Good morning. There’s a dirty little secret in finance—and maybe even in your own organization: A lot of planning is happening in Excel spreadsheets, a technology that’s roughly 40 years old. I recently sat down with Ben Pierce, general manager of Workday Adaptive Planning. He has spent 20 years in the industry watching the same cycle repeat itself in the finance department at many companies: someone pulls data from a planning system, dumps it into a spreadsheet, shares it, someone else creates a copy, and then no one knows which version is the source of truth. “Quite frankly, Excel is still the number one planning and analytics solution for the majority of our FP&A professionals,” Pierce said. But Workday, No. 430 on the Fortune 500, is betting that Adaptive Decision Intelligence, a new feature within Adaptive Planning—its FP&A and enterprise planning platform—will break that cycle for companies. Adaptive Decision Intelligence pulls together data from Workday’s own HCM and financials products, but also from external systems like Salesforce and Snowflake and even personal file storage like Google Drive or OneDrive. The idea is simple: give FP&A teams a governed, auditable, collaborative environment to do the work they’re already doing, just without the Excel challenges. FP&A transformation is underway across industries, driven by AI, autonomous finance, and hyper-personalized workflows, according to Deloitte. That means static reports and reactive forecasting are giving way to AI-driven, real-time scenario planning. Pierce posed the question: what does an FP&A analyst actually spend their time on? The answer, he says, isn’t building budgets— it’s wrangling data to figure out why something is off, and what to do about it. “The majority of the time our users are spending is on things like this,” he said. “Not actually on creating the budget.” That’s where the AI piece comes in. Using natural language prompts, users can ask the system to pull actuals, combine them with uploaded CSVs, detect mismatches, and build out a financial model—all while showing its work step by step. In a demo he showed me, the system flagged that EMEA revenue was $187,000 below plan and offered to investigate further. The interface itself is generated on the fly based on what the user is asking, rather than relying on pre-built dashboards. Pierce made a point of emphasizing that none of this happens outside the platform’s governance guardrails, which is a key distinction from simply feeding data into a public large language model. Workday acquired Adaptive in 2018 for around $1.5 billion. Today, the product serves more than 7,000 customers, roughly 4,000 of which run Adaptive on top of non-Workday systems. Adaptive Decision Intelligence is currently in early adopter testing, with a broader rollout targeted for this fall, Pierce said.
Sheryl Estrada [email protected]
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