How to Create Automated FP&A Insights using AI

“Just when you thought your toaster couldn’t get any smarter, CES 2025 is about to prove you wrong… promising to stuff artificial intelligence into literally everything that has a power button.” That’s Quartz’s summary of the year’s biggest tech show. Some of those AI innovations are going to be more useful than others – but if you’re in FP&A, Firmbase’s automated AI insights are a must. And they’re not the promise of the future; they’re already here.

Why FP&A Needs Automated Insights

FP&A is a job for a human. It requires solid financial knowledge and acumen, deep appreciation of the business and how it fits into the landscape of competitors and customers, excellent communication skills, stellar analytical abilities including being able to assess tradeoffs objectively, and a kind of intuition that only comes with time on the job.

At the same time, doing FP&A well also requires crunching huge amounts of data, tracking trends, and making actionable and relevant recommendations in a world where things change fast and frequently. Within that context, FP&A also have to stay alert for any signs that something is not as anticipated, whether that’s in terms of the factors that went into a prediction, business unit economics, workforce efficiency or strategy, or straight data errors.

It’s too much for any human. Doing it right, in other words, needs automated assistance.

Why AI is Ideal for the Job

Given the huge amounts of data and complexity of the patterns involved, AI is a natural tool for the job. It’s designed for precisely the aspects of the job that humans find tedious and repetitive, and does them more efficiently and more accurately than humans do – leaving people with the time and mental energy to leverage the results for analysis, strategy, and more.

Creating automated FP&A insights using AI can ease the burden for a wide range of aspects of the FP&A role, including:

Using regular language queries to answer vital business questions on the fly
Generating reports as needed
Identifying errors
Flagging anomalies or unexpected events
Unraveling key drivers
Creating custom plans

Leveraging AI for insights like these can make the difference between a job that uses the sophisticated skills of an FP&A professional effectively, enabling the business to see and grasp opportunities and avoid problems ahead of time… and a job that is mostly spent on unnecessary manual work. FP&A teams using Firmbase find that they reduce their manual load by as much as 80%.

Business Data Analysis

Many key FP&A insights revolve around strictly financial data. But the thing that makes FP&A stand out in an organization is the role it plays in overseeing the totality of the business reality, internally and in terms of external market and audience factors, and its function of being future-focused, preparing the organization to make the most of what lies ahead. That might start with financial data, but it’s also about business data more broadly.

One of the things that teams using Firmbase value so highly about our AI-first platform is that it empowers roles across the organization to collaborate using a unified business language, based on a shared understanding of business goals – all using the same platform.

Since Firmbase enables users to ask questions in natural language, and get easily understood results, with no code required, everyone in the business can suddenly be on the same page. Even better, they can all stand on a solid ground of data and analysis.

How to Create Automated FP&A Insights Using AI

Getting models to provide insights until recently required dedicated R&D resources, either from within the company or from a third party supplier. That limited what was possible, and meant that FP&A teams themselves couldn’t be fully masters of their own AI insights; they were dependent on others.

The huge advances in AI technology in the last year or two have changed the picture completely. Now, no code or development expertise is required. Models can be built in minutes to whatever specification is needed, and insights generated in real time, using up to date information.

FP&A teams need to be agile in order to stay on top of the evolving reality of their business and the markets, and now AI has become a powerful enabler of that agility.

In the case of Firmbase, creating automated FP&A insights using AI really is as easy as just asking a question, and waiting a few seconds for the agent to generate a detailed and intelligent response.

So there’s no “how to guide” we can provide with steps explaining what you need to do, because it really is that simple. However, there are some important elements to bear in mind in order to make sure you create the right insights for your business.

Creating the Right Automated FP&A Insights Using AI

A lot of these tips are similar to those you need more generally when you’re operating, as FP&A teams do, with information and impact across many departments in a business. They’re especially important to get right when it comes to AI insights, though, because how valuable the insights are depends on you creating them out of the right structure.

In a nutshell: AI can provide insights. But they’ll only be the right ones that you need, if you are careful to make sure you’re feeding the models the right data, keeping things up to date, ensuring sync across the organization, and providing the structure that makes them actionable.

Make sure data is up to date. FP&A needs to reflect the reality as it is now. The numbers you closed on last quarter aren’t going to cut it for a lot of the questions you need to ask – so make sure your systems are synced and integrated for real-time updates.
Ensure collected data reflects strategy. It’s all about the business. You need to ensure that the data you’re giving the model is what it needs to know in order to provide insights that are what you need.
Ask the right questions. AI insights are only as good as the human intelligence that inspires them. You need to ask the questions that matter, and that get to the heart of what you need to know to make a difference in the company.
Collaborate cross-departmentally. FP&A is such a fascinating field partly because it involves working with data from across the organization. To do that, you need to be clear about what you need, from which department, and you need to be confident that you’re getting the right information that reflects a shared understanding of what it represents.
Business language. Make sure you’re working with a platform that is comprehensible to people outside the finance department. Insights need to be relevant, and that means they need to be relatable to the people you’ll want to convince with them.
Communicate. It’s not just what you know, it’s how you explain it to others, that makes it impactful. AI can make it easy to get all stakeholders on the same data page, but it can’t provide the illusive but vital human factor. Regular, reliable, relatable communication is on you.

AI insights can save FP&A a lot of time and manual labor. At the end of the day, however, what makes insights truly valuable to a business is how they are put into practice.

FP&A teams leveraging automation and AI effectively through a dedicated AI-first platform can put their time to the most effective use, ensuring that insights are placed within the wider context of the business’ needs, priorities and goals, and communicating consistently and transparently with stakeholders across the company to drive understanding and impact.