5 Ways AI Can Help FP&A Leaders Navigate Uncertainty

For Greater Certainty — Embrace AI

AI IN ACTION

THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF AI FOR FINANCE

What AI for Finance Is — and Isn’t

NAVIGATING a new normal

These days the only certainty in business seems to be, well, uncertainty.

Key drivers are the tariffs’ rollercoaster, inflation risk, geopolitical tensions, market volatility, fast-changing consumer trends, and a technological revolution ushered in by advancing artificial intelligence (AI). Yet these head-spinning factors are just a sampling of what’s impacting businesses and organizations of all sizes, across all industries.

Underscoring the issue, the Fed’s March 2025 Economic Policy Uncertainty Index for the US spiked to the second highest level since tracking began in 1985. The only period that registered higher uncertainty was 2020 — fueled by the one-two punch of the COVID-19 pandemic and a contentious US presidential election. Meanwhile, the CBOE Volatility Index, which tracks fear and uncertainty in the stock market, has become prone to dramatic swings in recent months. The reason? Any number of news headlines can ultimately spark a swift spike in the fear factor among Wall Street traders.

Uncertainty and constant change are thus clearly here for the foreseeable future. From a finance perspective, this volatility can’t be ignored or tamed. However, financial planning and analysis (FP&A) leaders can effectively navigate the uncertainty in ways that mitigate risk, unearth opportunities, and create clear competitive advantages.

What's behind it?

TARIFFS

INFLATION RISK

GEOPOLITICAL TENSIONS

MARKET VOLATILITY

CHANGING CONSUMER TRENDS

TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

Navigating a New Normal

Where to begin? Well, FP&A leaders must first accept uncertainty and then invest in what will help the team and ultimately the organization navigate inevitable changes. Increasingly, that means gaining a more in-depth, nuanced understanding of the strengths and capabilities of AI. That understanding will deliver the dual benefit of vastly improved efficiency combined with unmatched analytical power. In turn, FP&A teams can address current challenges while gaining greater insight into what likely lies ahead for the business and the industry. Of course, AI is everywhere today and seemingly impacts everything. The result can be a sense of information overload, which can lead to paralysis.

What AI for Finance Is — And Isn't

Moving beyond paralysis requires excluding much of the mainstream AI hype that’s dominated by the more edgy, outlandish, or frivolous AI capabilities. Not to mention, ample prognostications swing wildly between AI ushering in unprecedented life-transforming ease and foretelling the end of civilization as we know it. All that information makes for compelling headlines, some of which surely offer a range of interesting and relevant issues and opinions. Yet for the purposes of leading the organization through turbulent times, a lot written and said about AI adds up to irrelevant noise. That noise can cloud what truly matters right now:

How can FP&A effectively invest in and integrate AI technology to operate more efficiently and effectively?

Focusing on that question adds considerable clarity. It reveals what AI for finance is — and what it’s not. For example, finance AI is built for…

Catching errors in reporting data, not flagging term-paper spelling mistakes.

Ensuring accurate financial forecasting, not predicting who will win the Super Bowl.

Bringing automation that speeds up financial processes, not shortening everyone’s coffee break.

Scrubbing forecasting numbers, not polishing resumes.

In short, AI built for finance is focused on a comparatively advanced set of tech-driven tools. Those tools are constantly being honed to maximize efficiencies and provide unprecedented analytical, predictive, and forecasting capabilities.

The Different Types of AI for Finance

Within the AI universe for finance, some specific distinctions can help clarify capabilities and target planning and investment to gain maximum benefit from the technology.

Agentic AI ingests vast amounts of data from multiple data sources and third-party applications to independently analyze, challenge, and develop strategies and execute tasks. With agentic AI, finance teams can automate complex accounting workflows by perceiving data, acting independently, and learning continuously.

Agentic AI

Gen ai

Generative AI (gen AI) can create new content/ideas and learn any complex subject matter. With gen AI, finance leaders can maintain a pulse on the business and adapt to market conditions. Finance can also predict and preempt strategic macroeconomic blockers, enhance organizational structure, and provide quick answers to evolving questions and real-time information.

Purpose-Built AI is designed with governance frameworks tailored to specific industries, geographies, and domains — such as financial services and customer service operations. Purpose-built AI helps ensure compliance, reliability, and effectiveness while maximizing business value.

purpose-built ai

5 Ways AI Can Help FP&A Leaders Navigate Uncertainty

With better clarity about what AI for finance is — and isn’t — FP&A leaders can better integrate or improve AI to maximize efficiency and improve analyses. The following five core capabilities that can help you, as an FP&A leader, navigate the uncertainty that impacts your business, the broader marketplace, and the economy.

Boost Forecast Accuracy

AI tackles head-on the myriad challenges created by traditional forecasts that, let’s face it, are often obsolete before even being completed. Today, as the pace of change and uncertainty accelerates, so does the amount of data and information necessary to forecast what lies ahead — and what the potential implications are for your company.

AI financial forecasting is not just light years more efficient, but also excels at accuracy and generating fresh insights. By leveraging machine learning (ML) algorithms, AI can analyze vast amounts of historical data and identify patterns human analysts cannot. This analysis leads to more precise, continuous predictions and helps FP&A teams make better-informed decisions. Forecasting capabilities can also be customized to meet an organization’s unique needs. For instance, Australian-based Endeavour Energy integrated OneStream into its financial forecasting process to better predict future commercial and residential energy usage. The company could utilize predictions about how the power grid would likely react to those trends.

Within a few months, Endeavour saw a game-changing drop in budget variance — from around 8% to just 1%. CFO Francoise Merit said faster, more robust, and more accurate forecasting also delivered a key ripple effect. Now, her team is free to focus on more strategic activities — which are increasingly viewed as “more relevant to the business,” ensuring finance is no longer “seen as the back office.”

Accelerate Decision-Making

When combined with faster, more accurate forecasts, AI capabilities help business leaders navigate uncertainty to make better, faster decisions — a necessity amid market volatility. AI-powered tools can process and analyze data much faster than traditional methods, providing real-time insights and recommendations. Further facilitating accelerated decision-making, AI helps establish and track key performance indicators (KPIs), such as revenue growth, expense ratios, and cash flow trends. Better budget accuracy and forecasts better aligned with actual financial performance are the result. Using advanced dashboards makes tracking KPIs easy and allows visibility to other business leaders, ensuring immediate access to real-time data to inform decisions.

Model Dynamic "What-If" Scenarios

What if?

Those two words can strike fear into the heart of finance and business leaders. That’s particularly true if their organization lacks the AI tools to help game out how to react should a “what if” become reality. Being equipped with AI, however, enables FP&A teams to quickly create and analyze various "what-if" scenarios. How? By enabling finance to process vast amounts of historical data (e.g., market trends, interest rates, economic indicators, geopolitical events) to create more realistic simulations.

In times of uncertainty and market volatility, this capability is indispensable. FP&A can, for instance, make assessments of the potential impact of different variables (e.g., tariff changes, inflation rates, regulatory changes, unexpected events impacting the market). By modeling these scenarios, FP&A professionals can better prepare for potential outcomes and develop more robust contingency plans.

Enhance Risk Management

By identifying patterns invisible to human analysts in real-time, AI improves risk management. This capability provides a more robust and precise approach to managing financial risks. With ML algorithms, AI also excels at flagging potential risks before they escalate into a full-blown problem. Those risks include data errors, cash flow issues, or emerging trends with unseen challenges. As a result, finance is equipped with early warning systems that reduce reaction time and limit exposure.

Improve Productivity and Insights

In many ways, AI takes the pressure off the FP&A team. AI can tackle time-devouring routine tasks and manual activities, freeing the team to focus on more strategic and value-driven work. Beyond handling the grunt work, AI can also uncover hidden trends and opportunities to further help FP&A pros work more proactively and strategically. The shift can serve as a key morale booster for the team, too, as they focus on more meaningful work. Then, FP&A becomes increasingly relevant and essential to business leaders across the organization looking to deliver stronger results and increase productivity within other teams.

AI in Action: How Polaris Accelerated Forecasting From Days to Hours

The key capabilities provided by AI proved transformative for Polaris, a global leader in powersports vehicles. While the company’s snowmobiles and motorcycles were lightning fast, their financial planning model was not atall fast. That challenge was amplified when COVID-19 and global supply chain turmoil ratcheted up pressure in managing production and shipments. Traditionally, those things were coordinated based on innovation and market demand. The scope and complexity of the challenges demanded the finance team operate with more speed and agility in planning and forecasting to keep pace with change. Enter OneStream’s SensibleAI™ Forecast, which offered a solution with capabilities to react to increasingly complex market changes. Before implementing OneStream, Polaris' business units relied on a highly manual financial planning model with many inputs. These included SIOP-generated shipped unit forecasts by product, product costs and MSRPs, freight cost, and dealer discounts to arrive at a gross margin view.

That sluggish process — a "driver-based revenue model” — relied on inputs such SIOP-generated shipped unit forecasts. To get a gross margin view under the model, Polaris had to forecast by product, product costs and MSRPs, freight cost, and dealer discounts to arrive at a gross margin view. The outdated model provided the perfect opportunity to incorporate ML-driven forecasting and transition to a unified planning process within OneStream. The results proved to be swift, significant, and sustainable. The Polaris finance team was able to do the following:

Replace five systems with one unified platform.

Reduce the time required to generate forecasts from days to mere hours.

Incorporate 2,800 SensibleAI Forecast models into driver-based forecasts.

Ultimately, the Polaris finance team dramatically increased the speed and accuracy of the planning and forecasting process, said Melanie Hermann, Director, Finance Process & Systems, Polaris, Inc.

“

Incorporating AI into our planning and forecasting through the OneStream SensibleAI Forecast accelerates the forecasting process and further elevates it with powerful ML data-driven forecasts. SensibleAI forecasts have shown to be more accurate, and the value-add dashboard enables the business users insights into the key features driving the forecast to easily manage, improve, and enhance the model.”

— Melanie Hermann, Director, Finance Process & Systems, Polaris, Inc.

For Greater Certainty — Embrace AI

Uncertainty clearly has an antidote — innovation.

The only way to address constant change is to embrace change within your team in the form of advancing AI technology. AI has the capability and power to allow you to pivot and react to emerging trends, unexpected events, and new threats and opportunities. While you can ignore much of the noise surrounding AI, you can’t afford to dismiss or delay how AI for finance can prove transformative. AI ultimately offers your team and your organization the path to ongoing growth and profitability.

Insight-driven forecasts, faster decision-making, dynamic scenario planning, enhanced risk management, and stronger insights and productivity can all be at your fingertips. You just need to commit to embracing and investing in AI technology. Doing so will provide much needed clarity and certainty. In turn, your organization will stay nimble, responsive, and ultimately competitive — no matter how much uncertainty exists due to market or global turmoil.

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