FEATURE
Michael Lengenfelder , Head of FP & A Product Management at Unit4 line-of-business leaders . This context is crucial and FP & A professionals must extract it to create a financial performance story that the business understands and trusts . The Actuals may state that marketing has significantly underspent in the first quarter , but the factors influencing this situation can only be extracted by interrogating the data and speaking to stakeholders .
Today , this is too difficult for GenAI . Vendors are building specialist versions of these tools , but they are still quite generic , which means it will be difficult to personalise analysis to an individual FP & A story .
Good FP & A reporting is indisputable
The more pragmatic approach is acknowledging that FP & A teams already have a pretty good model for reporting and telling an indisputable story about an organisation . Building a budget and forecast , then reviewing progress by comparing Actuals to Forecast provides a solid foundation for identifying variances . Today , an FP & A team can examine these deviations by testing assumptions in subplans more quickly than it takes to setup , train and validate the results from a GenAI tool .
In the future , if such tools can absorb all the relevant information within an FP & A plan , understand the nuances of an individual organisation , as well as the impact of external forces on that plan , then GenAI will be able to take on greater responsibility .
That role will rapidly expand in the coming years as the technology matures but , today , FP & A professionals are critical to the storytelling around financial performance . In the next 12 months , FP & A professionals should be
Today , an FP & A team can examine these deviations by testing assumptions in subplans more quickly than it takes to setup , train and validate the results from a GenAI tool .
available to understand the technology and its capabilities , then begin to map out what needs to be put in place to expand its use case . The responsibilities of FP & A professionals will likely change in the future , but thinking now about how GenAI can be integrated into your FP & A storytelling , it will create new opportunities for FP & A professionals . �
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