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Autonomous Finance - a matter of WHEN- not IF

Writer's picture: Dimitrios ChristodoulopoulosDimitrios Christodoulopoulos

A recent Gartner survey revealed that 64% of CFOs believe autonomous finance can become a reality within the next six years. However, only a few CFOs are making progress toward it.


An autonomous finance function is one in which processes and activities are partly governed and majority-operated by self-learning software agents that optimise operations. It yields augmented real-time insights, effortless compliance and greater flexibility in financial strategy with little to no human intervention.


Both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) can accelerate and enhance how Finance teams analyse and correlate the most relevant internal/external variables that contribute to forecasting accuracy and performance across all processes that comprise financial plans and results.


The adoption of AI and ML by the Office of Finance and Operations is a matter of when — not if.


But what is preventing CFOs from moving forward at this point in time? The survey highlighted 5 key barriers, with Mindset ranking the highest.

What is Sensible ML and how can it help break down the barriers?


OneStream’s first AI-enabled MarketPlace solution, Sensible ML, is designed to productise time-series ML modelling for CPM and break down the traditionally high barriers to entry of advanced analytics for organisations. Instead of taking on the burden of building models and investing into the underlying infrastructure, Sensible ML unleashes the power and sophistication of data science across Finance and Operations at scale and at a fraction of the total cost of alternative solutions.


What Use-Cases Does Sensible ML Support?


Sensible ML provides time-series forecasting capabilities with a strong focus on daily, weekly and monthly demand planning and other use cases for FP&A and operational teams. Based on the amount of historical data provided, but also the ability to take on additional business intuition such as events, pricing, competitive information and weather, Sensible ML can provide a range of predictive or ML models to help drive more precise/robust forecasting.


Here are a few examples below:


For Revenue Expense or Workforce Planning where monthly forecasts per target are required for top-down planning, Sensible ML can create predictive/statistical forecasts.


For more granular, bottom-up type forecasting by customer, product by location and/or S&OP where organisations can share hundreds of data points per target, Sensible ML can create weekly or even daily forecasts that even take into account specific intuition from the business analysis on impacts such as holidays, weather, pricing changes, competitive impacts — any intuition that is time-based.


What Business Value Does Sensible ML Provide?


Sensible ML unleashes the power of AI across enterprise planning processes. It does this by accelerating time to value for ML forecasting for CPM processes at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Sensible ML is purpose-built for Finance, Operations and Data Science teams to build, deploy and consume time-series models inside of OneStream.


Sensible ML empowers enterprise planning processes with scalable AI purpose-built for CPM, automating the creation of thousands of daily and/or weekly ML forecasts for demand planning and sales forecasting, reducing forecast bias with ML scenarios and driving better dialogue and collaboration. It also helps increase transparency and trust in forecast models with built-in drill-back capabilities and model monitoring.


Sensible ML helps organisations evolve enterprise planning processes by making ML forecasting easy for FP&A and operational analysts.


- It aids in the simplification and automation of complicated procedures carried out by teams of data scientists, business analysts, and engineers, reducing the burden on resourcing


- The typical complications from diverse development tools that impede ML deployment at scale and time-to-deployment are overcome by ML's pre-built systematised procedures and infrastructure.


- Rather than relying on generalised "top-down" models, Sensible ML generates unique forecasts by product and place by collecting business intuition to guide models and improve model performance.


- Sensible ML allows users to create, manage, and deploy ML forecasts directly from within OneStream, rather than forcing Finance teams to use multiple systems and processes that require data migration and reconciliation.


Reach out to find how PRYZM is assisting FP&A Teams Lead @ Speed from identifying and documenting Sensible ML use cases, data requirements and source data intake to setting up data sources in Analytic Blend, validating data and running through the Sensible ML model to generate predictive outputs.




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