UiPath’s Hitesh Ramani on Agentic Finance: Why the Hardest Part Isn’t Technology

“When people talk about agentic AI, they often focus on the technology,” Hitesh Ramani, UiPath’s chief accounting officer and deputy chief financial officer, tells SAPinsider. “In practice, the harder part is how the organization adapts to working with it.”

UiPath encountered that reality while embedding automation into its own SAP S/4HANA migration as part of a Customer Zero initiative, running automated workflows within live finance operations.

The operational benefits appeared quickly. The deeper challenges emerged more slowly.

Three forces soon began shaping how far those systems could go, Ramani explains: change management inside finance teams, governance frameworks that define when humans intervene, and the complexity of data spread across multiple enterprise systems.

Three Challenges That Shape Agentic Finance

“The three challenges reinforce each other,” Ramani says. “Change management, governance and trust, and cross-system complexity all interact.” Data integration often becomes the first pressure point.

“Data sits in many different places,” he says. “You have ERP systems, treasury platforms, consolidation tools, procurement systems, spreadsheets, and even email threads where information moves between teams.”

Automation and agentic workflows depend on those environments to operate together. “Getting an agent to reason across that landscape isn’t just an AI problem,” he adds. “It’s a data problem, an integration problem, and an architecture problem all at once.”

Weak integration can undermine the accuracy of automated analysis. That erodes trust in the system. Lower trust slows adoption, which delays the operational improvements that would otherwise help finance teams gain confidence in automated workflows.

Many organizations underestimate how quickly that cycle can emerge, Ramani says.
“Companies often try to solve these problems one at a time,” he adds. “In practice, they show up together.”

Governance Defines How Automation Operates in Finance

Addressing those challenges often begins with governance. Ramani suggests leaders establish clear frameworks that define how automated decisions are reviewed and when humans intervene.

“Finance operates in a highly controlled environment,” Ramani says. “When automation is involved in financial processes, organizations need to know exactly how decisions are made and where accountability sits.”

Human oversight remains central to that structure. “Automation should never remove accountability,” Ramani explains. “The goal is to create systems where agents can execute work efficiently while humans retain visibility and the ability to step in when needed.”

That balance allows automation to expand without undermining the controls finance organizations depend on. Clear governance frameworks—defining escalation paths, audit trails, and oversight responsibilities—help finance teams trust automated workflows as they become more embedded in daily operations.

Agentic Finance Requires Rethinking Entire Processes

Even inside organizations investing heavily in automation, Ramani explains most improvement ideas still begin at the task level. “When we look at ideas people submit, the overwhelming majority are still framed as task automation,” Ramani says.

That instinct reflects how finance teams have historically approached automation projects. Individual steps are optimized first, often within a single system or workflow.

Agentic systems change that logic. “People are still applying traditional automation thinking in an agentic AI world,” Ramani says. “The opportunity is not just to automate a step. It’s to rethink how entire processes operate.”

This shift requires asking different questions about how workflows move across systems and teams, Ramani adds. “Instead of asking what task can be automated, you start asking which steps can run in parallel,” Ramani says. “Where do processes intersect? How do multiple agents coordinate work across systems?”

Those questions push automation beyond efficiency improvements toward redesigning how finance processes operate across the enterprise.

Technology, Governance, and Teams Must Evolve Together

Redesigning finance processes at scale introduces a different set of challenges. Each dimension—data architecture, governance, and organizational change—affects the others.

Weak data integration reduces the reliability of automated insights. Lower reliability erodes trust inside finance teams, making change management harder and delaying the operational improvements automation is expected to deliver.

That often surprises organizations experimenting with agentic capabilities, Ramani notes. “People sometimes think they can solve these problems sequentially,” Ramani says. “First fix the data, then introduce automation, then address governance.”

In practice, those elements must evolve together.

“You can’t treat them as separate workstreams,” Ramani adds. “The technology, the governance, and the way teams work all have to move forward at the same time.”

UiPath’s own SAP S/4HANA Customer Zero migration illustrated that dynamic early. Automation, governance, and organizational change evolved together as finance teams worked alongside automated systems under live operating conditions.

The experience shaped how the company now approaches agentic finance.

Intelligent systems matter, Ramani suggests, but the real transformation occurs when organizations redesign how finance teams, processes, and technology operate together.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

• Agentic finance tests enterprise data architecture. Agentic systems require reliable context across ERP, treasury, procurement, and other finance environments. Organizations that treat SAP S/4HANA as a transactional core without addressing cross-system data integration may struggle to scale intelligent automation.
• Governance design determines how far automation can expand. As finance workflows become partially autonomous, escalation paths and audit trails become part of operational architecture. Governance frameworks increasingly determine where agents act independently and where human oversight remains necessary.
• Finance transformation depends on organizational design. Agentic automation changes how finance teams coordinate work with systems and with each other. Organizations that redesign processes, governance, and roles together will scale automation faster than those treating it primarily as a technology deployment.