Reimagining the Enterprise Experience With AI

In this article we discuss:

• AI-Generated Forecasting
• Automatically Integrating Data from Cloud Data Warehouses

AI is transforming every facet of business, whether organizations are ready or not. Predictions of its potential impact on society, employment, politics, culture, and business fill the media and the internet. Business leaders are intrigued by the possibilities and convinced that generative AI is truly a game changer.

But what is its role in FP&A?

It’s never been more important to be able to forecast for the future. With the rise of advanced AI models capable of surfacing complex data trends at speeds never seen before, businesses can benefit with accurate and reliable forecasts that can adapt in real time to changing macrofactors. Simply put, AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data incredibly quickly and share insights in conversational language can keep businesses ahead of the curve.

That’s where Workday Adaptive Planning enters the picture.

We’ve expanded our product capabilities by adding AI-powered, multidimensional predictive forecasting—a capability built right into the core of the application. This approach enables Workday Adaptive Planning to continue to deliver innovation natively to customers—enabling advanced planning across the enterprise for increased productivity and better decision-making.

AI-Generated Forecasting

We recently reached a significant milestone of over 1,000 customers actively leveraging AI capabilities within Workday Adaptive Planning. The adoption rate of our latest feature predictive forecaster is growing rapidly, with its use doubling every month among our customer base. With predictive forecaster, customers can take advantage of historical data to further drive predictive demand forecasts. And, thanks to real-time analysis of Workday AI, it’s also possible to incorporate other datasets to drive greater precision. This opens the door to a new kind of planning that continuously learns from data and adapts to a changing world.

We developed the predictive forecaster feature in close partnership with one of our early adopter customers Team Car Care, the largest franchisee of Jiffy Lube, with more than 500 outlets in 26 states. It has  been using the predictive forecaster feature to forecast how many customers will stop by individual Jiffy Lube stores at various times during the day, then feed that customer count into the company’s sales and workforce plans. AI will also help Team Car Care forecast how many of each of 500 products it needs to have in stock at each store and automate replenishment.

Predictive forecaster is now available to all Workday Adaptive Planning customers, with adoption across almost all industries and across customers of all sizes. A few examples of AI use cases:

• A multibillion-dollar communications company uses predictive forecaster to intelligently forecast subscriber growth in both existing and emerging markets
• A global retailer enhances product forecasting precision by analyzing SKU-level data across various customers and channels
• A large healthcare organization utilizes scenario analysis created by predictive forecaster to compare bottom-up forecasts for expenses and revenue, enhancing accuracy and strategic planning

We continue to collaborate with our customers to develop the next AI capability for Workday Adaptive Planning: conversational planning, which combines the power of generative AI with conversational user interface to enable any business customer to have a personalized experience surfacing critical data insights and collaborate with others. Conversational planning will be available to early adopter customers in 6 to 12 months.

We are also innovating the way our customers integrate their data into the planning process so that they can plan better, train models, and make more-informed decisions. Workday Adaptive Planning offers an embedded data integration platform, allowing customers to integrate a comprehensive dataset spanning financial systems, operational systems, and third-party data sources. To date, we know that our customers collectively have integrated over 350 unique source systems. Our embedded integration capability allows customers to plan with company wide data and automatically refresh the data—without being dependent on IT or coding.

Automatically Integrate Data from Cloud Data Warehouses

Continuing our commitment to supporting our customers’ data ecosystem, we are enhancing our embedded integration capability with a wizard-based connector, simplifying and expediting connections to cloud data warehouses. To start, we are excited to partner with Incorta, a Workday innovation partner, in this development and to expand our partnership with other cloud data warehouses to seamlessly fit into our customers’ data ecosystem. The connector to cloud data warehouses should be available in the second half of 2024.

At the same time, we are also seeing tremendous adoption among our Workday customers who have embraced the full financial transformation journey by deploying Workday Adaptive Planning as part of the Workday office of the CFO solution. Customers can leverage the Workday intelligent data core that blends their Workday data with third-party sources and transforms this data into detailed accounting, and then provides rich business insights to inform decision-making.

As we continue to innovate and develop our data integration platform and AI capabilities, we are committed to protecting your data, providing reliable service, and communicating transparently with our customers. We employ rigorous measures across our people, processes, and technology to help protect your data and ensure that our applications and infrastructure remain safe and resilient. 

To learn more, join us at the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference to see a live demonstration of Workday data integration and AI capabilities,and to continue the discussion.