Paul BarnhurstFP&A Expert Empowering Finance Professionals to Excel Everday

Manual reporting is becoming obsolete.

5 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief interview, Paul Barnhurst asks about low‑hanging AI opportunities for FP&A teams. The guest highlights that the most immediate win is automating data access: instead of manually logging into an ERP, clicking to export a report, and configuring time‑period filters, an AI agent (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot) can retrieve the same data programmatically. While each export may only take a few minutes, the cumulative time over weeks or months adds up to hundreds of hours of work that does not require human judgment. The speaker argues that such repetitive reporting tasks should be handed over to AI agents, freeing analysts for higher‑value activities.

Chapters

What is the low-hanging fruit that you think FP&A people shouldn't be doing anymore because of AI, whether it's Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot? What's one or two low-hanging fruit that you would say, hey, if you're doing it this way, you should be rethinking how you're doing it?
Definitely around accessing data, where the way we currently access data is like you go into your ERP and you click export a report, and then you go and you configure it and you say, I'm doing this time period, but you're your agent can just go and get all that data for you without going through a UI and taking all that time. It just goes and it runs connection that gets that data right back for you. So just those things like that where they might take 5, 10 minutes, but over the course of a month, a year, it adds up to hundreds of hours where, why am I doing this work if it doesn't require my judgment? I'm just exporting the same report every time. I think it should go to agents.