How Planful Delivers AI-Enhanced Finance

Strong financial performance management is a team effort, but a team is more than its starting lineup. Every player must run the same play to win.

Finance teams today are likely playing shorthanded due to talent shortages and demands to take on more responsibilities.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to help.

In this article, you’ll learn why AI is so crucial for finance teams today and explore how Planful approaches AI as a tool to improve financial processes.

Hungry for more? Get access to our on-demand webinar, “AI’s Impact on FP&A,” hosted in partnership with The CFO Leadership Council.

Your team is becoming more and more distracted by business complexity.

Changes to the playing field — economic, competitive, regulatory, etc. — require more speed and agility to improve reaction times. And, errors, lack of transparency, and manual effort add to the process friction and your frustrations.

AI and generative AI (Gen AI) are now at the “peak of inflated expectations,” according to Gartner. And the AI use case extends well beyond just the Office of the CFO.

• Sales teams use AI to listen in on sales calls and offer conversion improvements.
• Marketing teams use AI to improve content clarity and conciseness in blog posts.
• People teams use AI to better engage with top candidates.

It’s time for CFOs and finance teams to embrace AI alongside their non-finance counterparts.

To be clear, AI is much more than a trend or buzzword. When applied strategically, it holds tremendous potential to transform the way FP&A operates for the better.

Within finance, the subset of AI called machine learning (ML) predicts values, finds patterns, determines relationships, and more by analyzing and learning from relevant data.

Think of how your phone identifies the faces in a photo. To overly simplify the technology, ML has analyzed countless images to compare and recognize facial contours and expressions. ML can do the same with financial data, too.

At Planful, our vision is to provide a complete, off-the-shelf AI solution for structured and dynamic planning use cases. We’re bringing that vision to life by working to augment everything in Planful with AI and ML so our customers can make more informed decisions across the business.

Planful customers already use AI/ML in our Planful Predict suite of native, purpose-built solutions for finance AI/ML products.

How Planful harnesses AI sets us apart from others in the financial performance management space because our in-house experts understand the real frustrations faced by finance teams. Our tool is purpose-built for AI to tackle complex technical needs.

Here are just a few challenges to creating a credible AI-powered solution for finance:

• Data insufficiency: More than a few years of data is needed to render accurate AI-driven predictions.
• One size does not fit all: Many AI technology developers sell solutions that aren’t specifically built for finance.
• Productization: Many AI solutions are tacked-on components or outsourced rather than embedded into a purpose-built finance platform using proprietary technology and expertise.

We’re solving these three challenges and more with Predict.

Predict automates the discovery of anomalies and missing data, projects sales, budget, and other forecasts to pressure-test assumptions, and drastically simplifies and accelerates planning for folks in the business while increasing accuracy.

Predict goes further in how it understands financial data to improve seasonality assumptions, spot potential errors before they make it into the plan, and reduce review cycles.

Where Predict really shines is with a feedback loop that improves effectiveness over time. As customers evaluate Predict outputs, the underlying AI/ML gets better and better, saving the customer more and more time.

That’s not just for finance and accounting teams but for the business and budget owners who can quickly build intelligent projections with fewer errors and more fidelity to actual business performance.

Planful’s AI/ML capabilities are critical for identifying anomalies in financial data, reducing manual effort, and increasing trust in the data, which all combine to slash FP&A cycle times. The added confidence then lets finance teams focus more on delivering insights and guidance to the business.

When Rocket Software invested in Planful, the company was able to use Predict to spot potential errors in data and create hyper-accurate forecasts.

“Planful Predict looks at our historical data and highlights anomalies where our inputs might not match with those historical trends,” says Luis Martinez, Sr. Manager, FP&A at Rocket Software. “It is a great way to pressure test our assumptions and add value to our decision-making.”

With Predict handling the heavy lifting, Luis is able to focus on making strong financial decisions to support the company’s growth. Plus, thanks to Planful’s user-friendly interface, non-finance staff at Rocket Software can also create precise forecasts quickly and easily.

An AI-enabled finance function relies heavily on the irreplaceable value of human judgment and creativity.

It’s a common joke that AI is here to steal your job, the same as with spreadsheets in the 1980s. The new technology won’t replace you — but a person using it might.

Ready to transform your FP&A processes with AI? Register for our on-demand webinar, “AI’s Impact on FP&A,” in partnership with the CFO Leadership Council.

Or, get a demo to see Planful in action.