Let AI Agents Lift a Load from Your FP&A Shoulders

What is an AI Agent?  

We’re all familiar with chatbots, either through systems like ChatGPT or through customer service operations on apps and websites. A chatbot is the way in which AI tells us something; it gives us information, answers questions, or asks for basic information about our query or complaint to speed things up when we talk to a human representative. 

An AI agent is the next evolution of this familiar use. Rather than telling you something, an AI agent will do something for you or on your behalf. 

It’s very much like having an assistant take care of making a purchase or a booking or run a report or pull some numbers for you, once you’ve made a decision about something you need to buy, book or know. The only difference is that in this case you’re giving the instructions to a computer rather than a person. 

Advantages of AI Agents as Assistants

AI agents are an ideal fit for this kind of work, because there is no advantage that humans bring to the tasks through being human. If you need to put an event in your calendar, or compare prices for an item across sites, or turn some recipes into a shopping list and order the items on the list, there’s no aspect of human creativity or intelligence required. 

On the contrary, AI is better suited to this sort of task, because it’s less likely to make mistakes. It never copies and pastes from the wrong place, never gets tired or stressed or frustrated, and never gets distracted half way through. It doesn’t get overwhelmed by needing to do many tasks at the same time, either.

If you’re comparing to a human assistant, an AI agent never needs time off or a weekend. It’s always there, always ready to work and, if you have an ongoing task you want monitored in the background (such as keeping track of when a particular gadget goes on sale below a specific price) it never goes to sleep. 

FP&A is a complicated job. AI is here to help

FP&A is an especially fascinating area of finance, and although it requires the understanding of a company’s current and historical financial reality that all finance roles do, it’s unique in its focus on strategy, impactful recommendations and especially on the future. 

It’s also unusual in the extent to which it requires FP&A professionals to be aware of data coming from across the organization and the way in which different numbers, facts, projects, plans etc. interact with and affect one another. 

Being effective and successful in FP&A requires in-depth understanding of a business, its audience, its industry and its strategy. It requires agility to mitigate risk and grasp opportunities. It requires communication and narrative skills, to build a shared comprehension across stakeholders and departments and achieve buy-in on shared goals.

In short, FP&A is a complicated job and AI is not about to replace you . What AI can do in FP&A, however, is take on the work that otherwise gets in the way of you performing that core role well, and give you the information you need to do your job even better. 

FP&A AI Agents Use Cases

FP&A professionals can use AI agents to handle a lot of the heavy lifting that takes time and energy out of their day, prevent errors creeping in, streamline data management and reporting, and ensure that the right information is at their fingertips whenever they need it. 

Some of the tasks that FP&A teams are already using Firmbase’s AI-powered platform for include:

• Combine and analyze data from across departments. Data silos, manual data entry and irregular or infrequent uploads or syncs are the enemies of accuracy and understanding what’s really going on in a business. With a platform like Firmbase, you can combine information from across departments and systems for a single source of truth that an AI agent – and the human giving the instructions – can query whenever needed. 
• Automated FP&A insights. FP&A needs to be able to understand the complex business reality of the company, including relevant external factors. Being able to flag any unexpected changes and instantly analyze their projected impact is extremely valuable, and can be done more easily and continuously by agentic activity than by a human. 
• Predictive planning. The more real-time information you can work with, the more accurate your predictions and the planning based on them can be. 
• Identity data errors. Errors are inevitable, but they can cause serious issues in terms of accuracy, confidence and time required to resolve. All of this can have a real financial impact on a company. With AI agents automating, tracking and flagging issues, errors become less likely to occur, and more likely to be caught quickly and resolved when they do happen. 
• Answer questions in seconds. Working out business drivers, or generating reports on financial details, KPIs, or how a department or project is measuring up in terms of performance or budget versus actuals used to take meticulous, time-consuming work. With AI agents, all you need to do is type in the question in order to receive the answer within seconds. 

Each organization is different, and some FP&A teams may particularly value AI agents for use cases not included in this article, although the general uses above can save time and add value and speed for any company. 

One of the advantages of AI agents is that they work for you; you give the instructions, and they carry them out 24/7. So whatever burdens your FP&A team, it’s worth exploring whether AI agents can help. 

Alignment Across the Organization 

FP&A stands out within an organization for the way in which it is integrated with, has visibility into, and aims to impact the totality of the company. In some organizational structures this is even reflected by pairing FP&A professionals as business partners within other departments. 

Since impacting many departments, stakeholders and projects is an inherent part of the FP&A function (particularly taking a view over a year or more), success within FP&A depends on a number of key elements. FP&A must be able to view and work with cross-organizational data effectively. Good relationships and communication within the organization are crucial. Lastly, impact will be minimal without building shared buy-in for cross-departmental strategy. 

AI agents make all of this far easier. For example:

• Pull reports right away for whatever you need to know as part of a discussion on pricing, business drivers, revenue, projections and more. This makes it data-driven, not personal. 
• Non-financial folks can get it even without any level of technical expertise, simply by learning to ask the right questions to the agent.
• Regular, shared reports can be provided automatically in automated fashion, ensuring alignment that’s continuous across the organization. 
• Make the big picture accessible once all work systems are connected in a single platform, from marketing to sales to HR to CS and more.
• Create a new model in moments to examine the impact of suggested changes or projects. 

As with everything else, AI can’t replace the vital human touch. Relationships, communication, discussions, compromises, decision-making and continuous check-ins to ensure alignment can’t be handed over to a machine. 

What AI agents can do for FP&A teams is make all of this easier, smoother, and far more likely to be successful. If you’re not already exploring how this could empower your team, it’s time to start. We’d love to chat.