Every tech titan, from Apple to Oracle, is looking to sell some home‑brewed version of AI to their customers. However, enterprise vendors are pitching AI as something more than just a new type of application. 

They want us to think of it as a digital employee – maybe not on the payroll but with a clearly defined role, specific tasks and measurable responsibilities.

Salesforce is among the most ardent promoters of this idea, expressed through its dedicated Agentforce platform. It describes Agentforce as a framework to build and deploy digital labour that’s deeply embedded in your existing apps, data and business logic. 

Speaking at a May 2025 Agentforce Summit in Sydney, Eran Agrios, senior vice president and general manager of financial services at Salesforce, said she spends a lot of time talking about how to scale contact centres. She noted that in the past the only option was to hire more people, but now organisations can consider using a digital workforce instead.

“With agentic AI, we have a great opportunity to address business challenges with agents working alongside human employees, scaling capacity and productivity together beyond what has been possible,” she said.

Competitors such as Oracle NetSuite and BlackLine are rushing to produce their own versions of digital employees as a workforce to lighten the load of the finance team. 

Some of our largest institutions are already experimenting with the concept. ANZ is testing digital assistants to help staff in its ANZ Plus retail division with meeting preparation and follow-ups – tasks that can eat up hours each week. The bank is running internal proofs of concept with frontline employees, before introducing digital employees to customers. 

At the summit, Gerard Florian, then group executive for technology and group services at ANZ, emphasised the need to consider AI within the broader context of enhancing processing. 

“You need to first understand the end-to-end process, be it loan approval or customer onboarding, and then you need to break that down into tasks and the data required for each,” he says. “With that established, you can ask where does AI fit in?”

To support the rollout of AI, over 12 months ANZ sent 3000 employees through its AI Immersion Centre. The facility, located at the bank’s headquarters in Melbourne, wanted to accelerate leaders' knowledge of AI and support widespread adoption of the innovative tools across the organisation.

Digital employees in hard hats

Financial services, with its vast amount of paper shuffling, feels like a natural home for automations such as digital employees. But they’re also turning up in less obvious industries, including construction. 

Canberra-based developer Geocon used a Salesforce digital agent to manage post-settlement defects for a record-breaking 856-apartment complex. The system was set up in weeks and launched with minimal testing. 

“We’ve actually been a bit amazed, because the AI [agent] has gotten smarter and better at what it does since we launched it,” says Andy Magee, chief information officer at Geocon. 

The agent sits on Geocon’s website. Tenants and property managers can log defects, which the agent routes to the appropriate subcontractor. The agent then tracks each issue, updates stakeholder on progress, asks for access availability and explains the process. 

It can even interpret long, unstructured text from property managers responsible for dozens of units. 

“Our oversight has gone from having to manage all cases to [only] managing escalated cases and knowing that the agent is doing the heavy lifting for the rest of them,” Magee says.

Meanwhile, tradie marketplace Hipages is testing an AI agent to check whether new contractors hold the right construction licences. The Agentforce agent can interpret the complexities of licensing laws that vary by trade, job value and geography. 

In one case, the licence requirements change depending on which side of the ACT/NSW border you’re on. 

“When you sign up, we have people who consult this big, deep matrix and check against a bunch of different regulatory authorities around the country,” says Jeremy Burton, chief technology officer at Hipages. “The agents are now doing that work for them.”

Burton says the agents have achieved level-one maturity – conducting the extensive checks across the matrix and regulator websites. In the next level, the agents will confirm with operational systems that the checks have been completed.

Interestingly, the focus of the investment is not cost savings, but customer experience. Instead of waiting three hours for humans to run the checks, the digital agents can perform them in real time. “It gets [tradies] on the platform straight away, claiming leads and getting the value out of the platform while they're still excited from signing up,” Burton says.

A digital financial team

Accounting software provider NetSuite is taking a slightly different tack.

Rather than positioning agents as autonomous coworkers, NetSuite sees them as smart assistants designed to help overstretched finance teams do more with the same resources. 

“AI is going to be that assistant that helps them get a lot more done,” said Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite, during an interview in April 2025. 

Goldberg describes AI agents as software that ties together multiple technologies – optical character recognition, large language models, machine learning – and can take actions rather than just answer questions. 

For enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, that could mean parsing a poorly formatted invoice, identifying the right amount, flagging missing data and posting it to the right account.

For NetSuite, the goal isn’t disruption, it’s usability. ERPs are incredibly powerful and accordingly complex; finding information or updating records can require clicking through multiple screens. An AI agent with a chat interface can help untrained users carry out their tasks. In fact, it could remove the complexity of an ERP entirely. 

“We are definitely interested in seeing how we can make NetSuite so easy to use that implementing it in a very small company becomes more viable,” Goldberg says.

Enterprise reconciliation platform BlackLine is also releasing agents across key processes in the record-to-report and invoice-to-cash cycles. These digital employees will work in transaction matching, real-time anomaly detection and remittance processing. 

“Our vision is to bring autonomous finance to every company in the world,” says Jeremy Ung, BlackLine’s chief technology officer, in a recent release.

As AI giants continue to evolve their AI strategies, the question is: how many more digital employees are about to clock on? And how can they help your finance team?