For decades, the operating model of corporate finance departments has rested on an unyielding pattern: any process, spending decision, invoice, or budget must, without exception, receive human approval. Yet this control mechanism, designed to mitigate risk, has become a bottleneck stifling growth for many companies, according to a Pleo report.
These findings show that 89% of finance leaders in Spain feel unable to manage their companies’ growth due to bureaucratic burden and data fragmentation. All of this in a context where, according to the report, 94% of businesses in the country plan to expand over the coming year. Thus, the need for every relevant operation to receive a human sign-off has given rise to a “control tax” that forces finance departments to prioritize paperwork over real growth.
In response to this operational saturation, Pleo is pushing a new strategy: end the era of systematic approvals and rely on technology already available. Instead of adding more layers of validation and more staff to manually review receipts, the key is to lean on agentic technology together with policies, budgets, and predefined guardrails that ease the load on the finance department.
Under this new approach, routine financial transactions occur and are approved in the background automatically, as long as they stay within the limits and rules set by leadership. This means human intervention is no longer the norm but becomes the exception, reserved only for when the system detects an anomaly or a budget deviation.
Important decisions, for humans
According to Marija Nakevska, Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO) at Pleo, “Finance has depended on the same operating model for decades: every major decision must end with a human signature. AI is about to change this definitively. Rather than relying on people to authorize every transaction, financial teams will define a set of rules to automate their work. It’s not just about digitizing the old paperwork, but redesigning workflows from scratch. This enables teams to move from manual execution to oversight of the results, marking the greatest transformation in the sector since the introduction of ERP systems.”
This new direction aligns with the consolidation of agentic AI in the market, which enables decentralized financial management. Spending requests no longer require employees to use complex accounting platforms that hinder their workflows, but instead occur directly within the tools they already use, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, ChatGPT, or Claude.
With this proposal, Pleo underscores that the true value of Artificial Intelligence in 2026 no longer resides in the invoicing process, but in freeing professionals from repetitive tasks that consume their time, positioning them as the real architects of the company’s financial strategy and governance.
