From Numbers to Narratives with Generative AI: Revolutionizing Financial Planning & Analysis

Data and analytics is the foundation of financial planning and analysis (FP&A). But traditional approaches to FP & A need to catch up with the deluge of data and increasing business complexity of modern organizations. Financial analysts and leaders find themselves buried under spreadsheets, struggling to extract meaningful takeaways in time to inform key decisions. 

Conversational FP&A AI analytics promises to transform raw data into powerful financial insights and narratives that move the business forward, powered by generative AI (GenAI). This blog will outline the key benefits and use cases of GenAI for FP&A.

Written by: Chris Walker,

Head of Product Marketing at Tellius

The challenges of modern FP&A

Finance teams are bogged down by never-ending spreadsheets, complex financial tools, and manual processes. Amid shifting market conditions, compliance pressures, and rising data volumes, the question becomes: how can you ensure accuracy, speed, and strategic foresight without sacrificing peace of mind? How can you drive strategic alignment and support operational efficiency by optimizing cash flow, managing working capital effectively, and maintaining healthy operating margins?

The answer lies in trusted AI—intelligent, human-in-the-loop approaches to augmenting FP&A that help financial teams and CFOs alike sleep better at night.

Understanding: the missing ingredient in traditional FP&A tools

Today’s analytics solutions were never designed to “understand” your company. Sure, they can connect to your data, generate reports, and display KPIs, but they don’t fully grasp how those KPIs connect to your unique strategies, departments, and operations. Without this deep context, you’re left with surface-level information and hours of manual interpretation.

Tellius changes this equation by modeling your company’s financial DNA, drawing from ERP, CRM, spreadsheets, and more. The platform stitches together nuanced context, illuminating how different data points interact to shape profit margins, working capital needs, or revenue growth patterns. With this knowledge engine, you can quickly address critical questions like “Why did this happen—and what should we do about it?”

Real-life FP&A questions a modern FP&A tool can answer

Below are sample queries an FP&A professional might ask, followed by the kind of instant, AI-generated responses they could receive.

Example 1:

User Query: “How did our operating expenses compare in Q3 versus Q2, and what were the key drivers of the increase?”

AI Response:

• Summary: Operating expenses increased by 12% in Q3 compared to Q2.
• Drill-Down Insights:
  –Marketing spend rose by 20% due to a new product launch campaign.
  -Logistics costs grew by 8% as international shipping rates increased.
  -Travel and entertainment expenses increased by 5%, mainly driven by a sales offsite event.
• Actionable Insight: Consider negotiating new shipping contracts and reassessing marketing spend allocation to control OPEX growth.

Example 2:

User Query: “What impact did the new product launch have on our monthly recurring revenue last month?”

AI Response:

• Summary: MRR increased by 15% month-over-month following the launch.
• Key Drivers: New product upsells contributed 60% of this growth, with high adoption rates among existing mid-market customers.
• Opportunity: Focus on targeted campaigns for segments that showed increased conversion to further boost recurring revenue.

Example 3:

User Query: “Where did we see the largest variance in revenue last month compared to our forecast, and what explains this deviation?”

AI Response & Insights:

• Key Variances:
  -EMEA region underperformed by 8% against the forecast, primarily due to delayed contract sign-offs in the enterprise segment.
  -Meanwhile, APAC sales exceeded forecasts by 5% as a key distributor executed promotions earlier than expected.

Suggested Actions: Investigate the contract delays in EMEA to speed up deal closures. Leverage the successful APAC distributor strategies in other regions or products for improved conversions.

Why can Tellius do this?

1. Unified data integration & analysis
   Tellius plugs into ERP systems, CRMs, spreadsheets, and data lakes to create a single source of truth. Instead of bouncing between dozens of tools and formats and swapping tools to perform various analysis modes, you have a natural language back-and-forth with their data to answer and ask follow-up questions related to cash flow, financial performance, and more, unifying the data and necessary analysis behind the scenes, ensuring consistent, accurate insights.
2. Deep, contextual insights & accessible advanced analyticsTellius understands an organization’s data, business, and domain context. It discerns signals from the noise and spots true cost drivers, root causes of budget variances, and actionable risks/opportunities, whereas traditional finance and BI tools often fall short when it comes to intelligence, reasoning, and narratives on top of raw data. This means you get answers that don’t leave you guessing—complete with diagnostics, root cause analysis, and forward-looking recommendations based on trusted advanced analytics.
3. Contextual understanding
   It’s not just about numbers. It’s about what those numbers mean. Tellius captures the hierarchy and relationships behind every KPI, department, product line, and cost center. The platform’s AI models analyze historical patterns and business rules to provide insights that reflect your organization’s unique operational context and financial relationships.
4. Continuous learning & adaptation
   As your company evolves, so does Tellius. The platform refines its models to align with your changing business conditions, from new product lines and market expansions to shifts in cost structures. It learns from every interaction, feedback loop, and human validation step—growing from a capable assistant into a trusted advisor.
5. Human-in-the-Loop Verification & Collaboration
   Tellius encourages collaboration. Finance teams can validate insights, tweak assumptions, and confirm reasoning paths, ensuring that the AI-generated narratives align with the company’s strategic priorities and evolving data definitions. Over time, this synergy creates a robust, company-specific “knowledge layer” that captures institutional memory and best practices.

Benefits of AI analytics for FP&A

The benefits of an AI-assisted approach to FP&A are numerous:

• Accelerate: Compress month-long planning cycles into days with AI-powered financial analysis and forecasting.
• Automation: Transform manual processes into intelligent workflows that accelerate strategic decision-making.
• Alignment. Drive unified decision-making with real-time financial visibility across your entire organization.
• Frictionless. Combine the familiarity of Excel with the intelligence of AI.
• Future-proof. Stay ahead of the curve as AI transforms financial planning and analysis.
• Tailored. Automatically adapt to your organization’s unique KPIs, calculations, and reporting needs.

Real-world applications of Tellius AI for FP&A

GenAI can help supercharge many aspects of FP&A work:

PLANNING & BUDGETING

• Annual budget development: Build comprehensive annual budgets with AI-assisted allocation, automated consolidation, and collaborative workflow tools. Integrate historical data, market trends, and strategic goals to create more accurate and aligned budgets across departments.
• Rolling forecasts: Maintain agile, continuous planning with automated rolling forecasts that incorporate real-time data, market signals, and performance metrics. Easily adjust and update projections as conditions change.
• Capital expenditure (CapEx) planning: Optimize investment decisions with AI-powered CapEx analysis, ROI projections, and automated scenario modeling. Track project performance and maintain clear visibility into capital allocation.
• Headcount planning: Streamline workforce planning with integrated compensation analysis, automated cost calculations, and dynamic org modeling. Align staffing plans with business goals and budget constraints.
• Revenue planning: Create detailed revenue plans with AI-assisted forecasting, automated pipeline analysis, and dynamic pricing optimization. Incorporate market trends and historical performance for more accurate projections.

ANALYSIS

• Automated budget variance analysis: Empower rapid, automated budget variance detection with seasonality-adjusted, ML-based anomaly identification and precise threshold-based variance spotting. Go beyond simply knowing WHAT variances occur—gain instant insights into WHY they happen, with automated root cause analysis that uncovers the underlying drivers and key contributors behind each variance. Enhance financial forecasting speed and accuracy via fully explainable, no-/low-code predictive modeling to generate revenue, expense, and cash flow forecasts. Easily embed these forecasts into live Vizpads for performance tracking and unlimited sharing across the organization.
• Profitability analysis: Gain deep insights into profit drivers with AI-powered contribution margin analysis, automated customer/product segmentation, and dynamic cost allocation modeling. Instantly identify opportunities to optimize pricing, reduce costs, and improve margins across business units, products, and customers.
• Scenario analysis/modeling: Build sophisticated financial models with intelligent scenario generation to account for multiple variables and interdependencies. Leverage ML algorithms to evaluate thousands of potential outcomes and automatically identify the most impactful variables affecting your business performance.
• Dynamic scenario planning & sensitivity analysis: Stay agile in volatile markets with a conversational what-if interface that simulates a range of financial scenarios and variables, instantly visualizes potential outcomes, and empowers teams to adjust forecasts on the fly. Respond to shifts with confidence and speed, ensuring your strategies remain resilient and adaptive.
• Return on investment (ROI) analysis: Accelerate investment decisions with automated ROI calculations, predictive performance modeling, and comparative analysis across projects. Track actual versus projected returns in real time and receive AI-powered recommendations for optimizing resource allocation and maximizing returns.

REPORTING

• Management reporting: Automate the creation and distribution of comprehensive management reports with AI-generated insights, customizable templates, and real-time data integration. Enable self-service analytics for quick answers to ad hoc questions.
• Board reporting: Streamline board meeting preparation with automated report generation, dynamic visualizations, and strategic KPI tracking. Create compelling narratives that highlight key business drivers and strategic initiatives.
• Real-time performance & KPI dashboards: Build interactive, real-time dashboards that track critical performance metrics, with automated alerts for significant changes and AI-powered insights into underlying trends. Effortlessly track and visualize critical financial metrics across the business, integrate new data sources for enriched analysis, and explore fully granular data with infinite drill-down capabilities with sub-second speed. Generate shareable, downloadable reports and dashboards to maintain a clear view of financial health.
• Financial statements preparation: Accelerate financial close with automated consolidation, reconciliation, and statement generation. Ensure accuracy with AI-powered anomaly detection and validation checks.
• Performance metrics tracking: Monitor and analyze key performance indicators across the business with automated data collection, trend analysis, and predictive insights.

FORECASTING

• Revenue forecasting: Generate accurate revenue predictions using machine learning models that incorporate historical patterns, market conditions, and leading indicators. Automatically adjust forecasts based on real-time performance data.
• Expense forecasting: Create detailed expense projections with AI-powered trend analysis, automated categorization, and dynamic cost driver modeling. Track variances and receive early warnings about potential overruns.
• Cash flow forecasting: Optimize working capital with AI-enhanced cash flow projections, automated collection/payment pattern analysis, and dynamic liquidity planning.
• Working capital forecasting: Improve capital efficiency with automated working capital analysis, inventory optimization recommendations, and receivables/payables forecasting.
• Sales forecasting: Enhance sales predictions with AI-powered pipeline analysis, win rate modeling, and automated opportunity scoring. Integrate CRM data for more accurate forecasts.

AI-POWERED FP&A

• AI FP&A assistant (conversational Q&A): Use conversational AI for rapid Q&A on any metric and leverage automated insights to uncover key drivers behind shifts in operating margins, profitability, cost-to-to-revenue ratios, and beyond.
• Automated insights discovery: Transform raw financial data into actionable intelligence with an AI agent that proactively uncovers hidden trends, anomalies, and opportunities—highlighting key business drivers and suggesting strategic recommendations without manual analysis.
• Augmented financial narrative generation & communication: GenAI alleviates the time-intensive task of transforming complex financial data into tailored, presentation-ready insights for various business partners, from marketing to sales and R&D. With automated narrative generation, FP&A teams can quickly turn numbers into role-specific, easily digestible stories, making it simple to deliver insights and recommendations that resonate with each audience—without spending hours creating slides or rephrasing data.

Embrace the future with Tellius

Leveraging AI to supercharge and remove much of the grunt work from FP&A is not just a technological upgrade for organizations—it’s a strategic imperative. As the financial landscape grows more complex, the ability to quickly derive and communicate insights becomes a competitive advantage.

Tellius stands at the forefront of this transformation. Explore our platform today or read a short overview of our FP&A capabilities.