How To Govern AI Access To ERP And Financial Systems
Security Boulevard, Friday, March 13th, 2026
AI is now sitting in the middle of your financial systems, making decisions at machine speed with access to data that used to be tightly contained in ERP. If you don't explicitly govern how copilots and AI agents touch Oracle, SAP, and other business‑critical systems, you end up with opaque data flows, Segregation of Duties (SoD) violations you can't see, and 'ghost' machine identities that outlive projects and people.
Finance and IT leaders are under pressure to 'put AI to work' in GL, AP, AR, and forecasting. Native ERP copilots, external AI agents, and analytics assistants are now reading financial data, drafting journal entries, proposing adjustments, and even initiating workflows your existing controls never anticipated.
The problem is that traditional access models assume humans behind screens. When AI becomes the user, you get long‑lived tokens, API keys, or service principals instead of ephemeral sessions, shared 'bot' accounts instead of accountable identities, and complex chains of access where you can no longer answer basic questions: who accessed what, under which policy, and on whose authority-whether via ERP roles, SaaS connectors, or Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) managed identities.