Research2026-09-01
OpenAI's finance team used the company's Codex coding agent to automate part of its monthly-close reporting, cutting one compute-cost analysis from about five days to roughly five hours. Director of product finance Kyle Kober said the work let finance staff build their own tools rather than wait for engineering. Advisers caution that such code needs auditability guardrails and that token-based costs are rising.
What changed
Reconciling product-usage data with accounting records for the monthly close was done manually and took about five days.
What it unlocks
Finance staff building their own small automation tools with an AI coding agent instead of queuing for engineering help.
- compute analysis: 5 days to ~5 hours
- 90% of enterprise engineers using AI code assistants by 2028
- under 14% in early 2024
What you need to act on it
- access to an AI coding agent such as Codex
- internal guardrails for auditability of AI-written code
Sources