• Financial Controller, Procurement, Travel, and Payments agents act within policy – giving finance more control and eliminating busywork.
• For employees, forms, tickets, policies, reports and finance jargon are replaced with natural language conversation.
• Payhawk’s Fall ’25 Product Edition also includes global payments at 0.3% FX in 115 currencies.

LONDON, Sept. 16, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Payhawk, the finance orchestration and spend management platform, today announced its Fall ’25 Product Edition, expanding its AI Office of the CFO stack. The release brings a coordinated set of AI agents — Financial Controller, Procurement, Travel, and Payments — that complete everyday finance work, following the roles, policies, and approvals finance already sets with a full audit trail.

Employees make natural-language requests, and the agents guide them end-to-end through each process, collecting approvals in the background. Over time, agents learn preferences and anticipate needs, so tasks are completed faster and with less wasted effort.

“Enterprises don’t need more chat, they need outcomes,” said Hristo Borisov, CEO and Co-founder of Payhawk. “The majority of agents on the market today lack enterprise capabilities to be adopted at scale, such as permissions, policies, multi-tenancy, audit trails, and data security standards – all absolutely critical when it comes to business payments. Our AI agents act within your controls and finish real finance tasks, so the easy thing for employees is also the right thing for the business.”

Invisible orchestration by design

Payhawk’s agents operate within existing roles, permissions, and policies, keeping data in-platform and logging every action for auditability. Finance teams gain control and visibility, while repetitive busywork is eliminated.

What each аgent handles

• Financial Controller Agent — Speeds up month-end closing by chasing receipts and uploading documents from vendor portals automatically, flagging anomalies, and escalating reminders around close. Expenses are submitted 2x faster.
• Procurement Agent — Employees say what they need; the agent gathers context, applies budgets and policy, routes approvals, increases card limits or creates purchase orders — no forms, fewer tickets and reminders. Request to purchase time reduced by 60%.
• Travel Agent — Books within policy via natural language based on user preferences, then auto-creates a trip report and groups expenses for one-click approval and ERP export. Saves up to 90 minutes per trip.
• Payments Agent — Deflects approximately 40% of helpdesk work for your finance team by giving instant answers on failed transactions, blocked cards, pending reimbursements or funding issues and proposes compliant next steps.

Beyond the release of the AI Office of the CFO, Payhawk’s Fall ’25 Product Edition includes global payments at 0.3% FX in 115 currencies in partnership with JP Morgan Payments, enhanced role/permission controls, and additional platform improvements.

Payhawk will be hosting a product showcase on October 2nd 2025. To sign up, visit https://payhawk.com/editions/fall-2025.

About Payhawk

Payhawk is the finance orchestration platform that unifies global spend management with intelligent automation and real-time payments. Our solution combines corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, and procure-to-pay in a single platform — eliminating manual processes that slow companies down.

Unlike solutions that force a trade-off between powerful controls and great user experience, Payhawk delivers both, enabling finance teams to drive efficiency and growth while maintaining control. Headquartered in London with 9 offices across Europe and the US, Payhawk serves mid-market and enterprise companies in 32+ countries. Learn more at www.payhawk.com.

Georgi Ivanov
Senior Communications Manager
georgi.ivanov@payhawk.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e27967d8-aa3f-4532-a4f4-d36c2a530404

OpenAI has hired Mike Liberatore, the former chief financial officer at Elon Musk’s AI company xAI, CNBC reported on September 16. 

Liberatore’s LinkedIn profile lists his current role as the business finance officer at OpenAI. His tenure at xAI lasted merely four months, and previously, he worked as the vice president of finance and corporate development at Airbnb. 

The report added that Liberatore will report to OpenAI’s current CFO, Sarah Friar, and will work with co-founder Greg Brockman’s team, which manages the contracts and capital behind the company’s compute strategy. 

According to The Wall Street Journal’s report, Liberatore was involved with xAI’s funding efforts, including a $5 billion debt sale in June. He also oversaw xAI’s data centre expansion in Memphis, Tennessee, in the United States. The reasons for his departure remain unknown. 

Liberatore is an addition to the list of recent high-profile departures from xAI. Last month, Robert Keele, who was the general counsel at the company, announced his departure, stating that there were differences between his worldviews and Musk’s. 

The WSJ report also added that Raghu Rao, a senior lawyer overseeing the commercial and legal affairs for the company, left around the same time. 

Furthermore, Igor Babuschkin, the co-founder of the company, also announced last month that he was leaving xAI to start his own venture capital firm. 

That being said, Liberatore’s appointment at OpenAI comes at a time when the company has announced significant structural changes. 

OpenAI recently announced that its nonprofit division will now be ‘paired’ with a stake in its public benefit corporation (PBC), valued at over $100 billion. The company also announced it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft to transform its for-profit arm into a PBC. This structural change was initially announced by OpenAI in May. 

This article is based on the Future of Work Podcast episode “Why AI and ESG Must Evolve Together to Protect the Future of Work” with Kate O’Neill. Click here to listen to the entire episode.

In the rush to innovate, are today’s leaders forgetting why they started? 

Businesses chasing AI without aligning to human-centered metrics risk building beautiful systems that fail spectacularly.

In a recent episode of The Future of Work® Podcast, Kate O’Neill, CEO of KO Insights and a seasoned digital transformation strategist, delivered a critical message to today’s business leaders: you must stop chasing metrics in isolation and start thinking in terms of ecosystems. 

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As AI becomes an increasingly central part of how organizations operate, leaders face a choice: retrofit outdated success models to new technologies, or reimagine the system altogether through the lens of purpose, resilience, and human flourishing.

With a career advising clients as varied as Google, McDonald’s, and the United Nations, O’Neill isn’t a futurist just making vague predictions. She’s a strategist with a clear framework and a call to action to solve AI integration problems: align artificial intelligence initiatives with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles — not in name only, but in measurable, mission-driven ways that track real-world outcomes.

“I think ESG as a concept is valid. It’s not the principles that are wrong. It’s that we’ve been measuring the wrong things,” she said during the podcast conversation. 

This insight forms the cornerstone of O’Neill’s approach. In a world captivated by AI’s predictive capabilities and automation potential, organizations often overlook the encompassing impact of their decisions. 

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Are these technologies improving lives? Are they regenerating ecosystems — social or environmental — rather than extracting from them? Too often, she explains, companies confuse compliance with progress, chasing ESG as a branding exercise instead of a structural transformation.

This critique is not about abandoning ESG or digital transformation. Quite the opposite. It’s about evolving both.

From Checklists to Systems Thinking

The past decade has seen ESG reporting become a staple of corporate responsibility efforts. But O’Neill points out a flaw: ESG frameworks often push businesses to focus on standardized inputs and outputs rather than actual impact. 

These rubrics, while helpful for consistency, can fail to reflect the lived experience of people and communities affected by a company’s operations.

Instead, she argues for aligning with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a framework of 17 interrelated goals with actionable metrics designed to improve life for all — not just shareholders.

To her, that’s a better approach, as most businesses are doing something that could be furthering the SDGs, but they just don’t necessarily realize it.

From water access and infrastructure to gender equality and education, the SDGs provide a nuanced, flexible way for companies to identify where their operations already intersect with meaningful societal progress. 

More importantly, they allow companies to evolve those operations in a direction that’s measurable, values-aligned, and resilient.

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Making ESG Real in the Age of AI

AI technologies are tools that mirror the systems they’re built within. When integrated blindly, AI can amplify inequities and environmental damage. But when aligned with well-defined social goals, it can act as a force multiplier for good.

Consider how companies often rush to replace human labor with AI in the name of efficiency. O’Neill challenges this logic, not just from a social justice perspective but from a business strategy standpoint. In many cases, this kind of substitution overlooks deeper ESG implications — regional job displacement, lost organizational knowledge, reduced resilience in the face of uncertainty.

“Additive” use of AI, she argues, is far more effective than “replacing” strategies. Enhancing human capability, rather than removing it, yields more sustainable organizations.

This philosophy stems from a fundamental distinction O’Neill highlights: the difference between sense-making and prediction.

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Humans interpret, synthesize, and apply judgment. Machines, even the most advanced AI, rely on data and probability. One of her favorite analogies comes from healthcare: a doctor can hear the emotional nuance in a teenager’s “I’m fine” — something no large language model can reliably decode today. 

In complex systems — like health, education, or public infrastructure — nuance matters.

A Fast-Changing Landscape Needs Slow, Strategic Thinking

Much of the anxiety among today’s executives comes from the pace of change. Technology is moving faster than ever, and leaders are under pressure to act quickly or risk irrelevance. But as O’Neill notes, movement alone isn’t enough. Strategic motion — guided by values and grounded in measurable, ecosystem-wide outcomes — is what will separate resilient organizations from fragile ones.

The goal is progress, not perfection, and that progress requires recognizing the trade-offs embedded in every transformation decision.

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We are already seeing early-stage consequences: water-intensive AI data centers straining local ecosystems; workers displaced without meaningful re-skilling pathways; energy use surging in areas already vulnerable to climate stress. 

What Companies Can Do Now

The path forward, according to O’Neill, is rooted in clarity, alignment, and iteration. Businesses don’t need to pivot overnight or rebuild their operations from scratch. They need to take stock of what they already do well, identify the SDG most aligned with their mission, and begin tracking meaningful, relevant metrics that reflect their contribution to a better future.

This can be as simple as adding one SDG-aligned KPI to a leadership dashboard or as complex as redesigning hiring practices to retain knowledge and community ties. What matters most is the intentionality behind the action.

For leaders struggling with how to begin, O’Neill offers practical guidance: don’t wait for perfect information. Move. Learn. Adapt. Align technology strategy with purpose — not in a silo, but as part of a larger ecosystem of human and planetary thriving. Because in the future of work, success will be defined by how wisely we integrated AI into the human systems that sustain us.

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