At a Glance

  • Workday announced a new artificial intelligence capability on Wednesday aimed at streamlining financial planning and analysis workflows, the enterprise software giant said.
  • The new capability, called Adaptive Decision Intelligence, extends the company's Adaptive Planning platform and is designed to let teams ask questions in natural language and complete scenario analyses in minutes while pulling data from multiple enterprise systems.
  • "At the end of the day, what we want to do for users is make their lives easier, make them more productive, and help them focus on more strategic work rather than just processing data and trying to piece together spreadsheets," Ben Pierce, general manager of Workday Adaptive Planning, said in an interview.

Deep Dive

Enterprise software vendors are increasingly embedding AI into corporate finance and other business functions.

Last week, OneStream announced an expansion of its agentic AI capabilities, allowing interoperability with third-party systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot. Earlier this month, SAP launched an AI suite targeting a broad range of finance functions, including cash management, tax, planning, and billing.

Workday said its latest tool aims to address a core challenge in FP&A: teams often spend days pulling data from siloed systems, slowing down analysis.

"Today, planning and analysis is a fragmented process. On one hand, there is a governed planning environment that supports budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, where structure, control, and audit trails are critical," the company said in a press release. "On the other hand, there is ad hoc work and urgent requests, which often live in one-off spreadsheets used to answer pressing questions, test new ideas, or consolidate data that hasn't been modeled yet."

Pierce said Workday is not positioning the new capability as a complete replacement for spreadsheets, arguing that tools like Microsoft Excel may still remain in financial workflows even as enterprises automate more analysis and data preparation tasks.

"I think for years people have said, 'We're going to get people off Excel,' and I don't think that's ever going to happen," he said. "Excel has its place. I use Excel all the time. But I think this will allow people to not have to use Excel for the complex analysis they need to do and be able to move faster."

Workday said its new feature is designed to run scenario models and feed 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.

For example, when a region misses its targets, finance leaders can combine actuals and plans from Adaptive Planning with sales pipeline and staffing data for that region to identify whether the issue stems from weaker sales coverage, lower conversion rates, or declining productivity, Workday said.

The capability is built on Workday's existing security and permissions framework, preserving auditability and access controls, according to the press 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.