Paul Barnhurst argues that fully autonomous finance is a myth and human oversight will remain essential. Finance professionals should stop chasing new AI tools and instead master orchestration: writing clear instructions, deciding when to use AI, creating scripts, and maintaining solid data foundations.
If you're at full automation, I think autonomous finance is a myth in the sense of, hey, you could just have it fully autonomous. I think there's always human in the loop until we hit AGI. And you got chat, Copilot, project skills, you have scheduled tasks, via coding, agentic harness, full automation. Great. We'll deal with that when we're there, what that means. But I think for the training, I think for most people where the focus needs to be is understanding skills and not the technical size of skills. Skills are how to write instructions, learning how to write instructions, when to turn it over to AI, how to do the scripts. It's really about learning orchestration, and orchestration is skills and tasks. And honestly, if you learn skills, tasks, you learn the scripts, agentic harness is just kind of wrapping it all together to me. It's not like it's some whole new thing you have to learn. So that's why I believe the most important skill going forward, and it should have always been for FP&A people, and not all finance people, but some finance You have to understand data because you got to have the schema, you got to have the context, you have to have a solid data foundation.
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