiative.”
Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Aaron Levine:
Insight #2: Finance leaders are demanding AI that’s not just fast, but also transparent, turning ‘black-box’ hype into ‘glass-box’ trust they can act on.
Autonomous finance isn’t just about speed; it’s about trust. That’s why Prophix designed its AI agents not only to accelerate planning and reporting, but to surface explainable outcomes finance teams can understand and act on, according to Geoffrey Ng, chief AI and trust officer of Prophix.
“Our vision for Prophix One Intelligence is to deliver a conversational natural language interface that truly understands the office of the CFO,” Ng said during the event. “Through our copilot interface, finance teams can interact with intelligent systems embedded across the Prophix One platform, utilizing all relevant connected data sources to create explainable outcomes.”
In keeping with that focus on transparency, Prophix has re-architected its platform to deliver autonomous finance that operates as a “glass-box,” not a black-box, according to Vidhya Srinivasan, chief marketing officer of Prophix. Trust, security and privacy are non-negotiable in financial decision-making, and the company’s design gives customers confidence from day one.
“A lot of AI out there today are black box,” Srinivasan said during the event. “You don’t see what’s under the hood. But with Prophix One, the way you interact with the copilot, it is really auditable, explainable and really driven through human strategic insights as opposed to AI making decisions for us.”
Here is theCUBE’s complete video interview with Vidhya Srinivasan:
Insight #3: The next era of finance belongs to those who harness autonomous finance systems to turn data into direction and operations into growth.
Automation has evolved into something far more powerful: autonomous finance that can think, adapt and guide decisions in real time, according to Anurag Yagnik, chief technical officer of Prophix. By offloading routine budgeting, forecasting and reporting to intelligent systems, finance teams are moving from maintenance mode to strategic momentum.
“What we’ve done through these agents is that they do all of this on their own, autonomously,” Yagnik said during the event. “The idea here is to save so much manual labor and give our teams the ability to do all of this automatically.”
Beyond simply automating templates, autonomous finance in Prophix’s approach is about embedding business rules and context so agents can act like digital teammates — flagging variances, summarizing changes and surfacing strategic options before humans even ask. This real-time, proactive support transforms finance from a reactive reporting function into an active partner driving efficiency and growth, according to Yagnik.
“The Prophix AI agents are these pieces of technology that we’ve created to which we give specific business goals and then a set of tasks and a set of tools or capabilities within our Prophix One applications,” Yagnik said. “These agents then find the best way to call these tools to run these tasks to achieve those larger business goals.”
Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Yagnik:
To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of “The Future of Finance. Revealed.” event, here’s our complete event video playlist:
TheCUBE is a paid media partner for “The Future of Finance. Revealed.” event. Neither Prophix Software Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
Photo: SiliconANGLE