Paul Barnhurst argues that generative AI's real value in financial planning is enabling collaboration across teams, not just producing forecasts. He calls out annual budgeting as a months-long process that's outdated by Q1, leaving people exhausted and unwilling to do it again.
The cool thing I think about generative AI is not about forecasting in terms of like, hey, let's produce models and algorithms are going to spit out time series numbers. How do we facilitate broad scale collaboration and make it really, really easy? And I think Agentic AI is actually really good for that. So I think that's another area that's emerging on the FP&A side. Here's the analogy, right? Like right now everyone does an annual budget. It's really time consuming. You got to get all these stakeholders, you got to wrangle them in and they got to do a plan. And then you come up with a plan, takes months between Essentially, by the time you get there to the end, you finish Q1, you're like, this is all out of date. Now you got to do a reforecast. And it's like, well, I'm not doing that again. Like, I'm not going back to the 100 people and wrangling them. They don't even want to be part of it.
Trust and Leadership Lessons for FP&A From 100+ Top Leaders with CFO Jon Laudie
