Finance leaders crack down on AI before the bill gets bigger

By Puja Sharma

According to the report by  Payhawk, for the past two years, finance leaders have been told that AI would change everything. In 2026, that promise comes with an invoice.

What’s different now is not the technology—it’s the economics. AI usage is spreading across functions, vendors are multiplying, and data is moving more than ever. The result is simple: the AI bill is no longer hidden inside “innovation” budgets. It lands squarely on the CFO’s desk. And once it does, AI is treated like every other line item in finance—measured, allocated, governed, and tied to outcomes.

This is where hype meets unit economics. If an AI workflow cannot explain its cost per transaction, per customer, or per decision, it won’t survive. Finance teams will meter usage, allocate spend by workflow, and cut anything that doesn’t improve margins, reduce risk, or accelerate throughput. Call it AI FinOps if you like—but this shift is less about tools and more about discipline.

The same realism is hitting the idea of autonomous finance. The vision of systems that decide and execute end-to-end is compelling, but it will remain tightly constrained. Full autonomy will appear only in low-stakes, highly repeatable domains, where failure is cheap and reversible.

What actually scales is controlled delegation. Software will do more of the work, but only inside clearly defined authority limits—thresholds, approved counterparties, pre-set corridors, and constant logging of reasoning. Confidence drops? Risk rises? The system escalates. If AI touches the ledger or payment rails, human-in-the-loop oversight is non-negotiable. Not as a ceremonial sign-off, but as a real ability to intervene, explain outcomes, and shut things down when conditions change.

This discipline extends to money movement itself. For years, payments have been treated as plumbing—something to optimise for cost and speed once the business logic is done. In 2026, that mindset becomes dangerous. Trade fragmentation, sanctions risk, corridor volatility, and bank instability are turning money movement into resilience infrastructure. A single bank relationship is a single point of failure. A single payment rail is not a strategy. When APIs fail or corridors tighten, speed becomes irrelevant if funds cannot move at all.

This is why money orchestration is gaining ground—not because it’s elegant, but because it reduces fragility. Failover across providers, dynamic rerouting, and normalised reporting are becoming insurance policies. Finance leaders will prioritise systems that keep cash visible and mobile under stress, even if they cost more upfront.

Seen together, these shifts offer a cleaner way to frame 2026. If 2024 and 2025 were about adoption, 2026 is about credibility. Credibility with boards, because capital is priced and patience is thinner. Credibility with regulators and auditors, because AI without control is a liability, not an asset. And credibility with the business, because finance must enable speed without becoming the department of “no.”

This is why the autonomous finance narrative is both useful and misleading. Useful, because it points toward systems that do real work. Misleading, because it suggests the hard part is choosing the right technology.

In 2026, the real work is building a finance operating system that performs under pressure: governed AI spend, safe delegation, resilient money movement, visible cash, and controls that hold up when someone asks the only question that matters—prove it.