Recruiting AI to Reach for a Focused Iteration of Financing Planning

Vena, the Complete Planning platform loved by finance and trusted by business, has officially announced the launch of Vena Copilot, which is designed to conceive state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams. Developed in collaboration with Microsoft, the stated solution combines Vena’s category-leading FP&A expertise with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service large language models, including GPT-4, to help FP&A teams increase productivity, operational efficiency, and business agility. Talk about the whole value proposition on a slightly deeper level, though, we begin from Vena Copilot’s ability to help FP&A teams easily create and train a dedicated Complete Planning AI assistant that will be built on their organizational knowledge, and at the same time, learn from feedback and preferences to get smarter over time. Next up, we have the prospect of leveraging the solution to collect data, generate reports, analyze trends, optimize forecasts and do a whole lot more. This involves using a simple prompt to trim down the task timelines from hours to no more than a few minutes. Moving on to Vena Copilot’s promise of improving data interactions across the board, the solution here relies upon natural language to generate quicker and more comprehensive insights. These insights can include identifying seasonal patterns in revenue by product or identifying departments that have the highest in period actual to budget variances.

“Vena Copilot for FP&A is the result of our close collaboration with Microsoft to bring together the best of both worlds: Microsoft’s world-leading AI technology and Vena’s deep FP&A domain expertise,” said Hugh Cumming, Chief Technology Officer at Vena. “By integrating Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service large language models with Vena CubeFLEX, we are giving our customers a powerful addition to their Vena Complete Planning solution that leverages their existing data, systems, and workflows and enables generative AI capabilities that are tailored to their specific FP&A requirements.”

Rounding up highlights is a facility where Vena Copilot takes integrations with Microsoft 365 to create a seamless flow of work for the latter platform. Among other details, we must mention how Vena Copilot is also enterprise-ready, built with industry-leading generative AI enterprise security, compliance, and privacy capabilities, capabilities that are further driven by ethical principles, including role-based access controls and prompt compliance management. Such an intricate setup, like one might guess, ends up going a long distance when the agenda is especially to let FP&A teams deploy Vena Copilot easily, safely, and responsibly within compliance requirements. In case that didn’t sound impressive enough, then we must mention how this deployment can be realized without involving IT, data scientists, or AI engineers during the process.

Although pretty significant in its own right, Vena Copilot extends Vena’s already validated AI offering that harnesses Microsoft AI technology for Complete Planning. The said offering packs together Vena Insights, an intelligent, AI-powered reporting and analytics solution, and native integration with Copilot for Microsoft 365. Not just that, it also covers Microsoft Excel’s powerful AI toolset.

Anyway, Vena Copilot’s delivers a rather interesting follow-up to one report, which revealed that nearly 75 percent of an FP&A team’s work is gathering data and administering processes.

“Vena Copilot for FP&A is a game-changer for FP&A teams, empowering them to do more with less effort and better use of their resources,” said Hunter Madeley, CEO of Vena. “It’s not just a new tool, it’s a trusted ally that helps FP&A teams and their collaborators achieve their full strategic and operational potential, driving agility and resilience in the face of dynamic business conditions.”