How to govern AI access to financial reports

What's one thing you would never let AI do unsupervised in Finance?

Matt Hopkins answered this one for Built To Know.

"Decide for itself what it should have access to.

I use AI pretty heavily during planning and dev, and I've noticed how quickly the progression happens.

'Analyze this.'

Turns into:

'Fix this.'

And eventually:

'Fix this everywhere!'

The better these systems get, the easier it is to give them more access and more authority without really thinking about it.

That's mostly ok when I'm working in a development environment. It gets a lot more interesting when the AI has access to financial reporting.

A user might have hundreds or thousands of reports spread across different Network Drives or SharePoint sites and managed by different business units and locations. Just because an AI can technically find a report doesn't mean the person asking the question should be able to see it.

I think that distinction is going to become incredibly important as companies start connecting AI directly to enterprise data.

An AI agent shouldn't decide what you're allowed to see.

It should operate inside the permissions and governance that already exist, and only have access to the information the person using it is actually entitled to.

That's been a big part of how we've approached AI at Reportworq. Our MCP server can give AI access to reporting content distributed across the organization, but that access still needs to be governed.

AI makes it incredibly easy to connect everything.

Making sure it doesn't expose everything is the harder problem."

Why can't you just give AI access to every report?

Finding a report and being allowed to read it are two different things. Reporting content sits on network drives and SharePoint sites, owned by different business units and locations. An AI with broad access can reach all of it, while the person typing the question may be cleared for only a small part. If the AI decides what is in scope, one question can put a sensitive report in front of the wrong reader, and nobody approved that.

In Reportworq, when someone connects an AI assistant with their own work sign-in, the request runs as that person. Results are limited to the distribution jobs, folders and workspaces their permissions allow. Someone with no Reportworq account is turned away until an administrator adds and entitles one. Reportworq also records each call in an MCP Server Log, so an administrator can see who saw what, and when.

What this means for your team

Your people will connect AI to your reporting, and the question that follows is who could see what. When the AI works inside the permissions Finance already controls, the answer is the one you gave before AI arrived: each person saw the reports they were entitled to. AI becomes a new way to ask, and Finance keeps the say over who can see what. That is governed AI in practice.