In this special episode (part of Datarails’ FP&A Con 2024) Glenn hosts an all-star panel to debate AI and FP&A: Hype vs reality.

Join Nicolas Boucher, Christian Martinez, and Gabriela Gutierrez, alongside CFO Glenn Hopper, host of FP&A Today, and an AI thought leader and author. Delve into real-world applications, separating fact from fiction, and gain valuable practical insights into the present and future of AI in financial planning and analysis.

The Guests:

• Nicolas Boucher, Keynote speaker on AI for Finance & FP&A
• Christian Martinez, Finance Analytics Manager, Kraft Heinz
• Gabriela Gutierrez, Financial Planning & Analysis Specialist

In this episode:

How many FP&A pros are using AI in their work - how do you compare vs the results of our poll

The main misconceptions + and what not to do in the finance and AI era

The significance of ChatGPT 4o

The biggest barriers to AI adoptions

Practical uses of AI to use today , including forecasting and practical ways to save time

FP&A AI use cases that have shocked the panel

Which FP&A processes could most use AI help?

How to get started practically

AI capabilities in existing tools such as PowerBI

Why 2024 is about Python as the tool to learn to break the barrier of AI

Automation in finance’s relationship with other departments

Creating your own chatbot services

The importance of data maturity (before AI maturity)

How you will start to see AI inbuilt to all your finance techstack Download financial data (balance sheets, savings) from a company on Yahoo Finance and plug into Chat GPT 4o (Prompt: Act as a management consultant and analyze this data with an FP&A lens” (and getting volume analysis, volatility analysis, moving averages..)

FP&ACon 2024 (on demand) https://www.datarails.com/events/fpa-con-2024/

Join the AI Finance Club: https://ai-finance.club/

“Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models,”

FP&A professionals are the original business intelligence (BI) experts, says Len Mcfall, senior consultant, finance at Windstream Holdings, a $1billion US telecoms company.

“FP&A itself is synonymous with business intelligence,” he says. “And honestly, weren’t, weren’t we the first business intelligence? We’ve always been working with data. We’ve always been trying to simplify and present data in a meaningful way to people who might not,otherwise be literate.”

In this frank and honest interview McFall, whose background is heavily influenced by BI, gives insights from a 20 year career including HCT Investments, Sitel, Crossroads Treatment Center and a minefield of data at Windstream.

“I’m not a bullet point guy. I’m a paragraph guy” says Len– warning he’s not one for short, snappy answers, but a storyteller who loves to dive deep, as he reveals:

• Why 40% of my job is touching base with people to curate all the data we use across the organization
• Putting sales on blast: how often do you catch a forecast from a sales organization that’s even 50%, right?
• Coming into a company to save them after they were delivering finance reporting 30 days after close (from 30 days to day 8)
• the role of data analysis and bi in finance and in the decision making process.
• How business runs on “hunches” and why it is FP&A to prove that hunch
• Why if you cannot communicate to the business you are useless
• The vast amount of data we have access to in telecoms and how we separate the signal from the noise
• How finance rubs against IT and why it’s not pretty
• Why AI in finance is like a “very smart but green intern” and prompt engineers are ridiculous
• Killing for food in winters during his childhood

Connect with Len on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/len-mcfall-6274857b/

CFO Seth Zimmerman faced a triple blow of tests in his decades-long real estate career. Firstly, he witnessed the Lehman collapse first-hand from within a real estate division of the famed bank (“We just got a call from our New York office, a guy in New York. He’s like, well, it’s done. We’re bankrupt.”). Secondly, being forced to blow the whistle when his CEO boss pocketed $1m into his bank account–the day after a $10m raise (the startup is now defunct). Finally, being the finance person when a developer absconded with $12m. “One of the things that I’ve learned is that when it comes to money, you never know what somebody’s going to do”.

In this episode, Seth Zimmerman, CFO at Invest with Roots, explains the core metrics in finance real estate and why things are never cookie cutter (“Every deal is, is different and you have to look at them individually”)

Zimmerman talks:

• Life as CFO at Invest with Roots, one of the hottest companies in Atlanta,the only real estate portfolio that creates wealth for renters.
• The role of finance at a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) – a security that trades like a stock on the major exchanges and reports to the SEC.
• Blowing the whistle in finance when a former CFO pocketed $1m
• Creating $700,000 for residents at Invest with Roots
• Becoming CFO and bringing in budgeting and FP&A processes
• Love of modeling and how I am using modeling skills to get into the multifamily space
• How to find great finance staff +the accountant recruitment challenge
• Favorite Excel function
• My motorbike crash

Follow Seth on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethazimmerman/