Sage study shows finance teams lose 13 hours a week verifying AI outputs

Finance professionals are losing nearly 13 hours every week reconstructing, validating and defending AI-generated outputs. This is the key conclusion from a study by Sage, as concerns around the technology’s lack of transparency continue to weigh on the sector.

The global survey conducted by IDC of more than 2,000 senior finance leaders – published in The Emerging Economics of AI in Finance white paper – found that nearly three quarters of respondents would reject an AI tool if it could not explain how it reached its answers. Even if it claimed to be 99% accurate.

In the United States, nearly half of finance professionals surveyed said they spend 15 hours or more each week verifying AI outputs, while one in five said they spend at least 30 hours doing so.

More than half of organisations also said they would be willing to pay more for AI solutions that provide greater transparency into how AI-generated decisions are made.

“In finance, almost right has always been wrong,” said Sage CTO Aaron Harris.

“As AI takes on more complex financial workflows, the cost of uncertainty is simply too high. This research shows that the next era of AI won’t be won on raw model intelligence alone; it will be won on trust infrastructure.”

When it comes to finance, people need transparent AI

IDC Financial Applications Research Director Kevin Permenter added that organisations that treat trust as the foundation of their AI strategy would be better positioned to use the technology at scale.

“The organisations that will achieve the most durable AI advantage are those that reframe trust infrastructure not as a constraint on AI deployment, but as the foundation on which scalable AI is built,” he said.

“Organisations have a choice: act early to operationalize trust or risk becoming overwhelmed by verification overhead.” 

When asked what skills mattered most for a finance leader hired today, US respondents ranked risk management, governance and decision-making judgement as the top priority – more than twice as important as deep technical accounting knowledge.

According to Sage, the findings indicate that there’s a growing shift away from traditional black box AI systems and towards AI solutions that can provide visibility around reasoning, sources, and logic behind its AI-generated recommendations.

“Finance teams cannot afford to spend hours playing detective with black-box AI outputs,” Harris said. “They need solutions that bring transparency, control and traceability into the systems behind their outputs, so they can execute with absolute confidence.”

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