Both on the job and off, artificial intelligence seems to be driving most things these days. One prominent exception, however, is accounting at mid-market and small companies, a new report suggests.
While 63% of surveyed professionals are actively exploring AI, only 16% are actually using it, according to a poll by Accounting Seed, a Salesforce accounting app that uses AI agents to automate tasks.
The 128 participants were CFOs, controllers, other finance team members and IT/operations admins. About 60% work at companies with 51 to 500 employees, with the rest split between smaller and larger organizations.
Among participating CFOs, just 10% said they are using AI, but 77% said they are actively exploring it.
The research also found that just 12% of surveyed organizations have progressed to what Accounting Seed considers advanced adoption, using both automation tools and AI assistants. More than a third (34%) of them still rely mostly on manual processes, with no automation or AI in place. And 14% said they have no plans to use AI in accounting.
“Many finance teams want to adopt AI but don’t know which solutions are credible, haven’t built the foundational data that AI requires, and lack the internal alignment to move forward,” Accounting Seed said in its survey report.
The highest proportion of survey respondents who have adopted AI was found among IT and Salesforce administrators, which the report said indicates that AI adoption may be advancing faster on the technical side than finance teams realize. As a result, AI initiatives risk becoming technology projects disconnected from real business problems, the report noted.
Among the 14% of respondents with no plans to adopt AI, the top barrier they cited was leadership buy-in.
“Finance professionals need to be part of the conversation earlier, and technical teams need to understand the specific workflows AI is meant to improve,” Accounting Seed advised.
Asked what accounting challenge they most want AI to solve, 56% chose reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks. That was three times more than any other answer option. Most (84%) of those polled said they spend at least a quarter of their time on manual, repetitive tasks, and 33% spend more than half of their time doing so.
Accounting Seed pointed out a key nuance in the discussion about finance’s usage of AI: Many routine finance tasks are better suited to automation than AI.
“Payment processing, bank reconciliation and approval routing don’t always require machine learning — they require well-designed workflows with clear rules,” the report said.
