Agents Are Here, And They’re Changing Finance

There’s plenty of debate around AI agents: Is it buzz, or do they actually deliver? The answer is becoming clearer every day.

Gartner forecasts that by 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents, up from less than 5% today. That’s not hype, it’s a signal that organizations are already embedding agents into core workflows.

For finance teams, this means fewer analyst hours wasted on manual workflows, faster access to insights, and continuous monitoring at a scale no human team could match. The most valuable use cases aren’t about general-purpose AI but about agents designed to handle specific, repeatable tasks. That’s where the real ROI is showing up today.

~Ryan Erickson, Founding Executive

TLDR: What you need to know about AI in Finance

Ramp introduced controllers’ agents that enforce expense policies, flag anomalies, and provide audit-ready approvals, hitting 99% accuracy in reviews.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff confirmed AI agents have replaced 4,000 support roles, now handling 50% of the workload while humans step in for edge cases.

Magnetar, one of the industry’s most secretive hedge funds, made a $500M AI bet on CoreWeave, showing how seriously institutional capital is backing agent-scale infrastructure.

Basis Feature of the Week: Agents

One of the biggest challenges with most AI tools is the setup. They need to be trained, fed, or prompted before they’re helpful. Basis changes that. Because we’re already connected to your firm’s research apps and data, our Agents are ready to go the moment you activate them. No uploading files, no manual resets. The data engine behind Basis makes your research AI-ready from day one.

With Agents, what used to be tedious, manual work is fully automated. You can:

• Tap into our library of pre-configured agents (like the Thesis Stress Tester below)

• Or build your own in minutes with our simple front-end platform

Agents run continuously in the background, combining your internal research with trusted external sources, monitoring data, flagging risks, and surfacing insights so your team can focus on decisions, not grunt work.

Agent Workflow of the Week: Thesis Stress Tester

Our Thesis Stress Tester Agent automatically monitors internal data and external news to validate or challenge your investment thesis in real time. This workflow keeps teams aligned and reduces the risk of missing critical signals hidden across fragmented sources.

Instead of manually scanning news feeds and scattered documents, analysts can rely on the agent to:

• Pull in relevant internal research data

• Track external market news

• Surface conflicts or confirmations against your thesis

About Shift
Investment research shouldn't be this hard. Shift turns your firm's scattered knowledge into powerful insights with AI built for how you actually work. We're a team of builders and finance experts based in Charlottesville, VA. Visit shifthq.ai to learn more.