Pleo: Agentic AI Will Change How Finance Works
The biggest problem facing business finance today is execution. Teams know what needs to happen; they just don't have the time to make it happen.
AI can help, but progress has been slow-going. According to new research from Pleo, 78% believe the future of finance teams and professionals depends on the comprehensive understanding and use of AI. But 68% of UK finance professionals say AI skills, training and confidence in finance are severely lagging.
So what is finance AI getting wrong?
How agentic AI can change things
When it comes to traditional AI, capabilities that appeared groundbreaking three years ago are now the baseline. That’s because finance is more complex than ever, and 55% of UK finance leaders have not had a full uninterrupted day on strategic finance work in the past month.
Agentic AI has the potential to change this. While traditional AI waits for instructions and relies on finance leaders to drive the process, agentic AI executes actions; and the finance leader supervises the process, instead of micromanaging it. And finance leaders can finally focus on their craft, not their admin.
From workflow to workforce
Today, the reality for already-stretched finance teams is that every spend decision means a chain of manual steps, taking time and creating delays. But at Pleo, we're building a suite of AI agents to change that.
Pleo’s next evolution is to become an extended digital team for organisations everywhere. This will be done with the help of five specialised agents that run in the background, executing routine tasks autonomously, so finance leaders can focus on decisions that actually move the needle.
Pleo’s Policy Agent is already live, helping finance teams to enforce company spend rules in real-time by checking every expense and purchase against policy. This will be further boosted with the arrival of Pleo’s Expense Agent that captures card transactions, finds receipts, writes memos, applies General Ledger (GL) codes and submits the claim.
In addition, there will also be the AP Agent, processing invoices from email, creating records, coding them, scheduling payment and tracking approval status end to end. Then the Treasury Agent, targeting one of the finance team’s most underutilised functions; optimising cash flow, scheduling payments and surfacing budget risk before it becomes a problem. And finally, an Accounting Agent that codes transactions, reconciles accounts and closes the books.
For more than 10 years, Pleo has been committed to making the lives of financial leaders easier. Built by a CFO for CFOs, the first problem Pleo solved was expense management. But now this brief has extended throughout the finance function and today’s finance leaders need AI agents that do the same.
Stepping back to move forward
Today, the best agentic systems get out of the users’ way; the way organisations interact with software is changing.
From summer 2026, Pleo's agentic AI tools will be available in two ways. Firstly, the Pleo-provided agent. This works inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp and SMS, requiring no new app. So that when an expense needs a receipt, it looks in the employee's inbox first; when a budget threshold is crossed, it notifies the right person.
Then for those organisations already using personal AI agents, Pleo’s MCP interface connects them directly to financial data to take action. This means employees already using tools such as Claude, ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot can query spend, process expenses and run reports without switching tools.
Pleo’s shift to composable infrastructure is much bigger than saving the time of a copy and paste. It’s about informing every insight you receive with the knowledge of a company that’s built for European complexity.
Finance leaders aren’t going anywhere
Crucially, jumping from static SaaS dashboards to AI agents that take actions does not put finance leaders at risk. Pleo is committed to making the lives of financial leaders easier, not replacing them.
High-level financial strategy will always be something best suited to the experts and, while agentic models can enrich their insights and actions, the responsibility for setting direction will remain with the people using them.
Pleo’s vision for the future of finance is specialised AI agents that shift finance teams from execution to supervision. By next year, spend decisions will be handled by coordinated agent networks, with humans overseeing outcomes while AI executes the work. And, looking further ahead, Pleo aims to become the AI-powered operating system for company spend, automatically controlling, paying, recording and optimising every financial decision.
High performance and low interruption, humans prioritising human decisions, AI agents that cover the breadth of modern-day finance. This is how finance can solve its AI adoption problem and finally give teams the time, insight and capacity to lead the business; and in the way they were always meant to.
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Marija Nakevska
Chief Product & Technology Officer
