CFO offices are getting to grips with the idea that AI isn't that simple for their role, but interest isn't diminishing, says BlackLine CEO Owen Ryan

CFOs cannot sign off on financial statements generated by a ‘black box’. 

It’s a sentiment that has been expressed before but it’s worth another airing on a regular basis as more and more claims are made for the role of AI in accounting and financial management. That’s perhaps especially true in the wake of last week’s ‘SaaSpocalypse’ madness that had investors convinced bots and agents would replace every job function going. Bottom line - you trust signing off your bottom line to a bot at your own peril right now!

Fortunately It’s a message that seems to be hitting home with those who need to understand it and a more sophisticated approach is being embraced, according to Owen Ryan, CEO of financial software firm BlackLine:

We are seeing the early stages of an important evolution in the Office of the CFO as leaders look to move beyond simple automation toward intelligent AI-driven orchestration. The requirements for success are clear, AI in finance and accounting must be accurate, transparent, auditable and secure.

That’s just as well as BlackLine has AI messaging to get out there just as much as any other vendor. This is built around three pillars, explains Ryan, these being data, context and agency:

Together, these form a proprietary intelligence layer that allows BlackLine to build on its reputation and expand its market leadership. The foundation of our AI strategy is our data and connectivity. For over 20 years, BlackLine has served as the centralized hub where the world's most complex organizations turn raw data into financial truth. The scale of this continues to grow.

Last year, we processed tens of billions of transactions across our platform. We ingest data from thousands of disparate ERPs, sub-ledgers and third-party financial systems. We cleanse it, sanitize it and normalize it, creating a unified financial data set that acts as a single source of truth.

Human intelligence 

The reach of BlackLine’s connectivity continues to expand via APIs and connectors with new connectors for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle Fusion and Workday as well as deeper integrations with Snowflake and, coming up, Databricks. But alongside the tech credentials is an awareness of the role of human intelligence alongside its artificial counterpart. Ryan says:

This allows us to harness data from across the enterprise, creating the high-quality fuel required for trusted AI. We supplement this with intelligence and context. A generic model can summarize a document but it lacks the specific human and rich processing data needed to reconcile a balance sheet or manage industry-specific accounting challenges.

BlackLine has two decades of operational context from thousands of customers, including historical reconciliation decisions, justification narratives and review and approval actions along with successful and failed transaction matches and historical exception handling and auditor interactions. This proprietary intelligence allows us to deliver context aware predictions and automation, providing the necessary context to turn generative text into financial truth.

And, most importantly, there is a framework of governance with embedded controls, audit trails, segregation of duties and institutional experience. Ryan pitches:

We offer a managed digital workforce via our Verity agents, which are pre-packaged, pre-trained and fully auditable with clear chain of thought. We have architected our platform so that every action the AI takes leaves a digital footprint identical to a human user. This directly addresses the single biggest barrier to AI adoption in finance, the trust gap. By ensuring every AI agent leaves a standard immutable audit trail, providing the clear chain of thought that auditors require, we transform AI from an unacceptable risk into a compliant asset. This allows our customers to pursue productivity gains without compromising their controls environment.

And despite - or because of? - the caveats cited, Finance customers are interested in AI and its impact on the finance role, he argues, noting that “nearly every deal” involves discussion around Verity:

Customers are focused on how we are developing AI for them and how it naturally fits into their unique processes to deliver ROI quickly and safely.  We are also seeing growing adoption of our AI with customer usage of our AI capabilities more than doubling quarter-over-quarter with nearly 20% of all customers now using at least some form of our AI features.

To date, that interest has been mostly centered on generative AI, but Ryan’s expectation is that agentic AI is going to attract more attention in the coming months, but still proceeding with care:

I think from my experiences so far, our customers are being very measured and methodical on how they're thinking about the use of AI. And so there's definitely lots of cost savings that we see are there, but it's also the value and the accuracy and the timeliness of what we think we're going to be able to provide for our customers going forward.

There are still complexities to be addressed, he adds:

It's not just what the CFO and the controller want to do, it's the CIO as well as the Chief Legal Officer. So that's around for [you to work] through as companies are trying to figure out how quickly to move forward with AI, particularly given the requirements that they have to deal with, with their auditors and the SEC and things of that nature.

There’s also the inevitable question of budget allocation for AI as well:

I’m not sure I can tell you that it's necessarily a defined budget. But I think in the conversations that we're having and our teams are having in the field is if we can show real demonstrable value for what our AI can bring, than the CFOs and their teams seem to be able to find the budget for what they're looking to accomplish. So the hurdle for us is really being able to demonstrate a very strong ROI along with the reliability, trust, accuracy and security that our customers have already come to expect from us long time.

My take

Away from the ‘compulsory in 2026’ focus on AI, the other topic of interest around BlackLine is its relationship with SAP. The two have a long-standing partnership with SAP selling BlackLine solutions to its customer, a relationship that accounts for a quarter to nearly a third of the latter’s revenues.

But back in November it was rumored that SAP was about to make another move on Blackline, scuttlebutt fueled by activist investor activity. Since then, nothing has happened in public on that front. Ryan says:

Coming into 2026, I believe our alignment with SAP has never been stronger. We secured full product qualification for Studio360, unlocking the ability to sell directly into SAP's installed base of advanced financial close customers through our AFC integration.

We are currently engaged with SAP leaders to explore integrations for SAP's Joule Copilot with BlackLine's Verity agents to create a single unified digital workforce for finance. The objective is to create a seamless user experience while establishing a commercial framework to directly sell and monetize our Verity agents through a strategic proof of concept. Our shared goal is to define the future of the AI-powered autonomous close.

Critically, we have aligned BlackLine's KPIs as one of the measures of the compensation plans for both BlackLine and SAP customer success managers, ensuring our post-sales teams are financially incentivized to drive joint customer success. We are also deepening our channel strategy in the public sector by partnering with SAP and a leading public sector reseller to accelerate growth and adoption in this large market.

He concludes:

We expect our deepening and broadened collaboration with SAP to continue to drive momentum throughout 2026 and beyond.  I think we've made good progress with SAP. We're very, very proud of what we've been able to accomplish over the last couple of years as you've seen a sort of steady state of SAP customers being roughly about 25%, 26% of our revenue. I don't think you're going to see that materially change in the upcoming year. We've got a very strong pipeline.

So, nothing to see here? He sums up:

We’re seeing a lot of progress with what we're doing. But I think interestingly, we're having really great success through non-SAP customers as well. I don't think you should expect to see much of a shift in that mix of SAP versus non-SAP over the course of this year. That said, we're going to keep doing everything we can to drive that partnership to be as successful as we possibly can on behalf of our customers and our shareholders.

That’s be a ‘no’ then...