Agentic AI represents a fundamental shift: from AI that advises, to AI that acts. This shift creates enormous opportunity but also introduces a new class of operational, financial, and reputational risk that CEOs and CFOs must actively manage.

For the last two years, the enterprise AI market has followed a familiar pattern. A new tool launches. It promises to automate a specific task—sales emails, support replies, invoice parsing, demand forecasts. Enterprises buy it. Pilots run. Dashboards light up. Usage grows.

2025 will likely be remembered as the year agentic AI entered the enterprise narrative. Autonomous agents, multi-step reasoning, tool-using LLMs, and “AI employees” dominated roadmaps, board decks, and vendor demos.It was also, from a CFO’s vantage point, one of the least productive years for AI ROI.Enterprises ran dozens of pilots. Vendors promised step-function productivity. Internal teams showcased increasingly sophisticated agent behaviors.Yet when finance asked the simplest question, "what changed in the P&L?" The answer was often silence.