Why Your AI Worries Are Misplaced with FP&A

If you approach FP&A the way Firmbase’s clients do, as a way to impact your organization by bridging between financial reality and business strategy to avoid risk and grasp opportunities, than not only is AI not going to take your job, it’s going to help make your job what you’ve always wanted it to be. 

AI Fears Are Widespread

If you have been worrying about AI, you’re not the only one. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 32% of people in the US trust AI. More than 3 in 5 people express concern over AI-driven misinformation. And within a professional context, 58% of people worry about job displacement due to automation. In other words, they’re afraid AI will steal their job. 

Some of this comes from fear of the unknown. Some of it probably comes from years of stories and movies about the dangers of autonomous artificial intelligence. But some of it is based on a realistic understanding of AI’s strengths and advantages.

Crucially, AI is better at certain things than humans, or will soon be. Machines don’t need sleep, and they don’t need breaks, they just need more computing power, a larger GPU cluster. Machines are fast, do not become less accurate at repetitive tasks over time, don’t get bored, and don’t get distracted. 

Why FP&A Professionals Shouldn’t Fear AI

There are some jobs where AI’s strengths do present a threat. Manufacturing and logistics centers have already been revolutionized by automation, agriculture looks set to see similar shifts with autonomous robots, and professions which revolve around data entry or similar repetitive manual tasks are obviously at risk from a computer that can do the same things faster. 

That said, the picture is much less gloomy than the fears might suggest. According to a report from McKinsey, 20-50 million entirely new jobs, in a range of industries, will likely be created by AI by 2030. 

Moreover, FP&A specifically is an area which stands to benefit significantly from AI, rather than suffer from it. FP&A is by its nature a highly strategic role, assisting an organization in making data-driven decisions that keep the company agile to handle immediate challenges and positioned to avoid risks and optimize the value of opportunities in the longer term. 

It’s also fundamentally grounded in people and relationships. It doesn’t matter how great a piece of analysis is, or how perfectly attuned to the market and the business various recommendations might be, if they aren’t adopted internally. FP&A needs to help make sure that stakeholders are speaking the same business language and building mutually understood and supported goals.

The Advantages of AI for FP&A

What AI can help you with is to take on the time-consuming and frequently frustrating routine work that slows down FP&A professionals and distracts them from the analytical, interpretive, collaborative and strategic aspects of their role. 

FP&A work has to be based on a foundation of data. That inevitably requires a level of maintenance, review and laborious low-level data entry, calculation and assessment. Leveraging AI, that can change. 

For example, Firmbase’s Model Integrity AI agent is always on in the background, carrying out thousands of statistical checks to protect financial models and data from errors. When any anomalies, errors or inconsistencies are detected from any source, whether that’s an organization’s HRIS, CRM, ERP etc., it flags these issues in ways that fit seamlessly into a team’s workflow. 

Some of the advantages of using an agent like this include:

• Being able to catch mistakes like this in real time can save a huge amount of time and aggravation untangling the consequences of an error later on. 
• Gives a team consistent confidence in the data they’re working with.
• Helps different departments work together smoothly, with any gaps in expectations, definitions or performance caught early on to enable swift, easy resolution. 
• Having access to reliable, up-to-date information means teams can respond quickly to any changes or challenges with decisions based on reliable data. 
• Finding hidden trends and anomalies. 

AI can help FP&A teams level up in terms of efficiency, accuracy and collaboration. Where once it might have taken hours or even days to work out how pricing changes may impact revenue predictions, with AI agents like Firmbase’s, it’s as easy as typing in the question. FP&A professionals can then spend their time working out what the best thing to do about it is, and working with the relevant internal stakeholders to make sure that happens.

With AI, FP&A teams can compare plans and budgets, flag inconsistencies, analyze data from diverse sources and systems, and much more – all at the click of a button. Some of these features can even run automatically in the background. 

Instead of repeatedly handling routine tasks that a computer can do, FP&A professionals can spend their valuable time on activities like:

• Using the results of the analysis to assure the financial health of the business
• Determining what further questions need to be asked
• Uniting the information from across the business in ways that illuminate the current reality and any future risks or opportunities
• Ensuring relevant stakeholders are informed about changes as necessary, and help departments work together to achieve shared goals 

AI can’t do any of these things. Leveraging AI, however, FP&A teams can do much more of them. 

The Time to Start is Now

The AI wave has only just begun. It has huge potential, but companies that lag behind out of fear will need to catch up at a time when others are racing ahead. At this stage effective early adoption is a competitive advantage, but it won’t be long before failure to adopt will be a liability. 

The leap in generative AI has meant that it’s already available in forms that can make a meaningful difference to success. This is not an interesting technical evolution R&D gets excited about, but a way to level up a business that improves productivity, internal collaboration, and the bottom line. 

FP&A teams shouldn’t be concerned about the advent of AI. For FP&A specifically, AI is exactly what the profession – and the professionals working in it – need.