Sage & PwC launch explainable AI for finance teams

Sage has launched an AI initiative with PwC for finance teams, focused on trust and explainability.

Called Beyond the Black Box, the project is intended to help organisations understand, assess and adopt AI responsibly in finance settings. It builds on Sage's earlier AI Trust Label and broader responsible AI framework, with an emphasis on making AI outputs transparent enough for scrutiny by finance professionals, auditors and regulators.

Research commissioned by Sage and conducted by IDC found that 71% of finance leaders would reject an AI system if it could not explain its outputs, even when those outputs were highly accurate. The findings suggest trust, rather than technical progress, is a key reason adoption remains cautious in finance departments.

That caution carries a measurable workload. According to the research, finance professionals spend an average of 12.9 hours each week reconstructing, validating and defending AI-generated outputs. Sage said 28% of the time savings expected from AI are being lost to verification, explanation and reconstruction work.

Trust barrier

The issue is particularly sensitive in finance because outputs often need to be justified to internal and external stakeholders. Recommendations, figures and other AI-assisted decisions may need to stand up to scrutiny from boards, auditors and regulators, making explainability a practical requirement rather than a technical preference.

Sage is positioning the initiative as a move away from so-called black box AI systems, where users receive an answer without clear visibility into how it was produced. Instead, it is advocating what it calls a glass box approach, under which users can interrogate outputs and trace how recommendations were reached.

Through the partnership, Sage and PwC plan to develop tools and frameworks for finance teams to support responsible implementation. PwC was selected as lead partner partly because of its own use of AI across internal workflows. The firm said 86% of employees actively use AI tools, and more than 4,000 custom GPTs have been developed and reused.

Those figures suggest the accounting and advisory sector is already moving beyond experimentation in some areas, even as concerns over governance and reliability continue to shape wider deployment. The partnership is intended to combine Sage's software expertise with PwC's experience of implementing AI in business operations.

Steve Hare, Chief Executive Officer of Sage, said the central issue for finance teams was whether AI outputs could be explained clearly enough to be used in practice.

"Finance does not run on answers alone - it runs on answers you can explain," said Steve Hare, Chief Executive Officer, Sage. "If you cannot show how a number was produced, you cannot use it. That is why we are building AI differently. AI you can trust can't be a black box, we see it as a glass box that gives finance teams full visibility into how it works, so they can stand behind it with confidence."

From pilot to use

The initiative was designed with small and medium-sized businesses in mind, rather than only large corporations or technical specialists. That focus reflects Sage's core customer base in accounting, payroll, finance and HR software, and suggests it sees the next phase of AI adoption as depending on practical deployment in smaller organisations as well as major enterprises.

Sage also linked the work to its AI Academy, which is intended to guide organisations in adopting AI. The broader aim is to move finance teams from pilot projects and limited testing to wider use, while keeping governance and accountability in place.

For PwC, the partnership aligns with its own efforts to shape how AI is used in decision-making environments where accuracy alone is not enough. In finance functions, the need for accountability means any productivity gain can be undermined if staff still need to spend hours checking how a result was reached.

Marco Amitrano, PwC UK Senior Partner, said the issue went beyond the technology itself.

"PwC's role is to build trust as technology reshapes how business decisions are made," said Marco Amitrano, PwC UK Senior Partner, PwC. "This initiative with Sage reflects a shared ambition: to ensure AI innovation is grounded in the quality and transparency expected of market-leading finance systems."