Exclusive: Oracle's Meredith Rowan on embracing AI agents to boost productivity

Techday NZ

11-07-2025

Finance teams across Australasia are undergoing a seismic shift as AI agents become embedded in daily operations, automating transactional tasks and enabling finance professionals to play a more strategic role.
This transformation is "redefining the CFO's job" and positioning finance as a core driver of enterprise decision-making.
"We're in unprecedented times for CFOs," explained Meredith Rowan, Group Vice President for Applications at Oracle ANZ and ASEAN.
"We've cut all the costs that can be cut. Productivity growth in Australia is at its lowest rate in sixty years at just 0.9 percent. Yet finance teams are under enormous pressure to deliver more. The only path forward is leveraging technology, particularly agentic AI, to unlock productivity and insight," she said during a recent interview.
According to Rowan, the urgency for change is growing.
Finance leaders are contending with increasingly complex regulations, economic volatility, and rising expectations from their organisations. Traditional cost-cutting strategies have reached their limits, and manual processes like reconciliations, variance analysis, and data integration are undermining the impact of skilled finance teams.
"Many finance executives and their teams are bogged down in manual work, pulling data from multiple, often tricky sources," said Rowan.
"Automating that work with AI agents saves time, improves accuracy, and critically enables real-time insights that generate future value."
Unlike older automation tools that focused on single-task bots, Oracle's approach uses a network of AI agents working in tandem to orchestrate entire workflows.
In Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, more than 50 embedded agents operate collaboratively to support a variety of real-world use cases across finance, HR, supply chain and more.
"For example, a document AI agent can process a photo of a sales quotation, generate a requisition, fix data errors, and hand it over to a ledger agent for review, all in one seamless flow," Rowan explained.
This system does more than automate. It augments the capabilities of finance professionals.
"With these systems handling the heavy transactional lifting, finance professionals can focus on delivering strategic, predictive insights," she said.
"Finance is moving from being a back-office function to becoming the engine room for decision-making and growth."
Organisations are already seeing the impact. Rowan cited the case of a major New Zealand company whose CFO, newly promoted to CEO, made AI transformation a board-level priority.
"He pulled us into a meeting with the board to ask how to use AI to do things differently, move faster, and align with business goals," she said. "The companies that lean into AI are outpacing their competitors. They're operationalising AI to create real market differentiation."
Local use cases back this up.
A2 Milk ran both manual and AI-driven forecasts for several quarters, and the AI forecasts were consistently more accurate. Additionally, using the AI-based Dynamic Discounting feature in Oracle Cloud ERP Hearst Corporation optimised its working capital by taking advantage of early pay discounts across 40,000 vendors. The fully automated capability helped it save hundreds of thousands of dollars and improved relationships with suppliers. "This is time that can now be reinvested into work that adds real value," said Rowan.
The shift is also redefining the expectations placed on finance leaders.
"CFOs are no longer just responsible for the numbers," Rowan said. "They are stepping into CEO roles, taking on market strategy, and managing risk. If we equip them with intelligent tools, they become a strategic force within the organisation."
However, scaling these changes is not without challenges. Many teams are still transitioning from familiar on-premise systems to cloud-based platforms. This transition can be daunting.
"Change management is a critical issue," Rowan warned.
"Moving operations to the cloud and trusting an external provider to manage it well requires a leap of faith."
Oracle aims to support that leap. The company invests 9 billion US dollars in research and development annually, serves governments and leading banks, and collects insights from SaaS customers worldwide.
Feedback from customer councils helps Oracle refine its AI stack to reflect real-world needs.
"We see it as our responsibility to educate, to lead with best practice, and to challenge customers when complexity can be replaced with proven, standardised processes," Rowan said.
For organisations just beginning their AI journey, Rowan's advice is to start small.
"It can be overwhelming, and the risk is getting stuck weighing too many options," she said. "Start now. Identify a repetitive process and let an AI agent take it on. Learn from the experience and bring your people along with you. It's essential to engage the workforce at every stage."
As AI adoption accelerates, finance is shifting from a backward-looking discipline to a forward-focused, strategic powerhouse.
"CFOs are evolving from being transactional, reporting on last year's numbers, to being transformative," said Rowan. "They are using predictive analytics and real-time data as a guide for what comes next."