New industry benchmark shows AI-native finance teams cut manual work nearly in half and close two days faster

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FloQast, the Accounting Workflow Automation Platform created by accountants for accountants, today announced the results of a new industry report examining how accounting and finance teams are adopting AI. The findings, based on independent research across accounting and finance professionals in the US and UK, reveal a striking disconnect between AI ambition and execution. While 85% of accounting teams have made AI a strategic priority, only 10% are using it extensively. The study also found that the barriers holding them back have less to do with technology and more to do with trust, training, and governance.

The organizations pulling ahead are not simply the ones with the most advanced tools. They are the ones where leadership made a deliberate decision to build the controls foundation, the governance structure, and the team capability before scaling their AI investment.

According to the report, finance teams remain burdened by manual work, and the pressure to deliver faster, cleaner, and more defensible numbers continues to rise:

• Six in ten accountants spend 40% or more of their time on tasks such as reconciliations, data entry, and other busy work that does not require an actual accountant.
• Nearly one in five spend more than 60% of their week on manual tasks. That is three full days.
• 57% of close cycles take seven days or more.
   

Unlike other industries that measure AI success purely in terms of speed and efficiency, accounting carries an additional requirement. Namely, every output must be traceable, defensible, and signable by a human who stands behind it. Indeed, survey respondents cited the lack of traceability of AI outputs as a top adoption barrier.

“The accounting profession doesn’t have an AI ambition problem, it has an execution problem,” said FloQast co-founder and CEO Mike Whitmire, CPA (inactive), FCA. “What this research makes clear is that, in accounting, the real test of AI is whether a human can confidently sign off on that work and defend it to an auditor. The organizations succeeding with AI are the ones that are building for that reality from the start.”

“Our AI adoption was a success because Atrium treated it as a priority rather than a side experiment,” said Dan Hollman, Senior Director Of Accounting Solutions, Atrium Hospitality. “The structure we picked up from AI gave us a repeatable way to evaluate, govern, and scale workflows, so we weren’t inventing the rules as we went. Leadership backed that with real governance and then stood up an AI Center of Excellence to run it company-wide. The momentum here is collaborative and organizational, not one team’s project.”

The Accounting AI Maturity Index

The survey data revealed five distinct operational states across the profession, giving organizations a clear way to benchmark where they stand today. At the lowest end of the spectrum, the 10% of organizations at Level 1 are manual and disconnected. They have a spreadsheet-heavy close process with minimal traceability and treat AI strategy as an afterthought. At the top end, the 10% that have reached Level 5 operate as AI-native. They proactively partner with the business to refine agentic workflows and embrace system-wide automation.

The bulk of the profession sits in the middle of the maturity curve, and the performance gap between levels is substantial:

• The largest share of organizations, 38%, lands at Level 3, where teams have augmented their workflows with out-of-the-box AI automation while investing in staff reskilling and upskilling and running low-risk, high-impact AI pilots.
• Level 1 organizations report spending 63% of their time on manual tasks with an average close cycle of 8.7 days.
• In contrast, Level 5 organizations spend just 34% of their time on manual work and close in 6.7 days, or a full 2 days faster.
   

Controls Come First

What separates the top of the maturity curve from the bottom isn’t the sophistication of the AI tools in use. Rather, it’s the foundation underneath them. The report makes clear that accounting AI has to land on a base of documented, consistent financial controls, and most organizations haven’t built that base yet. Layering AI over weak or inconsistent controls doesn’t fix the problem; it accelerates the errors.

That foundation is missing more often than not. According to the survey, 51% of organizations operate with controls that are either informal or inconsistently applied across the close process. Additionally, only 27% of professionals strongly agree that current AI tools meet enterprise-grade governance and compliance standards.

The workflows causing the most manual pain are exactly the environments where AI excels: rules-based, repetitive, and high-volume. The report highlights account reconciliations as the profession’s most consistent speed bump, carrying both the highest manual burden and the highest perceived benefit from automation. While 55% of respondents identify reconciliations as the top automation opportunity, only 5% report a high degree of automation there today. Financial reporting ranks second, with 53% identifying it as a top automation opportunity.

What Leaders Are Doing Differently

That gap between opportunity and execution is exactly what leading organizations have closed. The teams seeing real gains have built the infrastructure to let AI do their work defensibly, and as a result they are reclaiming 25% of total working time from manual tasks. Among Level 5 organizations, 69% are actively executing an AI roadmap and 95% have embedded AI into the month-end close.

The rest of the profession wants to follow, but many are committing to AI faster than their teams are learning how to use it. While 92% of decision-makers expect AI investment to rise over the next two years, only 17% say their teams are ready to put that investment to work.

The barriers are specific and measurable. Thirty-nine percent of professionals cite data security and privacy concerns as their top obstacle. Thirty-one percent say their teams lack the AI skills and training to put new tools to work. And underlying both is the most accounting-specific barrier of all: when AI produces an output, someone has to trace it, validate it, and sign off on it. The organizations that pull ahead will be the ones that build trust, training, and governance into their AI plans from the start.

This is where the leaders diverge from everyone else. Level 5 organizations built their capabilities first and scaled their spending second. Lower-level organizations are moving in the opposite direction, with AI budgets climbing faster than the skills, controls, and governance foundations needed to support that spending.

Moving up the maturity curve

Wherever an organization lands on the maturity curve, the path forward looks different. For teams at Levels 1 through 3, the report’s advice is to stop looking for a silver bullet tool. Instead, they should document their workflows, build a controls foundation before adding any automation, and implement formal governance. For organizations at Levels 4 and 5, there is also more work to be done. The workflows they haven’t yet automated represent their biggest opportunity to keep advancing, and the best teams are redesigning around AI, not just layering it on top.

The findings also signal a shift in what the profession expects of its people. AI literacy has become a baseline expectation, with 88% of respondents saying it will be as important as GAAP expertise and 82% warning that failing to adopt AI will damage talent retention. The accountants who grow in the next decade will be the ones who know how to work alongside AI, govern its outputs, and stand behind what it produces.

“AI isn't something you buy your way into — it's something you build toward,” said Jonathan Mears, VP of Finance and Accounting, Liquid AI. “We made thinking about AI our default way of working, and with AI, that mindset snowballed into massive time savings with thoughtfully documented processes and reliable change management. The result is a faster, more consistent close, far less manual prep, and a team that spends its time reviewing and analyzing instead of preparing. It elevated our accountants; it didn't replace them.”

Read the full report here.

About FloQast
Created by accountants for accountants, FloQast’s Accounting Workflow Automation Platform allows accountants to automate accounting and audit workflows with auditable AI. Trusted by more than 3,500 global accounting teams – including Lululemon, Chipotle, and Shopify – FloQast enhances the way accounting teams work, enabling customers to automate close management, account reconciliations, accounting operations, and compliance activities. With FloQast, teams can utilize the latest advancements in AI technology to manage aspects of the close, reduce their compliance burden, stay audit-ready, and improve accuracy, visibility, and collaboration overall. FloQast also offers the FloQast Certified Accountant (FCA) program, a free certification designed to help accounting professionals build practical AI skills. FloQast is consistently rated #1 across all user review sites. Learn more at FloQast.com.

Contact:
John Siegel
Head of Communications
john.siegel@floqast.com