The treasury function is under more pressure than ever before

As interest rates fluctuate and economic headwinds persist, companies are turning to treasury leaders to provide real-time insights into liquidity, risk, and solvency. However, that’s challenging to achieve when most treasury workflows still rely on fragmented tools and labor-intensive processes.

At the same time, the risks of getting it wrong are escalating. Monthly corporate defaults surged to 19 in May 2025—more than double the eight reported in April and the highest monthly count since October 2020. Treasury isn’t just being asked to report—it’s being asked to help prevent failure. Yet the typical treasury tech stack remains stuck in a reactive mode. Cash flow forecasts are built on spreadsheets. Bank balances are pulled manually. Reports are generated with siloed data that doesn’t reflect today’s position—let alone tomorrow’s exposure.

“Economic concerns dominate the CFO risk agenda. Inflation, interest rates, and liquidity; global economic slowdown; and local or regional slowdowns are the top three issues.” — Deloitte Insights 2025

Cash flow forecasts are built on spreadsheets. Bank balances are pulled manually. Reports are generated with siloed data that doesn’t reflect today’s position—let alone tomorrow’s exposure.

The Hidden Bottleneck in Modern Treasury Operations

While sales, marketing, and even accounting have made progress over the last decade in automation, treasury remains stuck in a pre-digital workflow. The interfaces may be newer, but the processes underneath are still painfully manual.

Take cash positioning. At many companies, analysts still log into multiple bank portals, export balances, convert currencies, and stitch everything together in Excel—one entity at a time. If the business operates globally, that single task can eat up hours each day and still only deliver a lagging snapshot.

Cash flow forecasting isn’t much better. Treasury teams pull AP and AR data from ERPs, layer in bank activity, adjust for seasonality, and manually update 13-week cash models. Every new input—a late receivable, a one-off payment, a new entity—requires rework. According to PwC, 43% of treasury professionals cite cash flow forecasting as their number one challenge. It’s a familiar pain across the finance function—FP&A teams also struggle to maintain timely forecasts, with 63% unable to project beyond six months. These aren’t edge cases—they’re system-wide signs that existing infrastructure can’t keep up. Here’s how AI agents are helping FP&A teams move faster, without rebuilding from scratch.

That helps explain why 49% of finance leaders now rank building a scalable treasury as a top priority. The urgency is real: without automation, treasury can’t keep pace with the velocity and volatility of modern finance. Strategic work—like liquidity optimization, capital allocation, and risk management—keeps getting displaced by spreadsheet gymnastics.

Current Treasury Workflow vs Modern Expectations

A Smarter Layer for Your Existing Treasury Stack

AI agents are changing how treasury operates—not by replacing systems, but by making them smarter.

These agents connect directly to the tools your team already uses—such as ERP, TMS, spreadsheets, and banks —and sit on top of those systems as an intelligent execution layer. Instead of asking analysts to toggle between platforms, download CSVs, reconcile line items, and build reports, agents handle the orchestration and output.

For example:

• “What’s our total cash position by entity, as of this morning?”
• “Update our short-term forecast using yesterday’s AR and AP data.”
• “Alert me if our liquidity buffer drops below the 60-day threshold.”
• “Draft a monthly report for the CFO with cash trends, upcoming obligations, and FX risk.”

No coding. No reformatting. Just clear output from a single question.

And because these agents operate in real time, they don’t just accelerate execution—they fundamentally change how quickly treasury can respond. That shift is long overdue.

5 High-Impact Use Cases for Treasury AI Agents

AI agents are redefining how treasury teams operate by taking on high-leverage workflows that were previously manual, fragmented, or slow. Here are five critical use cases where agents are already delivering meaningful impact:

1. Global Cash Positioning in Real Time

Managing liquidity across multiple bank accounts, currencies, and legal entities is one of treasury’s most time-sensitive challenges. AI agents eliminate the need for daily manual exports by pulling live balances from sources and consolidating them into a real-time view. This enables accurate cash snapshots by entity, region, or currency—no spreadsheet consolidation required.

2. Automated Liquidity Forecasting That Actually Updates

Cash forecasting is essential for making informed capital and investment decisions; however, most forecasts are built on outdated data and require ongoing maintenance. Agents automatically update short-term forecasts using the latest actuals from ERP and bank feeds, adjusting for changes in inflows, outflows, and seasonality.

3. Never Miss Another Interest Payment or Covenant

Missed interest payments or covenant breaches can have serious financial consequences. Yet tracking these obligations typically requires manually updating schedules, reviewing credit terms, and reconciling across systems. AI agents can monitor debt obligations, flag upcoming payments, and proactively alert teams to any risk of noncompliance.

4. Turn Idle Cash Into Optimized Returns

In today’s high-rate environment, sitting on idle cash is a missed opportunity. Agents can help identify excess cash balances across entities or accounts and recommend aligned, short-term investment options based on internal policy and market rates.

5. Board Reports That Write Themselves

Treasury reports are critical for internal leadership, boards, auditors, and regulators—but preparing them is often a manual and time-consuming process. AI agents streamline this by pulling the relevant data across systems, organizing it into stakeholder-specific formats, and even drafting commentary based on key trends.

From Financial Coordination to Command Center

Treasury is often described as the financial control tower—but most teams don’t have the systems or bandwidth to truly operate that way. AI agents allow teams to shift from coordination to command. Instead of managing dozens of spreadsheets and reconciling week-old data, teams can spend their time analyzing trends, modeling scenarios, and making real-time adjustments to optimize cash and risk.

Why Concourse

At Concourse, we build AI agents specifically for corporate finance teams—and treasury is one of the highest-impact areas we support. Our agents connect directly to your ERP, TMS, bank portals, and spreadsheets, executing end-to-end workflows like cash positioning, forecasting, and stakeholder reporting.