Name: How PE-Backed CFOs Unlock Growth with AI-Powered Planning
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T17:16:09.840Z
Duration: 51 min 16 s
Description: How PE-Backed CFOs Unlock Growth with AI-Powered Planning

Transcript for "How PE-Backed CFOs Unlock Growth with AI-Powered Planning": Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining today's webinar. I'm just gonna give everyone a couple more seconds to trickle in here before we get things started. Alright. So we're here to talk about how PE backed CFOs use AI powered adaptive planning to unlock growth in their organization. My name is Adam Stevens. I'm a director in the technology practice at Accordion Partners, and I have three of my favorite colleagues here joining me, Nitin, Morton, and Eric, to talk about, how we can use Adaptive Planning, both from a product perspective and Morton as a recent customer. So in terms of an agenda today, I'm going to give a quick introduction and level set on the opportunity at hand. Morton's gonna talk about his story at Joe and the Juice, and then Nitin and Eric are gonna talk about the road map and do a demo of of the product. So as an introduction to Accordion, we are uniquely focused as a partner to private equity backed companies. So we sit at the intersection of the private equity sponsor and the portfolio company CFO and their teams. We orient our business on three distinct pillars. The CFO, which is sort of the legacy and the heritage of our business, strategic FP and A, and the overall finance foundation. We have a data and analytics pillar, which is focused on the overall data architecture and data strategy, and then the operational side of the house, which is supply chain and executing on operations. Underpinning all of that is what's called accordion intelligence, which is really a suite of practical AI enabled use cases to help companies through the entire, journey along their, their PE backing. And the intersection between the CFO and data and analytics, we have our Workday adaptive planning team. So I myself am an alumni of Workday, and we have, a number of Workday partners and, ex workmates on our team. So really excited to talk about the opportunity that's in front of us where we can use adaptive as a growth lever. We can use it to shift from our immediate needs to our more strategic priorities as an organization, and how are we gonna use AI to meet that moment. And so adaptive is a growth lever. This is really talking about the the native and the out of the box functionality within adaptive that you can use to help your business grow. So task automation and scalability, this is really around the automated consolidation, aggregation, and the in memory technology that Adaptive has to simplify the calculations and the actual, consolidation of your budget plan and actuals data. That is embedded with AI functionality, which is gonna be a theme throughout the day, but that's gonna allow you to save time as an organization. Visibility, flexibility, and analytics, this is really the data and reporting side of the house. So the integration frameworks, the the dashboarding, reporting, OfficeConnect, all of that is going to allow for self-service, more accurate decision making. And then the centralized structure and management, this is how you focus on strategy. So using adaptive to define your strategy for planning and setting drivers centrally and, creating that single source of the truth. As far as shifting from immediate needs to strategic priorities, we typically see p e portfolio companies reside on sort of the left hand side of the, the continuum here. So the immediate needs are obviously my p and l budget normally has some degree of workforce planning and some degree of automated board reporting built into it. But what we see at accordion commonly in the PE landscape is there's a number of common use cases that are strategic priorities for companies, but they're not enabled on a platform or a software like Adaptive that's really preventing those strategic priorities and those growths that growth from being executed. And we're going to show you and talk through how Workday Adaptive can support that growth and support executing those strategic priorities. And then seizing the AI opportunity. So every year, Accordion does a survey with PE sponsors and the CFOs of those portfolio companies. And one of the key topics that was discussed this year is AI. And so reading sort of the crosstabs and some of the main, pieces of that survey, we we sort of pulled three main points. The first one is that AI is a mandate. Across the board, pretty much every sponsor we surveyed and their CFOs are saying, We're prioritizing this. And really, the purpose for that prioritization is clear. It's not for marketing. It's not for anything other than creating value in your organization. And then lastly, if you're sitting there and you don't have any sort of AI use cases deployed, like, you're not behind. What we heard pretty much unanimously is that the majority of CFOs are still in the sort of beginning phases of deploying AI at their companies. And so you're not behind and you're not alone if you haven't done this. And our advice as accordion is firstly to understand what's standing in your way. And so in a lot of cases, it's the tool proliferation in the market. You hear a lot of things about this tool can do that, that tool can do this, that type of thing, and that can create confusion and uncertainty. The other areas around data foundations, do you have the people in your organization to do this? And so our advice to you as a finance leader is to understand what is standing in your way of deploying AI. And then setting a path forward. The role of the CFO in our view is to create the the value creation plan. So if we're gonna invest time and and money into this, how are we gonna use it to create value? So set that path forward and create that BCP. And then finally, take next steps here. So define and act and activate what we consider a quick win AI use case. And so there there are many of them out there across the board. And specifically with Adaptive, we have predictive forecaster, anomaly detection, and then the planning analysis agent, which I'm not gonna bury the lead here stealing one's thunder. We're gonna go through these, but those are some discrete next steps that you as a finance leader can take in order to seize this AI opportunity in their AI moment. But first, before we go into this, I'm gonna hand it off to Morton, who is a recent implementer of Adaptive, and he's gonna walk you through sort of his story as a finance leader at Joe and the Juice deploying Adaptive. Morton, I'll hand it over to you. And thank you very much, Adam, for, for that very good introduction. And, I just want to make sure that everyone can hear me. If not, then, okay. I see some people nodding. Great. And we are to to a good start here. Anyway, I mean, it's a little bit about about join the Jews, and I thought now we are sticking with the, with, the accordion colors here. I just want to be a bring a bit of pure vibe in the background here as well. Alright? For those of you who do not know JONE Juice, it's a, just a short introduction here. I see a lot of pink that's also in our in our logo. We've been pings since 2002. JONE Juice was originally incorporated in Denmark. About these, yeah, these, twenty three twenty three years ago. Started in a in a small backroom with a juice bar and quickly build up to, to what we have today of, more than 450 locations across 26 countries. So, again, truly international brand. We have stores in South Korea. We have stores that are opening in Texas next year. So really spanning across, across all continents. Yeah. As this, our mission is to make make healthy food sexy. I think we have a lot of marketing as well as I think most of you can, can realize. I'm on more than on the side. But one thing you cannot deny is that there's a super clear vibe. If you've ever visited your store, just do a bit of marketing yourself, pan bin, go there, is a it's an experience. Right? And, we serve these better for better view products. Switching out to the more, the more financial aspects, we have a very clear growth trajectory in front of us. So we have an ambition to, to reach 1,000 locations in 2028, and each of those has to be built. Each of those has to be planned. We're running with CapEx budgets of, yeah, between a 150 to 200,000,000 million dollars a year. We need to be able to manage that in a good and transparent way. On top of this, then I think one of the things that haven't been mentioned here is, well, yeah, we are owned by General Atlantic as a majority owner. And General Atlantic, even though they acquired the majority state back in '23, they've been part of, part of the Jira story since 2016. So we are nearing the end term of, of our PA ownership cycle. And, yeah, maybe you'll go by Wall Street and, and see it your logo at some point in time within the next few years. Again, I'm here in forecasting. That's one of the forecast we're doing. So as you can imagine, a lot of things going on on the on the HPNA side, and we need to have the right system in place. That's, that brings us on to to the next bit. We did a project back with, Adam and and his team from from Maccordian back in back in 2024, so last year. And I know we're here to to talk about adaptive planning. I just want to give a shout out as well to to the Accordion team. It's been a pleasure to to work with the team and it's been an even greater pleasure to work with such ecosystem as what we have here. So we went with Accordion as our partner on some multitrack, multitrack project. One of the tracks was to implement the CPM tool to to really raise a transparent to have in our financial planning. Again, I think we we were in the same place as many, many, many others had. Too much of, the planning work going on or forecasting, budgeting, business case accruals, things like that was going on in Excel. So millions of Excel sheets. Right? And some of it tied to each other through late late hours and, some sweating FP and A people, but it it wasn't scalable, really. And and we pretty quickly saw this. So one of the, one of the wish list items I had when going to, to this big project in '24, we need a CPM tool that, that can help unlock transparency. We want to make sure that we can automate more of our planning procedure. We want to have one source of truth. We want to say, okay, planning is not about throwing numbers around in Excel and by email. Planning is around actually making plans and then putting numbers to it. Right? And I think in the end, you can go into, if it's a strategic planning process, if it's a budgeting planning process, whatever, with the addition, ours is going to be 10%, you know, 10% finance in Excel, 90% strategy. And you always end up being the reverse. Right? 90% spending time in Excel and trying to make that tie out, and 10% actually crafting the story. I say we are not yet at the at the, let's say, 90% story and 10%, percent planning and finance work yet, But I see that we are getting so much closer, and that is very much due to the implementation we did here. So with Accordion, we are through a, a rigorous process of selecting different vendors. I think we had a five different systems that we were that we're choosing between, and that was on the shortlist. Right? So we had long list drawn up, and then we had shortlist of five systems. We all had the demos and went through that whole process. And adaptive planning just showed us what we need in our organization here. It's easy to go to. It's tested and tried. We know it can do not only now what we want, but also what we need in the future. So, that's why we decided to say, okay. This is adaptive planning that, that we're putting in. And just one backdrop here. My head of FBNA, who is, was the main guy on, on our adaptive system. Well, he he's tough to convince on new things. Super, super tough. And he came to me saying, I want adaptive. I've haven't been through all the, all the demos. Right? So he was actually the one taking the step and saying, that's a pull here. The more than this is what we need. Right? So, yeah. So that's where we where we went. The implementation was a was a two step approach. And, again, being a company that our chief growth officer calls Hypergrowth, as you can imagine, no day is boring. Right? And we have a million things to do, all the time. And and then spending time and actually implementing, you know, go through twelve months of planning and, how do you want on all of this to to really work and flow through? That that's not really in our DNA to to be honest. So we were implementing actually while we were going into the budgeting process. And we had a very aggressive timeline on on phase one. I think more aggressive than, I think Adam and and you seem even said, can this can this be done? You tried many adaptive implementations, and I'm happy to say, yes. It was done. And it was done with flying colors. We've been super happy about this during '25. We've just been able to go in and okay. This is what you put in. This is the approval that, that was by this and this person. These are your numbers. So please come back to me again and say that that we have wrong numbers. Right? So, again, just have this, have this whole transparency and and ease to access of what was actually going on, what were the agreements made. And that has been a game changer for organization, not only finance, but the broader organization as well. So phase one was really just to make sure that we had a buddishing tool that could work where we could put the numbers in and, you know, we make sure that we have the flows, the way we expect them to be. And we have them on full coherence of of data. We completed the budgeting process on time. I think first time ever in Joe's history. We had a quick result in the numbers as well. We realized in that hand, '25. So again, my position is super happy about that as well. Not only adaptive and recording related, we have some guys out in operations also doing a bit of that, but we have them to have transparency we need. We've moved afterwards, during '25, we've been through a few forecasting cycles and are using the same templates here as well. Now we come to, to phase two. So we decided again to synchronize it up to the budgeting phase. I said, okay. We want to do a bit more. Right? So we want to take first or take in bite sizes. Right? So our organization could could keep up. Right? Not only my team, but the broader organization as well. So we implemented the driver based planning. I remember sitting down with our regional finance director saying, you know what, guys? We're doing driver based planning this year. Everyone was super, super concerned. Up as a new system, and we haven't had, you know, three months to test. And where are we going to end up on this? And we just had the first executive body review meeting earlier today. It went well. It went super well. We're having now the team coming back and saying, you know what? If we if we hadn't done this, well, I've not I would have not I wouldn't have been able to take my meeting this week. I would have had to postpone two weeks. Right? So just the speed of, speed of cycles that we are able to go through. Also saying, okay. We have a we have a US team who needs to have a have a look again and how the tariffs are impacting. Okay. We could put them to to the job. And I think about an hour later, we could have new numbers of group after they put to the task. So just those cycle speeds is, is amazing. Gives much more flexibility, during a budgeting process. Yeah. One of the other things that we also put into, to phase two is, yeah, to to expand the, the planning to our headquarter functions. So go into our chief legal officer. Go into our chief legal officer. Go into, you know, all the chiefs. Right? Saying now we need your team into into adaptive. We need to have this transparency and well on all our cost lines. And we're sorting through those numbers now, and, well, honestly, we have a much better eye much better view than we had last year. And I'm in a position to make more reliable budgets that will guide us, oh, much further going into going into next year. And all in all, that's that's one of the things we we need to provide from from FP and A. We can report, we can analyze, we can plan, and we can make recommendations. And I say most of these tasks are becoming much easier from having access to access to data, from being able to to pull it out on the different slices that that we're planning on. And just knowing that everything is available, everything has coherence. So, yeah, that's the, the main part from from our side. So, again, as we are as we are saying here, we are planning strategic initiatives. We have a growth plan going until '28 now. That's always our our fixed point. And then that needs to turn into numbers, somehow. Right? And that's where we, that's where we're putting in in putting in that it adds to planning. And we have I think we we said once that, oh, now we're having phase two. We have ideas for the next five phases of what we wanna do. Right? And I think that goes to show the flexibility, but also the ease of access. So we can start small and get, you know, get the basics done, but we still have these five phases in front of us. Things that we know that we can do. When we say, okay, this is what we want to invest into, it will be a value add to the business. It will be a value add to to the finance function as well. And then, yeah, I think in terms of, lessons learned, I actually start a bit backwards here starting with number four of starting small and expanding incrementally. You could end up with, you know, say, new system implementation saying, oh, I want to realize all the synergies in in step one. Then it becomes a big project. I think some of you may have been through ERP implementations and never want to go through an ERP implementation again. Alright? This is when implementing a CPM tool, it's it's completely different. I think already from the first couple of weeks, you are going to see that that you have some added benefits here. And it only increases the more the more investment you make into you you may make into the system. Then, again, we need to have the set data foundation. We've decided that we want to link everything up, operational systems and the IP systems. All of that's flowing into, to adaptive. And I remember, you know, once you're in that process saying, well, I already done with the with the integrations. Come on. How is that so fast? Right? I remember being surprised about this. So, again, goes to show the right tools in place, you can get file very quickly. Then again, we're focusing on the, on the key business drivers. Again, starting small, and we are adding in increments on granularity in the business. We want to make sure that our business and users, they understand what is going on, and they are kind of going into the new way of doing things. So we are able making an evolution, an ambitious evolution year on year, but an evolution nonetheless. And as your last point here is empower users. This is not only an FP and A tool. We have our chief marketing officer who's definitely not a numbers person, right, going into Adaptive with her team and saying, okay. I this is this is how I want it. I have my template here. I can put in new FTE. I can click them on and off. Super user friendly on that bit. Does require a bit of investment, but we can get even non finance people to have to have success in this. So I think, all in all, that's it from, from my side. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your, journey with Adaptive Planning, and it's always inspiring to hear from a customer. And especially when a customer is, as exciting as joining the juice. I go there all the time. They have one in my, neighborhood. So I'm so excited to be in this call, and, you guys are doing a great job. Thank you so much. My name is Nitin McNager. I lead our outbound product management team here at Vocadata Planning. And today, I'll be covering couple of items with you, and those will cover generally, what eliminate work means to work the AI. I'll be talking about, bit on strategy and vision, intelligence center after planning, and then I'll pass over to Eric to take you through a demo of what exactly it looks like in a real application. Workday after planning has been growing. We were founded in 2003, acquired by Workday in 2018, and now we are over 7,000 customers across all the major countries and continents of the world. We are truly global, company and a product, and what means is that we have been so versatile. We have seen all the different planning aspect from different, products, industries, and geographies that we have a rich history of, understanding that what real planning, and the connected planning really means to an enterprise. We have also have had, witnessed significant upmarket growth. What that means is that 30% of Fortune 500 customers do use Volley Adaptive Planning. So from the scaling aspect, we also have customers as small, small, medium enterprises to as long as the larger enterprises of the world. The truth of today, business moves in milliseconds. Gone are the days when you have, to plan on a quarterly basis or a yearly basis. Right? We understand that as we are expanding our availability of data and the data platforms, the businesses are moving in milliseconds, and the data is refreshed by the minute. And what that means is that, because our integration platform is so strong, we are able to connect almost any data source to it after planning and now have ability of getting your data into your source systems or from your source systems within minutes. So, we know that this is the truth of most of the enterprise today that we are very well structured, but we are siloed. So we have a very functional, efficient finance working with HR, but they have hands off. And what it means is that it creates frictions. This is our view of unified, the Workday advantage. So Workday holds the finance, HR, and planning data all in one system. So it really matches the speed and agility which you want to plan, whether you're planning for your, money, you're planning for your people, or you're planning for agents. Recently, we also introduced ASR. It's workdays platform for managing your people, money, and agents all in one platform. So the work advantage is, the true efficiency comes in when we blend the finance and HR data and make it seamless across the different departments. This is how the Illuminate, which is the Workday branding for Workday AI, looks. Workday Illuminate, develops a set of responsible AI driven agents across the Worldpay application. And, you will see a Worldpay adaptive planning agent right in the center, and that's what we are going to talk a little bit more about. But I just wanted to give you a high level scope of what Worldpay has been doing across the application area, whether it's HR, finance, spin, and any other Workday products. So we are building huge amount of, agents to do the work for you. Specifically speaking about the planning agent, the planning agent, is the gen the generative AI agent, which we have deployed, within the work ecosystem. And it's embedded in the application. And it provides intelligence and automation across the platform. So Workday, adaptive planning agent knows the context. It understands your elastic hypercubes, then knows your dimensions and level, and intelligently answers the question which you ask. It definitely has deep contextual insights, so it's embedded within your data models, and it is a natural language interface. What it means is that not only, the modelers who have in-depth knowledge of where the data resides, now will the adaptive planning can be used across the organization by folks who just understands the business context, and they can just ask questions in simple natural language interface. So the view of the future. Right now, we are building our, skills, which will complement the models, of analyst planner modeler and admin role based features. So, the view of the feature would be that we have skills which complement, analyst function, a planner function, modeler and admin. And, eventually, you'll be able to just hire or spin up couple of these agents, which will be totally, working like a modeler or admin. Let's skip the slide. So, this is what I, meant that analyst is built up of particular skills like data exploration, automated variance analysis, KPA monitoring, and insight communication. And we are building skills to augment that. So, today, in adaptive planning, we have data exploration, automated variance analysis already in LA, stage. Our customers are using in production, and we are working on different skills like scenario planning, predictive forecasting, and formula engineering. So how does it look? Volker adaptive planning agent is a simplified UI. We just present you with a chatbot kind of experience, but it is very complex in the back end. It handles complex queries. It hands off to different skills and agents, and it determines that the query which you're asking is delivered to which skill agent right now. So whether it's you're asking a question about analyzing your setup data or whether it's asking or whether you're asking it to identify complex variances across across various dimensions and level. It is able to accurately identify a question and route it to a particular skill and answer back in multimodal format. So you don't even you not only get, textual understanding of your question, you also get infographics, and you can change the infographic, immediately within the application itself. This is the code from one of our existing customers, who is using predictive forecaster. And now, the code is, pretty strong. It says that AI has exceeded human accuracy. And, this company, which is a construction aggregate company based out of Virginia, now they have switched over the, forecasting generation to completely to break the forecaster. So they use predictive forecaster to generate all the predictions, and the budget forecasting in their enterprise using predictive forecaster. These are couple of more validations from our early adopter customers for the planning agent, and they have, found real value in as it takes out the stress from the data. Now you don't have to really understand the version which version of the day, of the, sheet holds your data. You need to just ask the question, and the agent will be able to intelligently figure it out. And it definitely leaves a lot of customers for more time for strategy and execution rather than number crunching. I wanted to briefly touch upon this slide also that workday adaptive Planning is a AI first platform, and we are keeping the human in the loop. And this is true for all the Workday agents, which are being developed across the Workday applications. And what that means is that the human will always be in control. So the agent will be able to assist you with the decision making capabilities, provide you the data in the way you want it, and you can keep iterating on it. But at the end of it, you as a human will be able to make a decision on it. So currently, we have a rich set of machine learning feature which are already available and, to all our customers in production. We have outlier reporting, which can create a report and, identify anomalies. We can also detect anomalies on the sheet, and we can create advanced prediction models using the pregenerated or preconfigured delivered, ML models app available to you. And we're all, we are delivering workday skills, workday agent skills, which is contextual health, data analysis, variance, and formula agent to really help you build up on your model as you go along. We're also investing in what's not today, but what is going to be in future. So we are going to keep improving on the ask workday feature, which follow-up and clarifying question. We'll be increasing our response explainability. So right now, you still get the responses that where, where the data sources are coming from. You just don't get the answer. You also get the source from where the answer is going to come from, so you have, more, confidence on the responses. With that, I pass on to Eric for a demo. Alright. Exciting things coming. Exciting things in the product today. And I think what's what's interesting is is I was kinda looking at the the the chat, and one of the questions came, you know, with with business changing, how do you keep up? How do you ensure that your drivers are being able to keep up? And I think that's one of the strengths of Workday Adaptive Planning is that you're not, in a whole codings kind of back end heavy, IP heavy application where if there's a new KPI that comes up, yeah, you just you can create that KPI within the same framework of Workday Adaptive Planning and use that as a driver. I mean, I I was a customer before joining Workday. I was a finance lead and then an admin of the product. And so much like, Morton and his experience and his team, I had that very similar experience of of being able to be much more agile, with our planning. So in this next around twenty minutes, I'm gonna do a demonstration of what is currently available and what we have, you know, on on the the, unlimited availability as well. So the the first thing that I wanna talk about is what is currently available. And what that is is our predictive forecast. Predictive forecast allows organizations of all sizes, without the real need of a of a data scientist to start to to leverage the capabilities And I think that that was one of the clear messages that Adam talked about, which is take some of these examples and get your feet wet with it with AI and and see how it can help, your organization. So what you're looking at here is a combination of of different forecast versions. The first one that I'm highlighting on the screen here in yellow is the human created forecast, and then all the other ones are leveraging AI algorithms. And you can, you know, produce the numbers, line them up, and that's what you're seeing down here is, in this example, we're looking at units. It could be attrition. It could be whatever your you know, we have, like, Nitin said, some of our our customers are are doing their entire forecast. So the idea here is you can you can choose what part of your business that you're looking at. Maybe it's subscribers if you're a SaaS based, company. But the idea is that you can line them up and keep that human in the loop. We're not replacing the admin the the analysis. We're just we're accelerating that analysis. And so where does where does one go to create these algorithms? And that's where I'm I'm headed behind the scenes. And the reason I'm showing this is not to just show you how the sausage is made, but to to impress upon your minds that Workday has really, made it easy for our customers to adopt AI functionality without a lot of scripting, coding, you know, hey. I've gotta call this IT. I've gotta call, you know, kind of the heavy heavy lift. And so what I'm doing is is how do you set up a version that re that is created through AI? As you can see, as I kinda scroll down here, is you get to choose, well, what what foundational models are we going to use? What is the beginning and the end of the forecast that I'm looking at? You know, what are the accounts that I want to use? We have customers that are using this to predict the demand for for their products. We also have customers that are using this to predict the demand at the store locations so that they can staff their their locations appropriately. So this is the advanced settings is where you can kind of involve that AI. We have seven different algorithms that you can choose from, and most of you will look at this and say, I don't have any idea what, Holt Winters is and and some might. But the idea here is that we also have the autofit function. What the autofit does is look at your it looks at your data, and it picks the best, algorithm to use. You also have the ability to to create, three different regressors. So if there's external information, external data that that really impacts, your your demand or your expenses or your revenue, you can bring those in as well. You can also have probability levels and and and really kinda hone in on how tight you want this model to to be created. I was speaking to a solution consultant that's out of Australia, and they talked about how they were at a meeting. And somebody came up and said, hey. We use predictive forecaster. Our revenue variance used to be 4 to 5,000,000, on a monthly basis, kind of swings. He says, now we're we've got that right around a million dollars. And so that really has helped us to free up the capital, because our forecasting is that much more accurate. And that's the the real benefit of using something that's already in the product today that comes with your subscription, etcetera. So the next thing that I wanna talk about is the the planning agent and what we have, around the planning agent. So one of the things that, we hear from our customers is as people come and go, some of that tribal knowledge of how Adaptive works kinda goes with it, or you have a new employee that joins and they have questions on how to. Ask Workday is contextual help. You can say, well, I'm on a dashboard, so it already knows that you're on the dashboard and, well, maybe you wanna ask some of the prompts. Or maybe you can say, you know, I wasn't paying attention during the meeting. How do I create a dashboard from scratch? So you can type the prompt in. You know, obviously, you could probably leave out the I wasn't paying attention, but the idea here is to show that you can type in that that context, and it knows what you're looking to do. But it also creates and as Nitin said, part of the responsible AI of of Workday is to give you that source. Where is it pulling from so that you're building confidence in the answers? If you like that answer, click the thumbs up. It's a helpful response. You're now training AskWorkday for your environment to to give those answers, more frequently. So this is one of the areas that we've launched is this contextual help, and it doesn't matter where you are within the application. You have that ability anybody has that ability to ask questions, of of the software. So gone are the days of having us kinda leaf through, how to books or whatever. You you have that ability right there. The other area where we have our planning agent, really kind of, first and foremost is in the ability to ask questions based on reports that are either created, you're curating a report, or you're just creating one from scratch. Given given our time here, I won't necessarily create one from scratch, but the idea is exactly the same. So with our HTML reporting, think of it like a giant pivot table on steroids. It is drag and drop functionality. You do not need an advanced IT degree to create these reports. You don't create a bottleneck in the administrative function for people to create reports. Here's an example of a pretty typical report. You've got your working budget, your actuals. You've got some variance and variance analysis here. And then you're looking at this report and saying, okay. I want to maybe summarize this report. Now, again, this human in the loop context is you have analysts on your team that can summarize reports. Right? They spend some time looking at the reports, summarizing the reports, looking into the data. What Workday's you know, ask Workday planning agent allows you to do is create this kind of summary of the report as the beginning of the analysis. And so, you know, as we're looking at the summary, it's going through all of the data elements. It's going through all of the accounts, the dimensions, and producing that, you know, kind of overarching, variance analysis at this level. So a couple of things I wanna point out. Number one, this is not like a large language model which gives you the most, you know, kind of popular answer. This is a repeatable, auditable, responsible AI built, application where ask Workday will give you the same numbers each time. It gives you the sources. The idea is that we want you to be confident that the AI is giving you the answers based on your data, your information on this report. You can ask it some additional questions. Let's identify some top variances. Let's go in and explore some of the contribution margin. Let's analyze that variance, or let's analyze our revenue variance. The idea here is that we want AI to be part of the normal flow of work, rather than, okay. Everybody stop. We've gotta run our AI now and and create that model. Workday adaptive planning is is AI within the with just in the normal flow of business. And so you can see here, we're starting to see where the contribution margins are coming from. Maybe we wanna analyze the revenue as well. So we've got our contribution margin. We've got, you know, kind of our, next level of product revenue. Maybe we wanna have a couple of different, I wanna look at department. You know, where you know, let's look at department or let's look at location and and drill that down. Now I can also, have AI kind of give me some suggestions of where I might look next. Right? Looking at my expenses or my allocation. Maybe break down by leaf level my product revenue. The idea here is that AI is helping the analyst kinda narrow down in, where they're they might want to see. You can also type in, as well in in the in the prompt bar as well. And so as an analyst, you know, you as a CFO, you as a director of FP and A, you are self serving and and utilizing ask Workday as that kind of, aid to help you get through, you know, a variance analysis. So in this example, we have kind of a collection of analysis. One of the things that ask Workday also allows is the auto generate of a presentation. So, again, we're trying to help all of our customers in their normal course of business. You know, you're looking at, okay. I've I've done this analysis. Now I wanna open a presentation, and this is gonna open up on my other screen here for just a second. And and so now we have a presentation that not only gives all of the variance explanation, creates the the charts, But, you know, let's say I want to, make an adjustment or change to a number or I want to see where these numbers are. You have the data labels that come over with it. So that's one of the areas that I really appreciate when it comes to, you know, dealing with, AI and kinda AI frameworks is that it's not one of those that just gives you the most popular answer. It's gonna give you an answer that you can trace back, you can see, you can you can interact with. So the this this is, you know, part of what we're currently offering. I think, Nitin said this is unlimited availability. Our customers are using this, testing it out, giving us feedback, and it will be generally available in our spring release of 2026. Before I go, I also wanted to talk about, you know, I see I think on Morton one of Morton's slides, he talked about OfficeConnect as being a way, to interact with the data. We do have a very mature Workday, excuse me, a a Microsoft Office, Connect product. I wanted to highlight, you know, kind of some of those, where you also have the ability to, have GSheets, you know, kind of Google Google documents, also connect into Workday after planning. And, you know, this is in my you know, you also have the ability to create a document in GSheets and then empower Ask Workday there as well. So not only in the HTML reporting you have the capability of enacting, Workday AI. For those of you that are using Google Sheets, you also have that ability to create reports and then ask Workday to summarize support, detect anomalies, etcetera. So it's it's really partnering with Workday at the size and scale of Workday. We're helping our customers take this journey into AI. And, you know, there's a lot of barriers to entry of of CFOs, finance teams. There's concern about data security and, oh, is this is are our customers gonna get my data? There's a lot of responsible framework with Workday, responsible AI framework so that not all AI is the same. Workday is a very responsible AI organization that gives you the documentation that really empowers you to have confidence in those numbers. So with that, I'm gonna kinda end by demonstration. If you guys have any questions, if you wanna see more, dive in deeper, please let us know. We're happy to have those conversations with you. And then I'm gonna turn the time back over. I think we have some q and a. You know, Adam, I'll turn that time back over to you. Right. I I think, Eric, I just wanted to answer one question which has been consistently asked here. How do we enable it? So, predictive forecast is available to all our customers. It's already enabled. Why you might not be seeing in your adaptive planning instance? Because it needs to be, checkboxed in your administration window. So you have to go and enable it for a particular set of users, the permission set, and then it'll be available to other users to use. Over to you, Adam. I'm just reading through the chat and the q and a to see if there are any unanswered questions that we haven't that we haven't, already answered. Yeah. I think we've covered everything. That that's good to hear. And then, maybe I can give a, a disclosure in your mind from the customer side. While, while you guys been talking talking AI, super, super interesting. I look forward to to taking that step in, in our solution as well as, I think, is one of the next we we're wanting to do. And I've been spending the time in adaptive helping our CMO get, get on top of our budgets. So I think that, that fit in pretty, pretty well. She's, she's happy and it's possible to do within half an hour because we have that transparency. So just a case that is fresh and hot off the press. Looks like we had a question about, do you have drill down capabilities to see details that roll up to the summary? Yes. I Yeah. Go ahead, Nittin. yes. I can take that. So, yes, Lynn. Thanks for your question. Absolutely. So what what, what is special about Workday Adaptive Planning Agent is that it captures the context from the screen where it invokes it from. That's why it is super smart. So, for example, if you're on a report sheet, it takes that context and starts you from there rather than starting you at a different point or random point in your Adaptive Planning instance. So, yes, once it has the initial context, you can drill down, by dimension level, and you can keep drilling down into the data. So that's that's your interaction within both the adapter planning agent, but you also have native drill down capabilities within reports and sheets. Perfect. Well, if there's no other, q and a, no other questions in the chat, maybe there are some coming in. Yeah. I think we can we can call it here. On behalf of Accordion, thank you everyone for taking time out of your day to join. I appreciate the dialogue and appreciate, everyone taking their time out of their day to, to participate here. So thank you everyone very much. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you.