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AI Business & IndustrySiliconANGLE AIPublished: Sep 18, 2026, 04:00 JST

Kozlik: AI in finance gated by trust, not budget

Kozlik: AI in finance gated by trust, not budget

3 Key Points

  1. What happened

    Christie Kozlik, chief accounting officer at Accel Entertainment Inc., told theCUBE that finance adoption is gated by trust, not budget, because AI answers in microseconds with absolute confidence whether right or wrong.

  2. Why it matters

    Because a model sounds equally certain whether it is right or wrong, enthusiasm for new tools has to be matched by a plan for checking what they produce, she said.

  3. What to watch

    Her targets are SEC reporting and the company's ERP systems buildout, both heavily audited; ROI is measured against cutting the financial close from seven days to five.

WHO IT HITSThis lands hardest on chief accounting officers and finance teams in regulated industries, where every number eventually reaches a filing that shareholders and regulators read, and on the auditors brought in to review AI outputs.

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Context & Analysis

TheCUBE's Krista Case and co-host Alison Kosik spoke with Kozlik at Amplify, in a segment sponsored by Workiva. Kozlik's starting point is that AI is already arriving from the inside out, through the software, reporting platforms and ERP systems that accounting teams already run, so the practical question is not whether to adopt it but how to check what it produces.

Her discipline is deliberately old-fashioned: every process gets a defined input, an expected output and a documented review, with internal and external auditors brought to the table early rather than after the fact. She frames the work as risk rating the data itself, footnote by footnote, rather than treating governance as a single blanket policy.

The stakes hinge on whether that review discipline can keep pace as AI moves into SEC reporting and the ERP buildout, the heavily audited areas she has chosen first. If the checks hold there, finance teams in regulated industries may have a template for moving faster; if they do not, the confidence of the model's answers is likely to be the thing that slows adoption.

FAQ
Why is trust the gating factor for AI in finance rather than cost?
Kozlik said the obstacle in finance is less cost than trust, since a model answers in microseconds and sounds equally certain whether it is right or wrong. Accel's discipline is to define an input, an expected output and a documented review for every process.
How does Accel Entertainment measure ROI on AI?
ROI gets the same treatment, measured against a metric such as cutting the financial close from seven days to five. Her near-term targets are SEC reporting and the company's ERP systems buildout.
What did Kozlik say about data governance?
She said it is probably more about risk rating that data: rate each footnote in a 10-K or 10-Q as AI bot-ready or not — yes, no, one, two, three — and put a game plan together for each one.
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