Here is the litmus test: Who clicks "Submit"?

• Copilot: Suggests the journal entry text. You click submit.
• Agent: Identifies the variance, prepares the entry, validates it against policy, and submits it for approval (or posts it directly, depending on thresholds).

Agents are "Doers." They interact with the ERP securely. They don't just talk about the work; they perform it.

A "Copilot CFO" still has a bottleneck: their team's capacity to drive the copilot. An "Agentic CFO" scales capacity exponentially because agents can run in parallel, 24/7, without fatigue.

This is how modern finance teams are achieving the "Continuous Close" - not by working harder, but by delegating the transactional work to digital workers.

One of the biggest frustrations with early Copilots was their "amnesia." You would explain a complex revenue recognition rule in one session, but the next time you logged in, the bot had forgotten everything. It was like hiring a new intern every single day. This limitation is inherent to the "chat" interface of Copilots, which rely on limited context windows.

Autonomous Agents, by contrast, are designed with long-term memory. They can ingest your entire policy handbook, months of email threads, and historical ledger data, and retain that context. When you ask an Agent to review a contract, it remembers the precedent from the similar deal you signed six months ago.

This persistent memory allows Agents to learn nuance over time. They don't just execute rules; they understand the "company way" of doing things. This accumulation of tacit knowledge is what allows them to move from simple tasks to complex decision-support roles that Copilots simply cannot handle.

A Copilot requires you to be awake, present, and staring at a screen. It waits for your prompt. If you stop typing, it stops working. This synchronous dependency limits the productivity gain to the speed at which you can type instructions. It's faster than doing it yourself, but it still requires your time.

Agents break this dependency. You can assign a task to an Agent - "Reconcile these 500 intercompany transactions and flag anomalies" - and then go to bed. The Agent works asynchronously, churning through the task, waiting for API rate limits, retrying failed queries, and compiling the result.

This shift to asynchronous capability is massive for global finance teams. It means work is happening 24/7. You wake up to a "Draft Complete" notification rather than a blank screen. The Agent becomes a true force multiplier, decoupling output from human hours effectively.

Most Copilots are great at single-step tasks: "Summarize this email" or "Find the Q3 revenue." But finance workflows are rarely single steps. They are chains of logic: "Look up the invoice, compare it to the PO, calculate the variance, check the approval limit, and then draft an email to the vendor."

Agents excel at this multi-step reasoning (Chain-of-Thought). They can break a vague goal ("Fix the AP backlog") into a sequence of hundreds of discrete actions. They can handle the "logic loops" - if X happens, do Y; if Z, do A - that would stump a basic chatbot.

This ability to handle "compound tasks" is what allows finance leaders to offload entire workflows. Instead of using AI to help them do the work, they are assigning the work to the AI. It fundamentally changes the operating model of the department from execution-focused to supervision-focused.