Published by AI Finance Office

Insights

What charity finance teams need to know about AI — the fortnightly briefing, longer articles, and practical resources you can use.

A fortnightly round-up of the AI news that actually matters to a charity finance team — tools, ERP releases, automation, regulation and the sector itself. Roughly a seven-minute read.

Issue 010 Latest

The Controls Arrive

Friday, 14 August 2026

EU AI Act enforcement went live on 2 August — fines up to €15m or 3% of worldwide turnover, plus transparency duties that reach deployers, not just model providers
Anthropic shipped three governance features in seven days: real-time DLP inference hooks, self-hosted environments, and a Compliance API covering Claude Code and Cowork
Sage Intacct Release 3 landed on 7 August with AI anomaly detection in AP generally available — and the headline Finance Intelligence Agent still in early adopter
Gartner: the finance pyramid becomes a diamond, with around 70% of finance roles shared human-AI jobs by 2030

Read issue → 7-min read

Issue 009

The Confidence Gap

Friday, 31 July 2026

97% of finance leaders say they could explain their AI agents to a regulator — 36% have nobody responsible for understanding how those agents work (Avalara, 1,500+ leaders)
Only 7% prioritise governance over speed, and Forrester finds 67% use AI in accounts payable but just 39% have an operating model for it
Gartner: 45% of finance AI investment leans to productivity, 20% to decision quality — and boards weight the second far more heavily
MCP ships its largest revision since launch, Claude Opus 5 arrives, and Sage Intacct Release 3 lands on 7 August

Read issue → 7-min read

Issue 008

The Verification Tax

Friday, 17 July 2026

Finance teams lose ~13 hours a week and 26% of expected AI productivity gains to checking AI's work (Sage/IDC, 2,275 finance leaders)
The full Charity Digital Skills Report 2026: 79% of charities routinely use AI, but distrust has more than doubled to 35%
FCA publishes the Mills Review — its blueprint for agentic finance
Xerocon London, SAP's Financial Closing Assistant, NetSuite 2026.2 and the biggest MCP revision since launch

Read issue → 7-min read

Issue 007

The Agents Arrive — and Governing Them Becomes the Job

Saturday, 4 July 2026

Live agents land across the stack: Xero JAX in Copilot, Intuit's QuickBooks agent team, SAP Joule, Trintech's close agents, Copilot Excel "skills"
The control layer arrives too: Anthropic's agent access & spend controls, BlackLine's Finance Control Console, Sage Intacct's read-only MCP gateway
Cisco's CFO: AI now drafts 80–90% of the company's regulatory filings
EU "Digital Omnibus" gets final approval — high-risk deadlines slip to late 2027; classification consultation extended to 23 July
Early Charity Digital Skills Report 2026: 91% of charities use AI, only 30% have a policy

Full briefing → 7-min read

Issue 006

The Model Leaps, Context Becomes the Constraint & the Governance Net Tightens

Saturday, 20 June 2026

Anthropic ships Fable 5 — then the US government orders it switched off three days later
Ramp names the real blocker: context, not the model (87% call AI critical, only 21% see value)
Digits' "Agentic Close" makes month-end an always-on process you configure in plain English
Gartner: finance AI succeeds only ~50% of the time — structure beats spend
Charity month-end, tested hands-on — plus 70% of UK SMEs now consult AI before their accountant

Full briefing → 7-min read

Insights

Want this in your inbox?