Why Artificial Intelligence Is Important in the Finance Function

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become integral to many industries, revolutionizing how businesses operate and make decisions. In the finance function, AI is no longer a futuristic concept — it’s becoming ubiquitous. AI is now embedded into daily workflows to enhance efficiency, accuracy, and decision-making capabilities. From predictive analytics in forecasting to anomaly detection during financial closes, AI is transforming the way in which finance teams work. This transformation is enabling finance to navigate today’s complex and fast-paced business environment with more confidence and agility.

Today, finance teams are tasked with managing vast amounts of data, maintaining compliance, and providing strategic insights to guide business decisions. Traditional methods of managing these tasks often rely on manual processes that are time-consuming and prone to error. AI is instead stepping in to automate many of these routine activities, allowing finance professionals to focus on more value-adding tasks such as strategic analysis and decision-making. In short, AI is becoming an essential tool for finance teams striving to stay competitive.

Enterprise Finance AI: OneStream's Commitment to the Office of the CFO

To speed the adoption of AI for finance, OneStream is committed to ensuring the Office of the CFO can obtain material value from AI and GenAI development. OneStream's approach to AI, called Enterprise Finance AI, focuses on empowering finance teams to fully leverage AI’s potential. This commitment improves workflows, ensures accuracy, and delivers meaningful insights.

Enterprise Finance AI includes three critical areas AI must meet to speed adoption and significant return on investment for the Office of the CFO:

• AI must be trusted

Finance leaders need to trust the data being used. With Enterprise Finance AI, OneStream ensures both first-party and third-party data are verified and provide 100% transparency into how the insights and answers were formed. This verification and transparency ensure that AI models built on this data are reliable and can be trusted to provide accurate insights.

• AI must be secure

Security is paramount in the finance world, especially when dealing with sensitive financial data. OneStream’s AI solutions are built on a secure, enterprise-grade platform, providing finance teams with assurance that data is safe and compliant with regulatory standards.

• AI must be purpose-built

AI is most powerful when seamlessly unified into existing workflows. With OneStream, the AI solutions are designed specifically for finance workflows. This purpose-built design allows finance teams to take advantage of sophisticated AI models without needing to be data science experts.

The Power of Quantitative AI and Generative AI

OneStream’s Sensible AI portfolio provides a set of purpose-built AI solutions tailored for finance teams. These solutions include the following:

1. Sensible Machine Learning (ML) enables AI financial forecasting and AI-powered scenario modeling. Sensible ML allows finance teams to simulate real-time “what-if” scenarios, using the company’s own enterprise data to evaluate the potential impacts of various market conditions (Figure 1). Such conditions include interest rate changes or supply chain disruptions.

Figure 1: Sensible ML Scenario Modeling

• Sensible GenAI is a purpose-built chatbot inside the OneStream platform (Figure 2). The chatbot brings business context to OneStream’s trusted, secure, and financially intelligent data. With Sensible GenAI, finance no longer needs to complete tedious and time-consuming tasks such as creating reports, researching, and entering commentary to explain variances. Instead, those tasks have been reduced to a simple conversation between a user and a financially intelligent, secure chatbot.

Figure 2: Sensible GenAI Chatbot Interacting With OneStream Financial Model

• Sensible AI Library embeds pre-built AI models across all workflows within OneStream. As a result, reporting, planning, and close & consolidations teams can reduce manual and error-prone tasks using capabilities such as AI-powered anomaly detection (Figure 3). This ability enables users to elevate their processes with more advanced, exception-based analysis.

Figure 3: Anomaly Detection Within Sensible AI Library

Quantitative AI and Generative AI – A Winning Combination

The combination of quantitative AI and generative AI will create a significant shift in how finance teams operate. With generative AI, finance professionals can interact with their data more intuitively, asking complex questions and receiving insightful answers in real-time. This ability accelerates decision-making processes and helps to reduce the bottlenecks often associated with data interpretation and reporting.

By unifying generative AI into existing finance workflows, OneStream is positioning itself to enhance the performance of every employee in the finance function. This synergy allows for everything from automating mundane tasks to enabling more strategic thinking. In turn, finance teams can operate at their best, contributing more effectively to the overall success of the business.

Between quantitative ML capabilities and generative AI, artificial intelligence will be ubiquitous across functions within the Office of Finance. OneStream will be synonymous with AI. Ultimately, OneStream is showing why artificial intelligence is important in the finance function.

Unlocking the Future of Finance

The future of finance is increasingly AI-driven. OneStream’s Sensible AI Portfolio is not only improving the speed and accuracy of financial processes — but also fundamentally transforming how finance teams operate. By automating routine tasks and providing deep, actionable insights, AI is freeing up finance professionals to focus on what matters most: driving business performance to Take Finance Further.

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OneStream’s Enterprise Finance AI strategy will empower finance teams to perform at their best. With purpose-built applied AI solutions for business planning and with unified generative AI, finance teams now have the foundation to navigate today’s complex financial landscape with confidence. As a result, AI is not only transforming workflows but also enabling finance to drive better business outcomes across the board.

To learn more on why artificial intelligence is important in the finance function, visit the OneStream AI Hub.