The Excel Era Is Fading as AI Reshapes Business Finance

Finance teams are finally shifting from spreadsheet-heavy routines to AI-driven workflows. Budgets for AI are rising in 2025, early adopters are reporting faster closes and fewer manual reconciliations, and a new generation of AI-native platforms is delivering real-time visibility. The momentum is clear even as leaders weigh data security, integration quality, and change management.

For years, finance departments invested in sophisticated software yet kept falling back on Excel to close the books and prep for audits. “Despite millions spent on financial software, many finance teams still rely on Excel to close their books and reconcile numbers while preparing them for audit,” said Ramnandan Krishnamurthy, co-founder and CEO of Maximor, a startup built to tackle this gap. That old rhythm is breaking as automated systems get good enough to handle the grunt work and surface answers in minutes, not days.

Adoption Moves From Pilot to Real Use

A Bain Capital Ventures survey of its CFO Advisory Board found 79% of CFOs plan to increase AI budgets in 2025, and 94% believe generative AI could significantly benefit at least one part of their finance organization within a year. Interest is high even if many are still early in deployment. The same research noted 71% haven’t yet rolled out gen AI inside finance and accounting. The direction of travel is unmistakable as finance roles evolve beyond manual reporting toward decision support and scenario planning, a shift we’ve tracked in our coverage of how white-collar work is changing with AI.

Early Results Show Why Momentum Is Building

Proptech firm Rently cut its monthly close from eight days to four after implementing Maximor’s agentic platform, according to CFO Dustin Neel, and avoided hiring two additional accountants. That sort of result is prompting leaders to reskill their teams. A recent Fortune survey found 64% of finance leaders plan to deepen technical skills by 2026 in areas like AI, automation, and data analysis.

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AI-Native Finance Tools Take Center Stage

A new breed of AI-first ERPs such as Doss, Everest, Quanta, and Rillet aims to rebuild the CFO stack from the ground up. The promise is a single, real-time source of financial truth that replaces brittle handoffs and batch reports. Other tools are zeroing in on specific bottlenecks. Numeric accelerates the month-end close through smart checklists, automated reconciliations, and an AI assistant that explains fluctuations. Maximor plugs AI agents directly into ERP, CRM, and billing systems to continuously ingest transactions and keep dashboards live rather than waiting for the last day of the month. It is a practical example of the agentic AI trend where autonomous systems coordinate multi-step work.

What CFOs Want From AI

Leaders are asking for more than simple automation. In anonymous feedback cited by Bain Capital Ventures, CFOs called for AI that performs variance analysis with commentary, similar to an FP&A analyst, and tools that can take operational inputs and run Monte Carlo simulations to estimate outcomes. Kyriba’s 2025 US CFO Survey echoes this push toward higher-value work, noting increased use of AI for strategic planning and investment analysis.

From Number Crunching to Decision Support

The big win is time. By offloading reconciliations, report assembly, and variance explanations to AI, teams can spend more hours on pricing strategy, scenario planning, and board preparation. Rently’s CFO said nearly half the team’s time moved to strategic work after deploying Maximor. That shift matches a broader trend. As a Deloitte analysis points out, AI is becoming a strategic finance asset, not just an automation tool.

Real-Time Data Becomes Standard

Slow, retrospective reporting has long frustrated finance. As Fuelfinance notes, by the time reports land, the numbers have already moved. AI flips that script by refreshing data pipelines continuously and making analysis conversational. Tools like Aleph let teams ask questions in plain English and get predictions on the fly, collapsing the time spent on ad hoc modeling and stakeholder questions and helping finance move from the last to know to the first to act.

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To stand up live dashboards without heavy coding, The TechBull suggests Databox. It pulls data from multiple systems into automated, real-time views that business leaders can trust. Learn more about Databox.

What Still Stands in the Way

Even with budget and intent, many CFOs say they have struggled to find solutions that truly fit their workflows. Data privacy and security remain top of mind, as covered in our look at the darker side of AI adoption. Leaders also weigh explainability and governance to keep trust high as models influence forecasting, spend controls, and investment decisions.

Outlook for 2025 and Beyond

Bain Capital Ventures expects early majority adoption to begin in 2025 after a year of experimentation. Fuelfinance puts it plainly that the bigger risk is standing still while competitors modernize their finance stack. Workday’s analysis of planning trends points to 2025 as a turning point where AI shifts from pilots to the operating backbone of finance. The takeaway is simple. Real-time, AI-assisted finance is moving from nice-to-have to normal.

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