In Asia Pacific (Apac), 75% of chief financial officers (CFOs) believe AI agents could increase their company revenue by almost 20%. More than three-quarters (77%) also believe AI agents will transform their business model, according to a Salesforce survey.
“With AI agents, we’re not merely transforming business models; we’re fundamentally reshaping the entire scope of the CFO function. This demands a new mindset as we expand beyond financial stewards to also become architects of agentic enterprise value,” says Robin Washington, president and chief operating and financial officer at Salesforce.
That shift is already underway. Eighty-three percent of CFOs are using AI in decision-making, particularly in risk assessments, financial forecasting and profitability analysis.
The survey also reveals that 50% of Apac CFOs say AI agents are changing the way they evaluate return on investment (ROI) of AI projects. The top measures now include productivity and efficiency gains, risk and compliance improvements, and long-term cost avoidance.
This change requires a mindset shift from short-term payback to long-term value creation. “The ongoing investment required for retraining, monitoring and improving AI models makes ROI more fluid than for fixed-function tools,” note CFO survey respondent.
The trend extends beyond CFOs. UiPath’s study shows 42% of companies in Southeast Asia have already implemented agentic AI, and 44% plan to adopt it within the next 12 months.
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Financial services, manufacturing, and retail are among the leading industries deploying autonomous systems, with customer support automation, risk management and fraud detection, and productivity gains seen as top use cases.
Yet, barriers remain. Southeast Asian organisations cited data privacy breaches (51%), security vulnerabilities due to AI agents’ autonomous actions (48%) and unintended consequences from complex interactions (47%) as top concerns. Cost, data security and integration challenges are also slowing broader adoption of AI agents.
One way of overcoming those challenges is to leverage agentic orchestration, which bridges isolated AI tasks. Doing so enables organisations to dynamically manage workflows and scale agentic automation across the organisation.
“While enterprises in this region are embracing the full potential of AI agents to streamline workflows and autonomously execute complex business processes, trust and security remain barriers to widespread implementation. Our agentic automation platform directly addresses these challenges, breaking down barriers to enterprise AI adoption by enhancing security and compliance, improving accuracy and reliability for agentic outcomes,” says DebDeep Sengupta, area vice president for South Asia at UiPath.
