Dive Brief:
- Workday is launching a new artificial intelligence capability aimed at streamlining financial planning and analysis workflows, the enterprise software giant said Wednesday.
- The new capability, called Adaptive Decision Intelligence, expands the company’s Adaptive Planning platform and is designed to let teams ask questions in natural language and perform scenario analysis in minutes, pulling data from multiple enterprise systems.
- “Ultimately, what we're trying to do for our users is make their lives easier, make them more productive and help them focus on more strategic work rather than just wrangling data and trying to mesh together spreadsheets,” Ben Pierce, general manager of Workday Adaptive Planning, said in an interview.
Dive Insight:
Enterprise software vendors are ramping up efforts to embed AI into corporate finance and other business functions.
Last week, OneStream announced that it was expanding its agentic AI capabilities, allowing interoperability with third-party systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot. Earlier in the month, SAP introduced an AI suite targeting a wide range of corporate finance functions including cash management, tax, planning and billing.
Workday said its latest tool is targeted at addressing a core FP&A challenge: teams often spend days pulling data from disconnected systems, slowing analysis work.
“Today, planning and analysis is a fragmented process. On one side, there is the governed planning environment that supports budgets, forecasts and reporting, where structure, controls and audit trails are essential,” the company said in a press release. “On the other, there is ad hoc work and urgent requests that often live in one‑off spreadsheets built to answer urgent questions, test new ideas or combine data that hasn't been modeled yet.”
Pierce said Workday is not positioning the new capability as a replacement for spreadsheets altogether, arguing that tools such as Microsoft Excel will likely remain part of finance workflows even as companies automate more analysis and data preparation tasks.
“I think people have said many times over the years, ‘We're going to move people out of Excel,’ and I don't think that ever happens,” he said. “Excel has a place. I use Excel all the time. But I think this will allow people to not have to use Excel for the complicated analysis that they need to do and be able to move a lot faster.”
Workday said its new feature is designed to run scenario models and incorporate approved decisions directly into forecasts and plans, leveraging data from the Adaptive Planning platform combined with other sources, including customer relationship management and human resources systems.
The capability is built on Workday’s existing security and permissions framework, preserving auditability and access controls, according to the release. The tool is currently available through an early adopter program and is expected to become more broadly available later this year, the company said.
