How Do AI Agents Speed Up Finance Research?

Praveer Melwani says tools should hand over the first draft of what changed, the first set of expectations, and the first thread to pull. An accountant used to review GL accounts period over period. A tool can take that initial pass and leave a set of items to chase. His T&E review already worked that way. The team got threads to pull and enough gut feel to chase them. With the data in hand, there is time for the second-order questions behind the numbers. The faster first pass still sits next to the audit trail.

Seema Amble and Ivan Makarov are the a16z partners hosting the episode. On the CFO tools the firm has backed, the product is moving from tracking a workflow to returning a result, and part of that product is the audit trail. A research cycle that used to take a month, pulling in data science, chasing people over email, and getting everyone in a room, can now be iterated with agents running in the background.