Monish Darda is the co-founder and CTO of Icertis.
Businesses are preparing for a shift in global trade as new geopolitical dynamics manifest in 2025. Concurrently, AI spending is projected to reach an astounding $337 billion, signaling another year of AI frenzy as enterprises contend for competitive advantage through the promise of transformation. This AI frenzy is being channeled into an extraordinary technology that is useful, practical and delivers enormous potential for the enterprise: agents, powered by GenAI and agentic workflows, that can autonomously orchestrate complex business processes.
Agents signal a step-change in the ability of AI to problem-solve with minimal human touchpoints. As businesses are called to transform their technology stacks with agentic workflows that improve financial performance, deep partnerships between technology and finance leaders are imperative to rethink strategies, create greater agility and ensure the enterprise is investing in the right areas.
Together, CTOs and CFOs can avoid these three financial pitfalls while championing a top-down AI approach that prioritizes ROI above all.
1. Leaving Money On The Negotiation Table
Commerce is defined by the relationships a business has with its customers, suppliers and partners. In any macro environment, success is dependent on the outcome of these connections and how they influence the flow of money in and out of the organization. These relationships are each embodied in a contract, which ultimately takes shape at the negotiation table with the intention of capturing promises on both sides.
In light of this, it’s shocking to find that, according to our own company research, 90% of CEOs and more than 80% of CFOs believe their business leaves money on the table during negotiations, creating a substantial yet avoidable impact on their bottom line.
Agentic workflows offer a game-changing solution to optimize business relationships before the final handshake. Rather than spending weeks preparing for a high-stakes negotiation and meticulously evaluating every potential risk, leadership teams can turn to specialized agents as partners to pinpoint the greatest threats and commercial potential in every business deal.
For example, agents orchestrated into workflows that can follow a chain of thought (CoT) like humans are able to surface insights from thousands of supplier agreements to determine which supplier offers the best value for the quality and quantity of goods received and why. They can even help automatically select the best suppliers and create a draft procurement strategy with supporting contracts to run the procurement process.
2. Overlooking Long-Term Customer And Supplier Performance
Are customers who make late payments being charged the appropriate fees? Is your business taking advantage of discount opportunities with suppliers, like volume-based cost cuts? These questions may seem straightforward, but for enterprises with thousands of customers and vendors across increasingly complex supply chains, the answer is just that—complex.
It would take an army of finance, legal and procurement professionals to manually track and ensure that the business receives everything it is entitled to, on time and in the full context of what was originally agreed upon. The good news is that agentic workflows powered by the right large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs) can track, reconcile, report and remedy these challenges. By applying agentic workflows to critical business information like contract data—and the business process that operates on that data—promises made on both sides can be analyzed and automated in real time to minimize revenue leakage. Our research indicates that leveraging contract-centric agentic workflows can identify gaps that cost companies as much as 9% of the overall value in customer and supplier agreements, totaling hundreds of millions in potential savings for the average Fortune 500 company.
3. Taking A “One Size Fits All” Approach To AI
In the crowded AI arena, determining where and how to make your AI dollars count is challenging for even the most seasoned leaders. Our research of more than 1,000 executives uncovered that finance is the No. 1 area of business that could realize immediate cost savings with AI, but it is the long-term ROI of these AI tools that truly impacts future growth.
AI-driven gains are contingent on giving AI access to the right data, having robust transactional systems in place that can be automated and investing in systems that can scale while integrating with other platforms. With agents and agentic workflows, it is even more imperative that contracts, which contain the rules of business, are managed and made available at the right place and time to ensure that agents can work seamlessly across systems and transactions.
CIOs and CTOs who believe AI will magically solve their problems might find themselves in a situation of overpromising and underdelivering if they do not focus on the right parts of their technology stack—like their contract management and financial systems—and seek out partners who embrace an open platform approach to leverage the potential of GenAI-powered agentic workflows that best address their business challenges.
Looking Ahead
2025 will be the year of business driven by agents. Ultimately, the commercial outcomes these agents enable, rather than the technology itself, paint the big picture that CFOs and CTOs alike should keep their eyes trained on. Together, business leaders can develop an AI strategy that drives revenue, suppresses value leakage and accelerates growth with risk mitigation and compliance in any landscape. The global economy is evolving, and we must all embrace the conversational and autonomous agent as a critical co-worker in navigating the changes ahead.
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