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Workday’s Global CFO AI Indicator Report

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This a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, highlighting key findings in the “Global CFO AI Indicator Report,” which Workday commissioned with FT Longitude. 

While the opportunity for AI in finance is nearly unlimited, it can also be overwhelming. To clarify a path forward, we created the “Global CFO AI Indicator Report,” commissioned with FT Longitude.

The CFO role has always been a pressure cooker—but today’s finance leaders face higher expectations than ever. To fulfill their charge of increasing efficiency and managing costs while driving deeper insights, CFOs understand they need to embrace the promise of AI.

The potential value is huge: generative AI can cut through lengthy reports by highlighting relevant information. It can automate repetitive manual tasks such as gathering and reconciling information at period end. It can detect anomalies and manage exceptions with lightning speed, providing real-time recommendations so teams can turn their attention to higher-value strategic work.

While the opportunity for AI in finance is nearly unlimited, it can also be overwhelming. To clarify a path forward, we created the “Global CFO AI Indicator Report: Four Steps for Finance Leaders to Expedite Time to Value with AI,” commissioned with FT Longitude. Through extensive research this global report explains AI’s impact on everyday finance duties and underscores the urgent need for finance leaders to start embracing AI and explore use cases.

In the words of Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, AI gives CFOs a “wonderful opportunity to revisit the fundamentals of value creation, capital allocation, capital management, and regulatory and organizational compliance.”

AI Pioneers: Paving the Way

To serve as our North Star, we separated the top third of all respondents—including CEOs and the heads of finance, IT, and HR—who responded to our survey, based on their level of AI investment and adoption maturity. This cohort, which we call the AI Pioneers, has already embraced AI to work more efficiently and create significant value.

Among AI Pioneers, 195 of those are in finance. They are working faster and more efficiently, finding more opportunities to reduce risk, and delivering significant strategic value to the business.

These respondents also express higher confidence in AI’s ability to deliver key benefits. Consider: more than half of finance AI Pioneers (52%) call the technology a gamechanger for the finance industry, compared to 39% of finance respondents overall. Similarly, 43% of finance AI Pioneers say AI will drive increased revenue and profits, and 39% believe it will boost data-driven decision-making, versus just 30% and 32%, respectively, of overall finance executives.

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Based on our research, we expect this divide between AI early adopters and everyone else to continue to grow. This gap will be particularly problematic in the finance world, where they have been slightly slower to adopt and implement AI than those in other functions: only 31% of finance teams have made good progress in deploying AI to automate workflows, while 32% of HR teams and 41% of IT teams have done so.

To follow AI pioneers in creating an actionable AI strategy, finance should start to get their data in order, and then implement small, tangible use cases that produce immediate results. From there, confidence and investments in the technology can expand.

The Data Imperative: Why Strong Data Management Matters

Managing ever-increasing sources of data is proving to be a significant struggle for finance. In fact, 63% acknowledge that their company’s data is somewhat or completely siloed. This doesn’t bode well for AI, which relies on clean data to deliver high-quality outputs. To truly harness the power of AI, finance teams first need a strong data foundation that can unify and contextualize disparate data sources.

Right now, finance teams everywhere have room for improvement in this realm. Only 7% of finance AI Pioneers find their data fully accessible, while a staggering 41% report siloed data. Among other finance teams, it’s even worse, at 47%. Because they’re naturally positioned to lead the implementation of AI in data-focused processes, finance departments should embrace a robust data strategy immediately so they can reap AI benefits down the line.

Creating Value: Hitting the Gas on Finance Transformation

As finance teams’ age-old responsibilities around reporting cash flow, investments, and P&Ls become increasingly automated, CFOs face a growing imperative to lean into value creation through improved access to data and deeper, more informed analysis. With AI-enabled workflows, today’s CFOs are in a unique position to connect the dots and become a key value architect within their organization.

No wonder, then, that AI Pioneers are already seeing the benefits of AI to improve value delivery. Only 23% of this group expressed dissatisfaction with the number of administrative tasks their teams need to complete—versus 34% of finance respondents overall.

Leaning in: The Best Way to Mitigate Risk

While the repetitive tasks in the finance function provide obvious use cases for AI, the function’s emphasis on risk mitigation and predictability make it understandably skeptical of the technology’s potential pitfalls. 

In fact, 35% of finance leaders report finance and accounting as the area of the business least prepared for AI and ML integration, with cybersecurity, compliance, and privacy capabilities a close second at 30%. In addition, when we asked finance heads to what extent they were concerned about specific issues which might arise as AI and ML become more integrated within their function, we found that 36% believed a lack of AI and ML transparency would weaken security and compliance. 

We also asked respondents what they believed would be the biggest risks to AI and ML adoption in finance, finding additional concerns around errors, bias, and security (see below).

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Though it may at first seem counterintuitive, the best response to these valid concerns is to get your data in order and lean into early adoption. Not only does embracing AI allow finance teams to acclimate to the technology faster than competitors, but the AI itself will mature and become better as it ingests more data. Despite skepticism, the time to adopt AI is now.

As the “CFO AI Indicator” report concludes: “Finance may be a naturally risk-averse, careful segment of the business, but it is also one of the most promising areas in which remarkable innovation and change is possible.” By embracing AI and building a robust data strategy, finance teams can emerge as changemakers within their organization, fearlessly pushing beyond traditional roles to create new value.

Get your roadmap to value creation here: “Global CFO AI Indicator Report: Four Steps for Finance Leaders to Expedite Time to Value with AI.”

For insight into additional aspects of the C-suite and early adopter advantage, download “C-Suite Global AI Indicator Report: AI Is the Ultimate Level-Up.”

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

The Mandate for Business Agility

How Artificial Intelligence will Impact the CFO

Fortune Interview with Workday’s CFO on Artificial Intelligence

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Workday Adaptive Planning Named a Leader in Gartner’s 2023 Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software

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Workday has been named a Leader for Workday Adaptive Planning in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Financial Planning Software. Gartner defines Leaders as those vendors “in the strongest position to influence the market’s growth and direction and are quick to provide mature offerings that meet market demand …They demonstrate a market-defining vision of how financial planning software can help FP&A leaders achieve their business objectives by providing oversight into financial and key operational data and enabling data-driven decisions, trend identification and essential insights for enterprise-wide planning.”

Workday was included in the Leader quadrant as a result of its implementation strategy, offering strategy and reporting tools.

According to Gartner, “The financial planning software market has shifted to meet the needs of FP&A leaders who are now seeking more agile processes to navigate the evolving landscape of enterprise-level risks, including the need for real-time predictive insights and flexibility in financial strategies … Additionally, these solutions provide adaptability and collaboration for tighter operational and financial performance feedback loops, extending their adoption across the enterprise.”

The annual report provides insight and analysis on vendors who deliver solutions that “facilitate FP&A transformation and covers planning, budgeting, forecasting, modelling, performance reporting and agile insights.” It also details five “noteworthy” trends in the market:

  • Increasing investments in AI/ML predictive capabilities
  • Greater transparency in AI/ML predictive results
  • Enhanced IBP (integrated business planning) through extended financial processes
  • Evolution of NLP (natural language processing)
  • Increases in cross-functional collaboration

This year’s Magic Quadrant provides insight and analysis on the following vendors in the market:

  • Acterys
  • Anaplan
  • Board
  • IBM
  • Insightsoftware
  • Jedox
  • Keplon
  • OneStream
  • Oracle
  • Planful
  • Prophix
  • SAP
  • Vena
  • Wolters Kluwer
  • Workday

Read the report today!

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Revelwood’s Expansion in Europe

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Earlier in the year I met with Ken Wolf and he shared with me the phenomenal success Revelwood has had in the US over the years. We talked through bringing that success to Europe. It really didn’t take long for both Ken and me to get excited about combining my experience with Revelwood’s track record of success in solutions for the Office of Finance.  We spent the next few months diving into the details of how we could make this happen……. Jump forward and I’ve joined Revelwood as Managing Director and we’ve launched the European business. 

You may ask what excited me about this opportunity.

After doing a lot of intel gathering on Revelwood, Workday Adaptive Planning and the market, it was a pretty easy decision to make. The size of the opportunity and the positive impact that Revelwood can have on the European market is significant. I was also impressed with the appetite Workday Adaptive Planning has to grow and invest in Europe. One other key factor…… The product is really good.

You talk about the size of the opportunity; can you give us an indication of what you see this being?

Well, I don’t want to give away our secret sauce today, however, what I can say is the range and number of companies that can benefit from a really good FP&A tool is enormous. It’s the full business spectrum from a fast-growing SME all the way up to top FTSE100 companies. Even a well-funded startup with an aggressive growth trajectory would hugely benefit from Workday Adaptive Planning.

So going back to why Revelwood?

Don’t get me wrong, all of the above is hugely important for any business to survive, grow and expand. However, the other key element is people and culture. It’s so important for successful businesses to have great people, enjoying what they do. I met with the senior management team before I joined and it was very clear that they all had a high level of energy and enthusiasm about Revelwood, the journey they have been on to date, and – importantly – the journey that sits ahead of us in the U.S., Europe & Latin America. Not surprisingly over my first few weeks of being at Revelwood, I saw this was the same energy and enthusiasm from the whole team. It’s quite special. There is a big focus on culture and enjoyment, which not only drives good internal behaviors but also exceptional client engagement. This is so important when we’re helping our clients unlock significant business value. I’m looking forward to building the Revelwood team in Europe and bringing that same special energy and enthusiasm to our European clients.

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Workday Adaptive Planning in Use: A Fireside Chat with Ben Hart, CFO of Texans Credit Union

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In a recent Fireside Chat, we had the opportunity to delve into the world of financial insights with Ben Hart, the CFO of Texans Credit Union. The conversation provided a glimpse into how using Workday Adaptive Planning has transformed financial processes within the credit union. 

Watch the recorded Fireside Chat:

Navigating the Financial Landscape

In the first part of the chat, Ben highlighted the challenges posed by the 18-month-long rising rate environment and the crucial role of pricing loans. The credit union leveraged the capabilities of Adaptive to ensure expected returns on various products. The dashboard in Adaptive allowed for real-time visualization and scenario comparisons – something that was impossible to do with static spreadsheets.

From Static to Dynamic: A Paradigm Shift

Ben emphasized the profound differences between the old and new processes and the transformative power of Adaptive. The ability to run “what if” scenarios, create visualizations on the fly, and assess the impact of assumptions in real time has provided a level of agility and responsiveness that was previously unattainable. Now that Texans CU is no longer bound by the limitations of static spreadsheets, the finance team can navigate financial complexities with ease, providing stakeholders with immediate, data-driven insights.

Collaborative Customization: Partnering with Revelwood

The chat also touched upon the collaborative effort with Revelwood in customizing Adaptive for Texans CU. Ben shed light on the necessity of engaging an external partner to expedite the budgeting component for their 2023 budgets. Revelwood not only facilitated the process but also played a crucial role in imparting knowledge to Ben’s team, ensuring a seamless transition and empowering them to become self-sufficient users of Adaptive.

Unlocking the Full Potential

Despite the evident success and positive feedback, Ben acknowledged that there’s more to explore in terms of Adaptive’s potential. Looking ahead, he wants to fine-tune income statements based on cost centers, moving beyond the current enterprise-wide focus. The scalability of Adaptive, in Ben’s view, ensures that the credit union will never outgrow the solution, allowing it to adapt to evolving needs seamlessly.

Real-Time Results and Continuous Improvement

One of the standout features highlighted by Ben was the ability to achieve real-time results during crucial financial discussions. Whether it’s assessing the impact of CapEx needs with the IT department or navigating the intricacies of the 2024 budget process, Adaptive allows for immediate insights, aligning stakeholders with the financial implications of their decisions.

The Decision to Engage External Expertise

Closing the conversation, Ben shed light on the decision to collaborate with an external consulting firm like Revelwood. The need for a quick and efficient onboarding, coupled with the desire for a higher level of expertise, were pivotal factors. The external partnership not only accelerated the implementation process but also brought a creative perspective, leveraging years of experience with Adaptive.

The Fireside Chat with Ben Hart provided a fascinating look into the evolving landscape of financial planning within credit unions. As the financial industry continues to evolve, insights from leaders like Ben offer valuable guidance for credit unions seeking to navigate a dynamic and challenging landscape.

Read more from this series:

Workday Adaptive Planning Customers See 249% ROI

Unlocking Success: Harnessing Customer Satisfaction Metrics with Workday Adaptive Planning

Aged to Perfection: The Whiskey Model for Workday Adaptive Planning

Home » Workday » Page 6

The Mandate for Business Agility

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This is a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. It highlights recent research from the Association for Finance Professionals (AFP). 

Change and disruption are inevitable, and to tackle them, finance must intentionally build agile practices into its work. That’s according to the Association of Finance Professionals (AFP) in its financial planning and analysis (FP&A) report, underwritten by Workday, Finance Agility: Change Is Part of the Plan. For organizations that strive to become more agile, it’s imperative to embrace a new model of business agility, in which planning and execution converge into an entirely new discipline—an ongoing, closed feedback loop of planning, execution, measurement, and adjustment.

The AFP guide outlines three key areas to focus on for addressing change as it happens. Read on to learn how your organization can navigate the path to business agility. 

Accelerate or Inhibit Agility in the Organization

The term agility implies a mindset open to change, the ability to rapidly assess the environment, and the capability for action that effects change. The importance of agility is often seen in adapting capabilities of working toward goals. Over time, agile companies outperform because they have a better capability to change internally in a world that is in a constant state of flux.

Finance owns the fiscal calendar with its agenda and rhythms and wields massive influence in defining:

  • How people spend their time in the planning cycles.
  • Metrics of success.
  • Depth of analysis into the business and related conversations.
  • Level of risk the organization is willing to take.

This goes far beyond just delivering the numbers, so FP&A must consider whether its processes and performance management systems add to agility (and cash flow) or detract from it.

Become a Dynamic, Learning Organization

Anti-agile traits include staff mistrust, turnover, and unengaged employees who simply follow routines. FP&A needs to define and create the agile culture it wants that is open to challenge. These steps can help:

  1. 1. Develop psychological safety on the team.
  2. 2. Develop good leaders.
  3. 3. Engender a team ethos of continual improvement.

Be Good Backstage to Be Good Onstage

Being agile and able to handle the unpredictable requires that you handle routine work. FP&A’s ability to deliver its services and insights on stage to business customers requires:

  • A reliable, scalable infrastructure operating backstage. 
  • A platform that allows FP&A to accomplish the work.
  • Access to good data with minimal curation.

To put these ideas into practice and develop a strong, resilient organization that can achieve its goals, even in the face of change, download the 2023 AFP FP&A Guide: Finance Agility: Change Is Part of the Plan, underwritten by Workday.

Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

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Active Planning Dashboards in Workday Adaptive Planning

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In today’s Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks video, Dave Miersch, Revelwood’s Workday Adaptive Planning practice lead, demonstrates how to use active dashboards. Active Planning dashboards allow for real-time updates and insights, eliminating the need to toggle between multiple screens. 

Watch this video to see Dave explain how Active Planning Dashboards:

  • Seamlessly integrate with sheets in Adaptive Planning
  • Enable easy data entry with real-time updates
  • Allow users to drill-down for more detailed information
  • Provide both a high-level overview while also facilitating in-depth analysis
  • Deliver flexibility to modify targets and entry points and offers options for changing display settings, adding notes and even reorganizing dimensions.

Dave also demonstrates how to seamlessly integrate sheets into a new dashboard. This functionality streamlines the process of creating comprehensive reports by combining various elements such as charts and views, with the newly added sheet. 

Active Planning Dashboards give you combined data entry and reporting in a unified interface, saving you time, reducing errors and enabling you to make more informed decisions.

Revelwood is an award-winning, Platinum Workday Adaptive Planning partner. We build solutions for the Office of Finance that minimize your risk by seamlessly incorporating business analytics into your everyday thinking. Combining the software with our best practices and out-of-the-box applications, we help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Limit the Drill Down List on a Workday Adaptive Planning Report

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Restrictions on Cube Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

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Workday Adaptive Planning Customers See 249% ROI

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This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday, highlighting a recent Total Economic Impact Report from Forrester.

Calculating the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying a modern planning platform is no simple task—it’s a comprehensive undertaking and a job for the (objective) experts. That’s why we commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study by Forrester Consulting to understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with deploying Workday Adaptive Planning.

As part of its research, Forrester interviewed five of our customers. Prior to using Workday Adaptive Planning, these interviewees noted how their organizations relied largely on spreadsheets and manual processes for their financial planning and forecasting activities, either because they didn’t have other solutions in place or because their legacy planning solutions were difficult to use. Aggregating, manipulating, reconciling, and reporting on data was time-consuming and error-prone, limiting the depth of analysis the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team could perform.

For a quick snapshot of the results (and they are significant), check out the Forrester Consulting infographic below. It explores how Workday Adaptive Planning helped the composite organization drive cost optimizations, increased FP&A productivity improvements, and delivered positive ROI, specifically:

  • Achieving 249% ROI
  • Reaching $2.30 million in net present value (NPV) 
  • Increasing FP&A productivity up to 20%

Download the full report here!

Read more from this series:

Unlocking Success: Harnessing Customer Satisfaction Metrics with Workday Adaptive Planning

Aged to Perfection: The Whiskey Model for Workday Adaptive Planning

Reusable Cash Flow Forecasting in the Solar Installation Industry

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How Artificial Intelligence will Impact the CFO

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This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday. It is the first installment of Workday’s Q&AI video series.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way finance leaders operate worldwide. Sayan Chakraborty, co-president of Workday, shares how AI is supporting CFOs in managing a range of global challenges, such as disruptions in supply chains and inflation. In addition, he highlights how AI can enable cost management, overcome talent shortages, and implement new strategies. Watch the video to gain insight into the effects of AI on finance.

This post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Fortune Interview with Workday’s CFO on Artificial Intelligence

The Power of the Growth Mindset: How CFOs Drive Success in Finance

Workday Adaptive Planning Recognized with the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Financial Planning Software

Home » Workday » Page 6

Increasing Accuracy in Forecasts by Using Workday Adaptive Planning with Incorta

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This is a guest post from Ardeshir Ghanbarzadeh, senior director of product marketing at our partner, Incorta. Ardeshir explains how the integration between Workday Adaptive Planning and Incorta helps FP&A leaders uncover opportunities, while also increasing accuracy.

FP&A leaders looking to increase the accuracy of forecasts and budgets need a comprehensive and detailed view of the financial and operational data that drives the business, and the ability to analyze this data, inform stakeholders and take appropriate action. However, many organizations today are challenged with the complexities of accessing complete, business-ready data from disparate sources in a timely and cost-effective way.

These challenges include:

  • Accessing complete data from multiple operational and financial systems
  • Identifying supply chain, inventory and cashflow bottlenecks in real time
  • Visibility to transactional details to analyze variances, trends and anomalies
  • Leveraging AI/ML to increase productivity and forecasting accuracy

Adding to these operational challenges are headwinds from today’s business and economic climate that have every organization looking to reduce costs without sacrificing productivity or growth.

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Incorta bridges the data gap and puts an end to the disjointed data experience by bringing together detailed, transaction-level data from Point-of-Sale, inventory, workforce, supply chain, ERP and financial systems including GL and subledger details, enabling FP&A teams to virtually eliminate guesswork and build highly accurate forecasting models. And since Incorta does not rely on traditional ETL processes and time-consuming batch loads, FP&A teams can access the latest actuals in minutes to quickly adjust forecasts and plans and stay on track to meet financial and operational objectives.

With the freedom to drill down into subledger details to investigate the veracity of topline metrics, variances and you can identify the key metrics that have a material financial and budgetary impact.

Adjust Plans with Ease

In a business environment where plans and forecasts are constantly changing, FP&A teams need immediate and granular visibility to new data to quickly respond and make adjustments that keep plans aligned with business strategy. However, limitations on data access combined with visibility to only topline metrics, aggregate values or subsets of data introduces uncertainty into the planning process. Incorta eliminates the complexities of accessing detailed data from ERP systems and business applications by quickly connecting and bringing together 100% of your financial and operational data, making it instantly available to Workday Adaptive Planning users for analysis.

Dramatically Better Forecasts

In the absence of complete, timely data organizations are forced to forecast and plan based on assumptions and experience. While some may be very good at this guessing game, it can lead to wide variances that negatively affect both operational efficiency and project budgets.

FP&A teams using Workday Adaptive Planning significantly increase the accuracy of their forecasts and budgets when using Incorta. With access to multisource transactional-level details from across the enterprise, users can drill any direction to analyze and identify anomalies, trends and operational bottlenecks that introduce risks and uncertainty into the forecasting and planning processes.

Embracing AI-lead Analysis

While the philosophical debate on whether AI will lead to humanity’s destruction or nirvana continues, knowledge workers need to leverage the capabilities of AI and machine learning tools and their benefits. AI-driven analysis of data at scale speeds up analysis by quickly finding anomalies, identifying areas of risk or even uncovering new opportunities that could take months to discover manually. Although AI insights are only as good as the data used to train, tune and deploy these capabilities. Inaccurate or partial datasets used to create ML models can lead to false predictions. In order to avoid this dilemma, data teams can uplevel their AI projects for FP&A with the benefit of complete, multisource data to support ML models and advanced analytics.

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Whether your organization relies on data from multiple ERP or EPM solutions, inventory management, operational or financial systems, Incorta can simplify access and delivery of complete, transaction-level data to Workday Adaptive Planning users at record speed so you can create a consistent experience for FP&A teams that drives continuous improvement of the planning and budgeting process.

In summary, Incorta helps Workday Adaptive Planning users:

  • Increase the accuracy of P&L models, workforce plans, and scenario analysis.
  • Get immediate access to detailed data from multiple POS, CRM, GL, inventory and operational systems.
  • Drill into subledger details to investigate variances and identify drivers with financial impact.
  • Eliminate guesswork with instant access to the latest actuals, quickly adjust forecasts and align scenario plans.

This blog post was originally published on the Incorta blog.

Read more about Data Analytics in Finance:

Bringing Operational Analytics to the Office of Finance

Incorta Recognized in 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms

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