The Excel spreadsheet has been the tried, trusted canvas for financial and business planning data for more than 40 years. A common language for generations of CFOs spanning every country on the planet.
I’m not here to tell you it’s going anywhere soon. I’m fluent in spreadsheet myself, and I’m deep in Excel weekly if not more.
AI has evolved well past the experimental phase, and already shows signs of replacing Excel as the planning canvas of choice - for this generation and future ones.
Among the latest evolutions for enterprise applications like AI forecasting software is “agentic” AI, as Lucas Mearian reports in Computerworld.
Going beyond simple AI assistants, AI agents can autonomously plan, execute, and adapt their actions in complex, dynamic and unpredictable situations. And they’re evolving fast, particularly in the customer service space.
My friend Daniel O'Sullivan from Gartner (quoted in the article) expects that inside the next 5 years, agentic AI will resolve a full 80% of common customer service issues autonomously - with no human intervention.
“Unlike traditional GenAI tools,” he says, “agentic AI will proactively resolve service requests on behalf of customers, marking a new era in customer engagement.”
But what about finance or business planning as a whole? What about budgeting, planning or forecasting?
Before you start building agentic AI into your tech stack - let alone the change management involved in rolling it out - first ask yourself if you’ve got the AI essentials in your business planning:
Is your FP&A software purpose-built for the AI era (like Una) so you can keep pace with the competition? Or just have an add-on assistant so you can check the AI box?
Visit our site to see why - as we put it - plans have changed.
And if you do want to learn more about the future of agentic AI, visit ComputerWorld at:
Ready to take control of your budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting? Schedule a demo and see how Una’s financial planning & analysis software can work for you.
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