Your AI Agent Can Approve Its Own Payments, But Who Signs For It?
Nearly a third of Australian organizations (32.5%) are using agentic AI, raising critical questions about responsibility and control as these systems gain more autonomy.
Organizations have started automating their processes with agents but not always granting full autonomy. Agents can prepare the work, but they aren't always trusted to finish it. In our business, sending an email, authorizing a payment or finalizing a new user's setup still needs a person to sign off.
Control Gap
Our clients have taken a similar approach and, in fact, none of them currently allow an agent to make payments on their behalf. Instead, all approvals are undertaken manually by individuals under the normal segregation of duties that has been in place to protect the finance function for decades.
In other words, the person who can amend a supplier's bank account details is not the person who approves payment to that supplier. Historically, the person that sets up a payment is not the same person that approves it for processing.
Someone independent of the person who set up the payment, who can see the evidence and has the authority to refuse, is a control.
Risk Exposure
This well-established risk reduction methodology is in danger of being overturned by agentic AI. If an organization grants the AI agent the ability to run under the login of the person who built it, then the same credential is used to create and approve payments.
As a result, the checks designed to identify redirected payments are removed. In Australia alone, payment redirection scams cost AU$166.8 million in 2025. When agents approve payments, the gap in controls is hard to spot.
Governance Framework
Australia's recently updated Information Security Manual (ISM), issued in September 2026, states that all AI-enabled agents should have their own identity and be recorded within a register. The register should capture details of the owner of the agent as well as the business reason for its use.
The recent joint report from the cyber security agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand describes hijacked procurement agents that automatically process payments and also create very convincing audit trails for such processing.
Governing AI agents is essentially the same as governing humans who execute decisions within an organization: namely, delegating authority and ensuring appropriate segregation of duties. COSO advises organizations to separate the ability to configure AI tools from the authority to approve their outputs and says each generative AI tool should have a named owner.
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