BlackLine launches new AI tools to boost CFOs' financial insights

BlackLine has expanded its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across its financial automation platform, introducing new AI agents that seek to improve financial operations for the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

The company now has integrated AI across major financial workflows including record-to-report and invoice-to-cash. According to BlackLine, these updates are intended to help finance and accounting teams reduce operational risk, increase the speed of decision-making, and provide real-time financial intelligence at scale.

BlackLine stated that its approach to AI is defined by an emphasis on accuracy, efficiency, and intelligence, and is designed to support rather than replace human decision-making. The company noted that measurable improvements in areas including speed, accuracy, and compliance are among the expected outcomes from these new features.

Owen Ryan, Co-CEO and Chairman of the Board at BlackLine, said, "For more than 20 years, BlackLine has been the trusted innovation partner for the Office of the CFO. Our differentiated AI approach helps customers accelerate time to value and make smarter decisions – without compromising data integrity. The Office of the CFO runs on trust, and trust begins with clean, reliable data. By ensuring data quality at the source, we empower CFOs to lead with speed, precision, and confidence."

The expanded AI capabilities are natively integrated into the BlackLine platform and deliver automation and intelligence across key financial processes. The company described several ways in which customers are realising value from the AI enhancements. These include accelerating time to value through transforming raw financial data into executive reports, automating financial statement commentary to reduce manual workloads, and detecting anomalies across large volumes of journal entries – a task beyond the capacity of manual review.

Key features in the current platform update include the Document Description Summariser, which automatically summarises document contents to improve both compliance and support. The Financial Close Journals Risk Analyser detects irregularities in journal entries and flags potential audit risks, while the Consolidation & Financial Analytics: Variance Automation & Footnote Generator creates initial explanations for financial statement fluctuations and supporting footnotes.

The platform also offers Summarisation Agents, which convert financial statements into actionable insights for finance and accounting teams, as well as Intercompany Predictive Guidance intended to prevent intercompany transaction failures before they impact the ledger. The Invoice-to-Cash AR Payment Forecasting function uses machine learning to forecast customer payment behaviour, with an aim to enhance the accuracy of cash flow projections.

Jeremy Ung, BlackLine's Chief Technology Officer, commented, "Our vision is to bring autonomous finance to every company in the world. We've built agentic AI that goes beyond automation, empowering customers to anticipate, decide, and act faster. Data is the new currency, and trusted insights are everything. With transparency, control, and auditability at the core, our AI delivers intelligence at scale. We believe Forrester's recent recognition of our AR Intelligence in their Top AI Use Cases for AR Automation in 2025 report affirms the strength of our approach."

Looking ahead, BlackLine outlined further AI and agentic AI enhancements set for release in the coming months. Planned updates include Matching Agents, which are designed to accelerate transaction matching by suggesting and improving pass rules; a Variance Anomaly Detection Agent for real-time outlier identification and variance explanations; Remittance Processing to extract remittance data without invoice templates; and Summarisation and Translation Agents aimed at increasing efficiency in accounts receivable with AI-generated summaries and multilingual translation.