tl;dr
An AI assistant is a conversational AI tool that helps a finance team member with day-to-day tasks: answering a question about the numbers, drafting a report, surfacing an anomaly, generally in response to a direct request rather than running a process autonomously.
The distinction from an AI agent is initiative. An assistant responds to what it's asked. An agent is given a goal and decides the steps to reach it on its own. Both have a place in a finance team's toolkit, and the two increasingly work together: an assistant to answer the question, an agent to act on the answer.
See how this works in Light's Agents.
