📄 Abstract
Municipal councils worldwide are facing increasing pressure to modernize their financial governance systems in response to heightened public expectations, expanding data complexity, and evolving regulatory demands. Traditional municipal financial management practices—characterized by manual processing, retrospective reporting, and soloed information flows—have proven inadequate for real-time fiscal decision-making. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative enabler of intelligent, efficient, and transparent municipal financial governance. AI-enabled funds management integrates machine learning, natural language processing, robotic process automation, and algorithmic decision-support systems to enhance budgeting, forecasting, auditing, expenditure tracking, and risk management. Drawing on theoretical foundations such as digital governance theory, new public management, socio-technical systems theory, and algorithmic governance, this study explores how AI reshapes municipal financial processes by improving analytical capacity, automation, and data-driven decision-making. The paper highlights the limitations of traditional financial management systems and explains how AI technologies address challenges related to forecasting accuracy, fraud detection, transparency, and administrative inefficiency. It further examines the transformative potential of AI in enhancing revenue planning, compliance monitoring, and citizen participation through intelligent interfaces and automated reporting tools. However, the study also identifies critical ethical, governance, and capacity-related concerns, including algorithmic bias, data privacy risks, skills shortages, and the need for robust institutional safeguards. Ultimately, the analysis demonstrates that the successful adoption of AI-enabled funds management requires integrated governance frameworks, responsible AI principles, and sustained capacity-building efforts. The findings provide a theoretical foundation for understanding AI’s role in transforming municipal financial governance and offer direction for future empirical research and policy development.
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📚 How to Cite:
Bharath S, Swati Kulkarni , AI ENABLED FUNDS MANAGEMENT: TRANSFORMING FINANCIAL GOVERNANCE IN MUNICIPAL COUNCILS , Volume 13 , Issue 6, June 2026, EPRA International Journal of Environmental Economics, Commerce and Educational Management(ECEM) , Pages: 325 - 328 ,