Inside Rippling Finance, Ep. 1: AI governance for accounting

Most accounting teams are using AI. Almost none are doing it in a way that would survive an audit.

Informal AI usage in corporate finance is not just risky. It is unverifiable. If an analyst uses AI to help calculate an accrual with no log, no review mechanism, and no standardization, that workflow is completely unauditable. Field auditors are being told to look for AI usage. If you have not thought about your audit trail before you hit run, you will not be able to reconstruct it after.

Shayne Kuhaneck, Rippling's Chief Accounting Officer, spent the last year building the governance infrastructure to solve this. His framework lets the accounting team move fast with AI while keeping every workflow auditable, reviewable, and defensible to auditors.

In this first episode of Inside Rippling Finance, Shayne walks through the full framework live, with Q&A from finance leaders.

What's inside:

• Why informal AI usage creates real audit exposure and how field auditors are already starting to ask hard questions

• The 3-principle governance framework: risk first, controls matched to the risk, and an unalterable audit trail for every AI action

• A quantitative risk formula (Risk = Impact x Likelihood x Autonomy x Explainability) and four risk tiers for categorizing any use case

• The 4-bucket complexity spectrum: from simple conversational queries to autonomous agents connected directly to your ERP

• What Rippling's accounting team is using AI for today, with buckets 1 and 2 live in production

• How Rippling built an internal AI skill to automate the risk assessment intake and generate standardized audit documentation

• The future state: close management agents, automated accrual reconciliations, IDSW capitalization, and continuous compliance

• Live Q&A with finance leaders on task force structure, auditor readiness, and team inclusion