The Future of Finance with SensibleAI™ Forecast

Getting Started with SensibleAI Forecast

Real-World Impact: Stake Center Locating

Accelerated Time to Value

Reimagining AI-Powered Planningwith SensibleAI Forecast

The Challenges of Traditional Forecasting

Transforming Financial and Operational Planning with SensibleAI Forecast

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The Future of Finance with SensibleAI™ Forecast

Today, finance and operational teams are under increasing pressure to drive efficiency, improve accuracy, and enhance forecasting capabilities. Yet traditional methods of planning and forecasting can no longer keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions.

Those dynamics leave finance with a unique vantage point facing a diverse set of challenges simultaneously: external forces, internal complexities, and siloed operations (see Figure 1).

EXTERNAL FORCES

INTERNAL COMPLEXITIES

SILOED OPERATIONS

Macroeconomic Impacts Supply Chains Prices Competition

More Enterprise Systems Integration Challenges Inefficient Reporting & Analysis Tools

Siloed Decision-making Limited Decision Support Lack of Agility

Figure 1: Traditional Challenges in the Office of the CFO

As captured in OneStream’s recently released survey Finance 2035: Return to Investment, the role of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is more important than ever today. In fact, CFOs overwhelmingly agreed on why that’s the case:

75%

of CFOs report that expectations on CFOs have multiplied over the last 3–5 years. As this pressure intensifies, CFOs will need to expand and strenghten their already diverse skill sets to remain impactful.

The survey also revealed significant barriers to the Office of the CFO’s success: siloed approaches, limitations of legacy tech, and a talent crunch (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Barriers to the Office of the CFO’s Success

SILOED APPROACH

LEGACY TECH

TALENT CRUNCH

70%

72%

78%

identify limited cross-functional collaboration as a significant barrier

identify legacy systems and technology limitations

identify skill gaps in the finance department

These survey results underscore the enormous opportunity for finance to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). With AI and ML, finance can transform forecasting and planning processes across the enterprise, making them more efficient and effective.

Transforming Financial and Operational Planning with SensibleAI Forecast

Transformation is where OneStream’s SensibleAI Forecast comes in. With this transformative, AI-powered solution, organizations can unify the power of machine learning with enterprise business planning.

Unified ML-powered financial and operational forecasting within OneStream, enabling real-time, AI-driven insights. This single-source of truth eliminates silos and enhances cross-functional collaboration between finance and other departments (e.g., sales, operations, marketing, and HR).

SensibleAI Forecast is purpose-built for finance teams, offering the following:

Scalable AI-driven planning platform that future-proofs organizations by adapting to evolving financial and operational needs.

No-code AI adoption empowers finance and operational professionals without requiring expensive and limited data science expertise.

The Challenges of Traditional Forecasting

With traditional forecasting, many finance teams struggle with outdated forecasting methods that rely heavily on manual processes and a very narrow set of historical data.

Traditional forecasting methods typically rely on historical data and only incorporate a few drivers or variables. By ignoring external variables like macroeconomic data, demographic data, or weather, finance is not generating the most accurate forecast possible.

Lack of External Variables

Static forecasting models fail to adapt to rapid economic changes.

Market Volatility

The increasing volume of enterprise data makes it difficult to extract meaningful insights.

Data Overload

Legacy tools require significant human intervention, leading to inefficiencies, biases, and inaccuracies. These manual methods lack the scale to model at a granular level and across all areas of the business.

Manual Effort & Scale

Here are some of the common challenges:

Reimagining AI-Powered Planning with SensibleAI Forecast

SensibleAI Forecast addresses the outlined challenges by using AI-driven automation to generate more accurate, scalable, and agile financial forecasts.

No-Code AutoML Forecasting

Purpose-built AI for finance and operations enables no-code forecasting. For the entire ML-forecasting process, business planners are independently creating ML-backed forecasts — from data ingestion and quality to model building, utilization, and consumption.

Auto-Ingestion of Internal and External Variables

Built-in connectors automatically retrieve external data such as weather, interest rates, and other macroeconomic indicators. These variables can be used to improve the accuracy and efficiency of a prediction.

Dynamic Models Adapt to Changing Data

Models re-build as data changes and an AutoML model engine handpicks individual models for each prediction. In addition, models adapt down to the lowest level of forecast granularity (e.g. by product-location-customer). This process ensures unmatched accuracy for each forecast for each intersection — at scale for hundreds and thousands of intersections at once.

Built-In Data Management

No-code ingestion, cleansing, and manipulation of detailed operational data is possible from any source. Sources include point-of-sale (POS) systems, data warehouses (DW), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and multidimensional cube data.

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Here are some of the key value distinctions:

Accelerated Time to Value

It boils down to five key tenants:

SensibleAI Forecast automatically analyzes past trends and both internal and external factors. As a result, SensibleAI solution delivers on average, across all our customers, 25%+ accuracy improvements over traditional forecasting methods.

AI-Driven Forecasting Accuracy

With OneStream’s proprietary AutoML engine, finance teams can produce forecasts in a fraction of the time required by legacy models. SensibleAI Forecast reduces the time needed to create a forecast for all our customers by an average of 85%+. This improved efficiency enables organizations to run more frequent forecasts, model different scenarios, and proactively prepare for the future.

Automated & Scalable Predictions

The “black box” problem common in AI applications is eliminated by ensuring full visibility into data sources, modeling assumptions, and forecast drivers. Plus, out-of-box transparency dashboards highlight the influence of each variable across the portfolio or on individual predictions for each product-location combination.

Built-In Trust & Transparency

SensibleAI Forecast’s AutoML solution is purpose-built for the Office of CFO. With the solution, AI-driven forecasting and predictive insights take weeks — not years — compared to traditional “do-it-yourself” (DIY) AI projects.

SensibleAI Forecast eliminates the complexity, cost, and delays associated with building AI models from scratch, ensuring a faster, more efficient path to value. While most DIY AI projects never reach production, 100% of SensibleAI Forecast models do. What Makes SensibleAI Forecast different?

AutoML brings the power of ML forecasting to business users, accelerating development of use cases within SensibleAI Forecast. With rapid model deployment, users are empowered to create diverse forecasting use cases from rolling 12-month profit and loss (P&L) projections to short-term demand sensing. That capability maximizes the value of AI across the organization.

Democratized & Agile Forecasting

ML is natively unified within OneStream and functionally unified across business planning processes, ensuring consistency, alignment, and ease of adoption across the business.

Unification

Real-World Impact: Stake Center Locating

onestream.com

191 N. Chester Street Birmingham, MI 48009

Phone: +1.248.650.1490 sales@onestreamsoftware.com

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Are you ready to transform your finance function with AI?

Schedule your demonstration now to see how SensibleAI Forecast can empower your team today!

Customer Story: Stake Center

Stake Center Locating, a leading professional services company in the locating industry, struggled with creating forecasts due to the variable nature of projects and client demands. Similarly, the company faced challenges in predicting workload and resource allocation for underground utility locating services.

With SensibleAI Forecast, Stake Center Locating achieved the following:

15 – 20%

improvement in forecast accuracy of ticket volumes, which translated into millions of dollars in savings

10 million

work orders evaluated each year

A shift

With AI-driven insights, the finance team gained confidence in its ability to proactively manage financial risks and opportunities. Further, the staggering numbers Stake Center Locating realized show that SensibleAI Forecast undeniably delivers accelerated time to value and millions in savings for our customers. Regarding AI/ML, the most common question asked by customers is, David Kennedy, CIO of Stake Center Locating, recommends that organizations looking to get started with their AI journey “just do it.”

from quarterly and annual forecasts to a daily forecast for the following 2 weeks, updated weekly

“

How do we get started?”

OneStream’s SensibleAI Forecast ensures finance professionals can harness the power of AI without needing specialized technical knowledge. As a result of this democratization of AI, the barrier to entry is significantly lowered when implementing SensibleAI Forecast. The goal is to start small and gain quick wins to deliver the most value in a short period.

Getting Started with SensibleAI Forecast

To help achieve that goal, OneStream’s AI team partners with our customers to find the right use case to start using SensibleAI Forecast before expanding to other areas. We see our customers starting with the following use cases:

Any area within the organization that represents a significant percentage of revenues or margins

Any area within the organization with the biggest forecasting variances compared to actuals

Any area within the organization with the cleanest data

Finance leaders who adopt AI-driven forecasting today will gain a competitive advantage and improve business resilience in an unpredictable market.

Conclusion

AI and machine learning are no longer futuristic concepts — they are essential tools for modern finance teams. With SensibleAI Forecast, organizations can move beyond manual forecasting and DIY AI projects. Organizations can then achieve unprecedented accuracy, efficiency, and agility in a fraction of the time and cost of standard processes.

Conclusion