blogHow AI agents can improve scenario planning for FP&A
AI agents are everywhere. It can sometimes seem as though there’s a new AI agent application out every week, with companies such as Meta, Amazon, Priceline, Instacart and many others adding agentic AI features, launching agentic products and in the news for it all.
Given the noise, it’s not surprising that the huge potential of AI agents to improve scenario planning for FP&A, and enhance and streamline other areas within finance and FP&A, are sometimes overlooked.
At Firmbase, however, these uses are very much in the spotlight, and we’re seeing firsthand how effective AI agents are in making scenario planning and other tasks more effective, more efficient, and much easier.
AI Agents are an Ideal Fit for Scenario Planning
Scenario planning helps businesses to prepare to avoid risk and grasp opportunities ahead of them, by mapping out possible future scenarios and their impact on the business. Often, scenario planning includes assessing both how likely certain scenarios are, and how dramatic their effects would be on the company.
If your company is sensitive to the price of a commodity such as metals, food or fuel, or to supply chain disruptions, or to areas of governmental regulation, then it pays to be prepared in advance for what shifts might look like, and what they would mean for your company.
To do this effectively, you need to be looking at a lot of data. Just looking at the examples above, factors such as climate, weather, industry disruption (such as a disease affecting crops or animals, or a disaster impacting mines, refineries etc.), shipping flexibility and resilience, geopolitical changes, regulatory alterations, governmental policy shifts and more all need to be taken into account.
Humans can analyze this kind of data, but it’s time-consuming and difficult work. That’s problematic for scenario planning, which needs to be up-to-date to be most relevant, and working with data that’s as real time as possible.
It’s no problem for AI agents, though. AI agents can work with real-time data at huge scale, to crunch the numbers whenever needed to get the results your business needs to know.
AI Agents Take Scenario Planning to the Next Level
The effect of AI agents in scenario planning plays out over a number of areas, including:
- Increasing the number of data points included without increasing manhours required for analysis
- Speeding up the process
- Creating automated insights on demand
- Identifying and helping to avoid data errors
- Ensuring data from across the organization is included
- Running budget vs. actuals on auto-pilot
The overall impact of including AI agents in scenario planning is that you don’t just get the same scenario planning process made more efficient, but rather get a genuinely upgraded version of scenario planning.
Your FP&A team will be able to understand more scenarios, more accurately assess their impact on the business, and be better equipped to mitigate risks and grasp opportunities.
Integrating AI Agents Enables FP&A Professionals to Shine
There’s sometimes a fear that incorporating AI makes humans less valuable, but here the opposite is true.
The value of FP&A teams isn’t that they’re good at crunching the numbers as part of scenario planning. It’s that:
- They are good at working out which numbers, from where, and in which way, should be involved
- They’re good at understanding the scenarios and why certain results need to be planned for
- They’re good at prioritizing which scenarios to invest in hedging against, and where it’s possible to kill more than scenario with the same well positioned stone
- They’re good at turning the plans into actions, getting other stakeholders on board, and following up to make sure the business has what it needs
With AI agents taking on more of the detailed data work, FP&A professionals can invest their time where it really counts to maximize the impact and success of FP&A in and for the organization.
