Roughly 90% of Homemade AI Agents Go Unused, by One Guess
A CFO's team built dozens of AI helpers; by one guess most sit unused, but staff learned to automate first.
The a16z Show · The New CFO: How AI Is Rewriting the Finance Function | Figma CFO Praveer MelwaniSeema Amble, a venture capital partner who talks with finance chiefs, guesses that roughly 90% of homemade AI agents go unused.
Amble said one growth-stage chief financial officer told her his team built 40 to 50 agents in a month or two.
The tools were aimed at tedious manual work, including pulling information together and reconciling it across systems.
Amble said the habit still mattered because staff started thinking automation first rather than doing work manually, which she called "almost as important as getting the agent built."
Questions people ask
What is an AI agent in an office?
An AI agent here is a small software helper that is given a job to do, like pulling numbers from different systems, checking them against each other, and drafting a summary. Unlike a simple chatbot, it can take several steps on its own.
What should happen to all these one-off experiments?
Figma chief financial officer Praveer Melwani said a systems team could harmonize bottom-up builds and productize them so they live beyond the original builder. That is his idea for what should happen, not a description of what usually happens.