AI is flooding finance with promises of speed, precision, and automation — but the reality inside FP&A looks very different. This episode cuts through the hype and dives into the uncomfortable truth: AI doesn’t repair financial systems. It reveals them. When companies announce “AI-powered forecasting,” FP&A teams know what really happens next. The machine ingests legacy logic, inconsistent drivers, timing drift, and half-defined categories—and amplifies every flaw.

Executives celebrate innovation. Controllers still clean spreadsheets manually. FP&A becomes the buffer between expectation and reality.

This episode breaks down why AI struggles inside messy finance environments, what it exposes first, and how teams can prepare before the technology multiplies their blind spots. No buzzwords. No corporate spin. Just an honest look at AI’s impact on forecasting, logic structure, and the day-to-day work of FP&A.

If you’ve ever heard “AI will fix this” and felt a knot in your stomach, this is the episode that finally explains why.

When the spreadsheet says “stable” but the business doesn’t, FP&A enters its most uncomfortable—and most important—territory. In this episode of FP&A Daily, Sarah Schlott breaks down the quiet tension every finance operator knows too well: the numbers look calm, the dashboards look clean, but the lived reality of the business is shifting under your feet. This isn’t a miss. It’s drift. The subtle, early signals that appear long before a variance ever hits a deck.

Sarah unpacks why Q1 exposes this more than any other time of year, how models fall out of sync with real operations, and why the best FP&A teams don’t wait for data to “prove” what instinct already knows. You’ll learn how to read operator noise as early-warning data, how to spot misalignment before it becomes narrative, and how to keep your model awake when the world moves faster than your logic.

If your numbers say “fine” but something in your gut says otherwise—this is the episode you needed.

When markets turn erratic, the numbers don’t just shift — they speak.

In this episode of FP&A Daily, Sarah Schlott explores how volatility exposes the truthfulness of your systems. She unpacks why most models don’t fail dramatically — they decay quietly — and why “stability” in finance often disguises brittleness. Through lived experience and sharp analogies, she reveals how to design FP&A architecture that bends without breaking, how to turn chaos into clarity, and how to build forecasts that listen when the market starts shouting.

Because in the end, volatility doesn’t destroy systems. It reveals who built them to last.