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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Cleansing with Microsoft Power Query

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In our last blog post on using Microsoft Power Query, we talked about using the tool to organize your data. Today we’ll look at using it for data cleansing. 

Data Cleansing with Microsoft Power Query

1. Handling Missing Values

Missing or incomplete data can lead to poor analysis and translation of data. Power Query lets you replace, remove, or fill in missing values according to your data quality requirements. To do this, select the column with missing data and right-click. In the new window, select fill and the desired fill direction. 

2. Standardizing Data

Inconsistent data formats can create confusion. Power Query helps you standardize data by applying formatting rules, such as converting text to lowercase or uppercase. Right-click after selecting a column and select transform in the new window, choose a desired output. 

3. Error Handling

Power Query allows you to identify and handle errors in your data. You can replace errors with specific values or filter them out entirely. To remove error simply highlight the column with the error and select the “Remove Rows” option on the home tab. From there select “Remove Errors.”

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4. Data Type Conversion

Ensuring that data types are consistent is crucial. Power Query automatically helps you by converting data types to match your analysis needs.

By harnessing the power of Power Query, you can unlock valuable insights from your data and make data-driven decisions with confidence. So, start using Power Query today, and take your data preparation skills to the next level!

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

Home » Workday » Page 7

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Organization with Microsoft Power Query

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In the world of business, data analysis and interpretation are essential to creating effective, well-informed decisions. However, messy and unorganized data can create serious roadblocks in this process, leading to inefficiencies, and lost opportunities. Fortunately, Microsoft Power Query is a powerful tool designed to eliminate the headaches and tedious tasks related to creating clean and accurate data. The first step is to organize your data.

What is Microsoft Power Query?

Microsoft Power Query is in Excel under the data tab under the “Get and Transform Data” group option. It is designed for data transformation that can also be used for other Microsoft applications such as Power BI and Power Automate. The tool allows users to connect to various data sources, transform data into the desired format, and load it into their preferred destination in ways that native Excel functions such as formulas and pivot tables cannot. 

Benefits of Using Microsoft Power Query

Data from Multiple Sources: Power Query acts as a one-stop shop for you to connect to a wide range of data sources, including databases, spreadsheets, web services, and more. This means you can gather data from multiple sources in one place for analysis.

Data Transformation: With Power Query’s intuitive interface, you can easily clean, reshape, and transform data without writing complex code. It offers a range of functions and transformations to suit your needs.

Automation: Power Query enables automation of data extraction and transformation processes. This reduces manual errors and saves time, especially when working with large datasets.

Reusable Queries and Data Volume: The tool saves a history of previous queries for future use. This allows users to reuse processes for similar datasets, saving time and effort. Additionally, queries can import copious records of data that would not fit into a standard Excel worksheet.  

Data Connection: Updates from the source data are seamlessly integrated into your Power Query process. This ensures that your analysis is always based on the most up-to-date information.

Data Organization with Power Query

1. Data Connection

To start organizing and cleaning data using Power Query, you need to establish a connection to your data source. In this example, the data is in an Excel worksheet as a table. 

Loading the table can be done via the “From Table/Range” option in Excel or the relevant data source connector in other Microsoft applications.

2. Data Import and Preview

Once your data source is connected, Power Query displays a preview of your data. This step allows you to review the data’s structure and make initial decisions about what needs to be cleaned or transformed.

3. Removing Duplicates

Duplicate data can skew your analysis. Power Query provides a simple way to remove duplicate rows, ensuring that your data is clean and accurate. To do this, highlight the desired columns and select “Remove Rows” and the “Remove Duplicates” option.

4. Filtering Data

You can filter data based on specific criteria. This can be helpful when you need to focus on a particular subset of your data. Find the drop-down menu above each column header to easily filter your data.

5. Data Transformation

Power Query provides a wide range of transformation options. You can perform tasks like splitting columns, merging data, renaming columns, and more. These transformations help you reshape the data to fit your analysis needs. To rename, simply double-click the column header and type the desired name.

6. Reporting

After making the desired changes to your data, return the data back to excel by selecting the “Close & Load” option and selecting “Close & Load To.” Then select the desired output in the following window. 

Additionally, Pivot tables can be used to retrieve data directly from Power Query. This can be helpful when the data set does not fit in a native Excel spreadsheet. To do this, select “Close & Load” in Power Query, and select “Close & Load To.” From the following dialogue box, select “Only Create Connection.” Now you can insert a Pivot Table using an external data source and select your query.

Microsoft Power Query is an indispensable tool for professionals working with data. Whether you’re dealing with financial records, customer information, or any other dataset, Power Query simplifies the process of data organization and cleansing, saving you time and ensuring data accuracy. 

Check back soon for our next blog post on Microsoft Power Query. We’ll share tips on using Microsoft Power Query to cleanse your data.

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

Home » Workday » Page 7

Fortune Interview with Workday’s CFO on Artificial Intelligence

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This article by Sheryl Estradada (Sheryl.Estrada@Fortune.com) originally appeared in Fortune’s CFO Daily newsletter.

Generative AI developments are moving at a rapid pace. And CFOs are tasked with understanding the latest trends as it relates to the workplace.

“It’s not like finance people who are savvy in technology can do it all themselves,” Zane Rowe, CFO at Workday, tells me. “What I love about technology is that it actually takes more than just anyone with one discipline to implement.” You have to bring a cross-functional group together to think about what type of strategic changes are needed, determine the technology to support it, and create a plan for change management, Rowe says. “I’m very fortunate to have a wealth of people that I know in different areas that keep me challenged and learning,” he says. 

Rowe began his role as finance chief at Workday (which is a CFO Daily sponsor) in June. The enterprise cloud company’s total annual revenues for its fiscal year 2023 were $6.22 billion, an increase of 21.0% from fiscal 2022. Rowe succeeded former Workday CFO Barbara Larson, who stepped back to spend more time with her family, according to the company.

Rowe was most recently CFO of VMware, a developer of virtualization software, for seven years. During that time, he served as interim CEO from February to May 2021. Before VMware, Rowe was the CFO at EMC. He was also previously CFO at United Airlines and Continental Airlines and then led North American sales for Apple. 

Working as a finance chief in the people-centric airline industry was actually a catalyst for his love of tech. “Back in those days with the airlines it was about growing internationally and connecting people, and technology became such a big part of underpinning that,” he says. “And then I shifted, and had an opportunity to work at Apple, and found my passion for technology and driving change.”

Rowe says Workday’s people, culture, and products attracted him to the CFO role. The company recently announced a series of new AI and machine learning (ML) enhancements for finance and HR solutions, including generative AI capabilities for creating job descriptions and employee growth plans, for example. In using AL and ML technology, “on the financial side, you can be looking at variance analysis, you can take a lot of the mundane tasks out of the everyday work week,” Rowe says.

What CFOs are thinking about GenAI

Generative AI, and its impact on productivity, continues to be a hot topic in the business community. Recent McKinsey research estimates that generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.  

What’s Rowe hearing from fellow CFOs about investing in this technology? Companies that don’t prepare themselves for technological disruption run the risk of competitors capturing market share and taking business away, Rowe says. “I think many CFOs do recognize this,” he says.

“In the area of AI and the work going on there, a lot of the peer groups that I talk to are very inquisitive and want to learn a lot more about it,” he says. “I think the nature of the job has changed where I haven’t heard many CFOs pull back on that type of spending. In fact, they are encouraging it, to really understand where it adds value.”

According to Deloitte’s CFO Signals survey for Q3 2023, the finance chiefs surveyed said if their company decides to incorporate generative AI, these are the top three goals: to reduce costs (52%), provide better customer experience (50%), and achieve greater margins, efficiencies and productivity (45%), according to the report.

Thinking outside the box

Rowe still believes in being people-centric, so, since joining Workday, he’s been having a lot of conversations. “I’m spending a lot of time with customers to understand what we can do with the product, and spending time with our own product teams looking at cutting-edge ideas,” Rowe says. He’s also building out the finance and accounting teams, he says. 

What does he seek in a team member? Someone who can think outside of the box, according to Rowe. “We did a session fairly recently with our accounting team to think about how they can use AI to do processes a little bit more differently and creatively than they did before,” he says. You can find the original article on Fortune.com.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

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

No, Artificial Intelligence Will Not Replace Finance Jobs

Home » Workday » Page 7

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Using Display Fields in Modeled Sheets

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Modeled sheets in Workday Adaptive Planning often have no monthly data that displays on the sheet. To see the monthly calculations you must go to row details and create a report or create a separate sheet (standard or cube). However, you can see the calculated amounts in the sheet display by using the Display Column feature.

In this demo data, we see a typical Personnel modeled sheet. Notice there are no months. None of the calculated accounts such as Salary, FICA and Bonus are shown in a monthly display.

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However, the Salary column is shown and is the Salary that was loaded. Assume this file was loaded in January 2023 and now it is August 2023. We can go to the columns definition of the modeled sheet editor and select Display Columns:

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Which displays all the calculated accounts in a selection:

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Bring over Personnel Salary and we see the following options:

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Leaving the default options, we refresh the modeled sheet display to see a new field, Personnel Salary:

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Personnel Salary is showing the monthly salary cost. Notice for those making $120,000, the new field is displaying $10,000 for the monthly salary. We can change the parameter, “Number of time periods in Rollup Range” from 1 to 12 as shown:

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And the result is the monthly salary is now displaying the annual salary:

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To see how the different parameters affect the display consider the following scenarios.

  1. 1. Display 1 Year before Reference Time Period
  2. 2. Display Year Containing Reference Time Period
  3. 3. Display 1 year after Reference Time Period

To see the current time period, set the parameter and see the result:

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To see the 1 year later time period, set the parameter:

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Note: the Start of plan is Jul 2023. So, Year After Reference Time Period is Jan – Dec of 2024.

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Here, we can see that the salaries have increased by 3% which is the annual raise percentage. By switching from 1 month to 12 we get:

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These numbers represent the calendar year (Jan – Dec) after the reference period.

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. We help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning by combining the software with our best practices and expert guidance.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Restrictions on Cube Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Reordering Parent and Children Cube Accounts in Cube Sheets

Home » Workday » Page 7

Unlocking Success: Harnessing Customer Satisfaction Metrics with Workday Adaptive Planning

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In today’s competitive business landscape, customer satisfaction is more critical than ever. Happy customers are not only likely to stay loyal but also become advocates for your brand, driving growth through referrals and repeat business. Workday Adaptive Planning can help monitor customer satisfaction metrics and leverage the data for strategic decision-making, with a particular focus on the professional services industry.

The Importance of Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the backbone of any successful business, but it holds even more significance in the professional services sector. Here’s why:

1. Client Retention:

High customer satisfaction translates into strong client retention rates. Satisfied clients are more likely to continue using your services, providing a stable revenue stream.

2. Reliable Referrals:

Happy customers become your brand advocates. They are more inclined to recommend your services to others, leading to a steady influx of new clients through referrals.

3. Competitive Advantage:

Exceptional customer satisfaction sets you apart from your competitors. It’s a key differentiator that can make potential clients choose your services over others.

Leveraging Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning offers a powerful solution for tracking and utilizing customer satisfaction metrics. Here’s how it can help:

1. Integration with Customer Feedback Software:

Workday Adaptive Planning seamlessly integrates with customer feedback software like Zendesk or Monday. You can easily import customer satisfaction data into the platform, ensuring that teams across your organization have access to valuable insights.

2. Comprehensive Dashboard:

The platform provides an active dashboard displaying essential metrics such as average SLA, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and customer satisfaction. It also breaks down renewal rates by team leads. Conditional formatting helps identify areas where improvements can be made.

3. Drill-Down Capabilities:

With Workday Adaptive Planning, you can drill down into the data further. For example, you can explore specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as new references. This feature allows for in-depth analysis and customized reporting.

4. Informed Decision-Making:

By leveraging the data from customer satisfaction metrics, businesses can make informed decisions. Whether it’s retaining clients, generating references, or delivering projects on time, the platform offers insights to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

5. Industry-Specific Metrics:

Workday Adaptive Planning doesn’t just stop at basic metrics. It can provide additional details on industry-specific metrics, giving you a more comprehensive view of your performance within your sector.

In a world where customer satisfaction reigns supreme, Workday Adaptive Planning empowers businesses, especially those in the professional services industry, to turn data into actionable insights. By monitoring and analyzing customer satisfaction metrics, you can maintain your current customer base and drive business growth.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into other Adaptive use cases for professional services or want to explore how Workday Adaptive Planning can transform your organization, take a look at our Workday-approved framework for using Adaptive Planning to track customer satisfaction.

Read more from this series:

Aged to Perfection: The Whiskey Model for Workday Adaptive Planning

Reusable Cash Flow Forecasting in the Solar Installation Industry

What-if Analysis in Workday Adaptive Planning

Home » Workday » Page 7

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

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. In It, A McKinsey & Company senior partner lays out five elements that help drive performance, and finance leaders from Adobe, e.l.f. Beauty, and TD Bank share their individual approaches to growth, in a Fortune virtual event.

For CFOs, a growth mindset means the ability to help their companies thrive by firing on multiple cylinders.

That’s according to Ishaan Seth, a senior partner and co-lead of global banking and securities practice at McKinsey & Company, who outlined a three-pronged approach that includes customer acquisition and retention, innovation, and building new businesses.

“The mindset that personifies the best growth leaders, be they CFOs or CEOs, are those who can help the company operate across all three of those areas at once,” Seth said in a Fortune webinar sponsored by Workday. “That’s the essence of the growth mindset.”

Developed by Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck, the concept of a “growth mindset” was based on research that found people enjoyed greater success when they believed their talents could be developed “through hard work, good strategies, and input from others.” The research also found effects for organizations: “When entire companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed; they also receive greater organizational support for collaboration and innovation,” Dweck wrote.

In practice, a growth mindset can be seen in the C-suite of successful organizations. Seth said McKinsey surveyed 2,500 public companies over the past two decades and found five variables that drive outperformance in relation to their peers.

  1. 1. Resource allocation. “How dynamically or fluidly are you reallocating resources to newer businesses and opportunities?” Seth said.
  2. 2. Mergers and acquisitions. “M&A and a constant portfolio pruning both on acquisition but equally on divestiture” is critical, Seth said. “Are you regenerating the base?”
  3. 3. Productivity and efficiency. Outpacing peers is important.
  4. 4. Technology and technology innovation. “It’s a space where the arms race to keep current has in many cases across industries outstripped the ability for companies to invest at the level to be on the leading edge,” Seth said.
  5. 5. Margin expansion. This is accomplished by refreshing the value proposition, he added.

When it comes to technology, finance leaders are uniquely positioned to drive innovation at scale by making the right investments and establishing the pace necessary to more quickly benefit from that technology—whether it’s artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or generative AI.

Seth cited a McKinsey study that found generative AI could potentially add $2.6-$4.4 trillion per year to the global economy, noting that the United Kingdom’s entire GDP in 2021 was $3.1 trillion.

Finance leaders, then, must understand how to invest intelligently in technology and help set the pace at which to do so. 

“Is there a competitive advantage in getting to a higher-quality capability around whatever the technology may be 12 or 20 months sooner than your competitors?” Seth said. “The CFO can play an outsized role in driving speed as a source of competitive advantage.”

Seth added that calculating the return on investment (ROI) on technology spending might well require organizations to rethink their key performance indicators (KPIs), with CFOs driving the conversation around growth metrics.

The CFO, he said, owns the value creation story of a company. “We see the role of the CFO as being able to describe what it would take to double the market cap of the company in five years.”

Creating an Atmosphere of Innovation

To Mandy Fields, senior vice president and CFO at e.l.f. Beauty, leadership means promoting an organizational growth mindset by creating an environment that fosters innovation. 

“It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks, but it’s the manager’s job to make sure it’s safe for others to take them,” she said, attributing that ideal to the company’s 17 consecutive quarters of net sales growth—with a fourth quarter that saw sales growth of nearly 80%. “A lot of that has been not being afraid to take risks.”

As an example, Fields said e.l.f. Beauty in 2019 decided to invest in growing their presence on social media video platform TikTok, a move that resulted in “amazing” engagement. “As we went into the pandemic in 2020, when everybody was rushing in to figure out how to get on this platform, how to engage with the consumer, we were already there.”

Fields said the company holds annual off-site meetings to align its people to its priorities. “It helps us think about how we set an annual budget, but it really is an opportunity for inspiration, imagination, and possibility to converge,” she added. “That’s motivating for the team—not just for finance but for the entire company—to know that even though we’ve experienced this tremendous growth, there’s still so much more ahead of us.”

‘Be Constructively Unreasonable’

For enterprise software company Adobe, innovation is part of its DNA, according to Dan Durn, CFO and executive vice president, finance, technology services and operations. 

“We are consistently reinventing the company and engaging with customers in a way that’s very relevant for them,” he said. “Status quo is not a business strategy.”

Durn said understanding Adobe’s products “with granularity” helps the company innovate in order to serve customers better, making its growth and market position sustainable for the long run. He added that there’s “a velocity within the company” and clarity about innovation, as well as how to achieve growth via acquisitions. 

“We’re going to primarily be an organic, innovation-driven company,” Durn said. “But we will complement from time to time, and you can see that speed play out not only in our decision-making but the way we want to enable customers as well.”

The concept of a growth mindset—and continuous learning—is critical within a technology company, Durn said, offering a guiding leadership principle: “Be constructively unreasonable, which is that sweet spot of stretching people to more than they thought was possible and getting them to lean into problems and deliver more than they thought was possible.”

Growth on Personal and Organizational Levels

The variability in the macro environment, along with competition for customers in the retail banking space, keeps TD Bank CFO Xihao Hu focused on innovation on the customer-facing side as well as the back end. 

“We are working on enhancing our strategies to make sure we not only defend our turf but can continue to speed up our customer acquisitions, bring new customers in, and retain the loyal customer,” he said, adding that the bank had recently launched two new, unique credit card products and is looking at expanding its commercial banking into new geographies.

TD Bank’s growth mindset, Hu said, shows up on organizational and personal levels. “Once we had the strategy set, we embarked on a journey to tell the story across TD Bank in the U.S.,” he added, sharing in detail the bank’s plans with leaders who would then “take those stories back to their teams to cascade that sense of a mindset of growth.”

Hu also described a three-year blueprint for finance employees to improve their storytelling abilities to help TD Bank’s business partners grow. “We want to shift from a traditional role of overseers of past transactions into strategic partners to our finance employees,” he said.

Watch the full Fortune webcast “Emerging CFO: Maintaining a Growth Mindset in Turbulent Times.”

Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Navigating the BPM Vendor Landscape: Key Insights from the 2023-2024 Report

Navigating Economic Volatility: Insights from CFOs

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

Home » Workday » Page 7

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

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One of the solutions in our best-of-breed portfolio of software for the Office of Finance, Workday Adaptive Planning, has been recognized by the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Financial Planning Software. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice distinctions recognize vendors and products that are highly rated by their customers. 

This is based on reviews and ratings from 84 leaders in the Office of Finance who rely on Workday Adaptive Planning for strategic business insight. The software has an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 with 97% of users giving Workday Adaptive Planning 4 or 5 stars.

In just four short years, we’ve helped many clients transform their finance functions through using Workday Adaptive Planning. Here’s what some of Revelwood’s clients have to say about Workday Adaptive Planning:

“Workday Adaptive Planning allows me to step back and let the CFO do more with the data. With Excel, our CFO had to come back to me with questions and comments. Now she can make the changes she needs to directly in Workday Adaptive Planning. It is very powerful for her to do scenario planning in the model herself.” – Kris Gilbert, Controller, Nautel. 

“Workday Adaptive Planning is a very intuitive and flexible solution. Revelwood was very creative in how they implemented Workday Adaptive Planning for Texans Credit Union. We had weekly meetings with Revelwood where they would share their knowledge and even go through technical details with us.” – Ben Hart, CFO, Texans Credit Union

“[With Workday Adaptive Planning] We’ve changed the finance team’s value proposition. Our activities are no longer about building the reports, they are about analyzing the data.” – Ryan Garceau, head of operations and finance, Invaio Sciences. 

Workday Adaptive Planning is used by more than 6,000 customers in all industries across the globe.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

No, Artificial Intelligence Will Not Replace Finance Jobs

Annual Planning Versus Continuous Planning

Professional Services Firms Need Future-Ready Forecasting

Home » Workday » Page 7

No, Artificial Intelligence Will Not Replace Finance Jobs

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. It is a recent discussion between Workday’s Terrance Wampler and Stanford Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, explaining why CFOs are well-positioned to lead the AI revolution using a human-centered approach to artificial intelligence.

Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, has some advice for finance professionals concerned about whether artificial intelligence (AI) will replace their jobs: “AI is not going to replace CFOs. It is going to replace CFOs who don’t use AI with those who do.”

I [Terrance Wampler] had a great discussion with Professor Brynjolfsson recently at the Workday Future of Intelligent Finance Tour in San Francisco. The event—hosted in partnership with American Institute of Certified Public Accountants-Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (AICPA-CIMA) and Accenture—was designed to help finance and IT professionals leverage AI, machine learning (ML), and other advanced technologies to accelerate their journey to becoming finance futurists.

Brynjolfsson, who also serves as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, gave attendees a crash course on how AI will reshape the future of finance as we know it. Having just come from a visit to Washington, D.C., to brief the White House and the Council of Economic Advisors on the impact of AI, Brynjolfsson has a front-row seat to the potential for AI to change workforce dynamics. 

“In the early stages of AI, we knew that low-skilled labor would be impacted,” he told me. “As the technology has progressed, we’re seeing that professional workers—CFOs, accountants, lawyers, doctors—are going to be very much affected. Affected doesn’t mean automated. It doesn’t mean replaced. Rather, AI is going to augment your abilities and give you the freedom to do new things.” 

I couldn’t agree more with that positive assessment, which is why we’re investing so heavily in generative AI as the innovation engine for Workday Enterprise Management Cloud. As the group general manager for Workday’s suite of solutions for the office of the CFO, I see generative AI as an enabler of finance’s dual role as value protector and value creator.

Value protection tasks such as internal audit, risk management, and regulatory compliance can benefit from AI’s ability to comb through vast amounts of data to detect and surface anomalies before they destroy a company’s value or market reputation. Large language models (LLMs) can be trained to stay updated on the latest financial regulations, ensuring that compliance is always up to date. They can also assist in risk management by identifying patterns in data that might signify potential risks and by building robust risk models that consider a wide array of factors.

AI can also help drive value creation, whether that’s automating routine tasks to drive cost savings or enabling top-line growth. LLMs, for example, can help predict customer behavior, create more accurate forecasts, and improve scenario modeling by processing a large volume of data and considering a multitude of variables. Augmenting the capabilities of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams would allow them to prepare for a wider range of potential outcomes, making planning more resilient and adaptable to changing market conditions. 

Thanks to productivity gains like these, Brynjolfsson predicts that generative AI will be bigger than any of the technologies we’ve used over the last 10 years. He provided an example from new research he led on how generative AI is boosting call center productivity. 

“A couple of years ago, we teamed up with a company and a couple of Stanford professors and graduates to start a company that helps call centers do a better job,” he said. “And what we found was that the operators who used the AI model were dramatically more productive and more successful than the ones who didn’t, with the least skilled operators 35% more productive.” 

Brynjolfsson went on to explain that the model learned from the most successful operators, listening in on their conversations and identifying phrases or suggestions that improved customer sentiment. The model then passed on those skills to the newest operators. “That’s the kind of tacit knowledge that was previously really hard to automate.”

Generative AI and the CFO Role

Gartner analysts recently noted that CFOs are best positioned to help lead the implementation of generative AI in corporations because they have more insight into opportunities to leverage the technology to reduce costs, improve productivity, and increase revenue streams. “The CFO should be on the frontier of the AI revolution,” Brynjolfsson said. “CFOs understand how to work with unstructured and structured data and do sophisticated analyses on that data, which is why they can make such a big impact.” 

Brynjolfsson also sees human resources teams benefiting. “I did an estimate a few years ago and found that the value of human capital in the U.S. economy is a little over $200 trillion—10 times the value of the gross domestic product (GDP). But the problem with human capital is it’s very poorly measured and understood,” he said. “There are a lot of soft intangibles in there. AI’s large language models can do a lot to capture and understand the value of your human capital.” 

Given AI’s power to disrupt the economy, I asked Brynjolfsson about his take on the mood in Washington around regulating AI.

“I came away from my trip really impressed with how up to speed the government officials I met with were on generative AI,” he noted. “They understand that there’s a tidal wave coming that will be bigger than the impact of the pandemic on remote work, and they are taking it very seriously.” 

Brynjolfsson closed out our chat on a positive note, predicting that AI could potentially double the productivity rate currently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office over the next decade. He also sees AI giving us more resources to address challenges we face on the healthcare front, such as cancer, and on the educational front, such as personalized education. The reason is AI’s ability to unlock human potential versus just seeing it as cost-saving automation. 

“Any one of you who has tried to call an automated voice response system knows it can be very frustrating, especially when there’s a long tail of questions that we ask that aren’t common,” he said. “We humans are much better at dealing with exceptions than machines, so a good partnership is where AI can answer common questions and humans can deal with exceptions. AI has a much higher upside in terms of creating additional value than simply trying to take costs out.” 


Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Professional Services Firms Need Future-Ready Forecasting

Enterprise Planning Helps Professional Services Firms Adapt to Changes

FP&A Done Right: Trends in Accounting and Finance

Home » Workday » Page 7

Professional Services Firms Need Future-Ready Forecasting

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. It highlights some approaches for professional services firms to keep up with the breakneck pace of work.

Professional services firms don’t have the luxury of gradually adjusting to an evolving digital environment. For them, the digital future is pretty much here. More than one-third of professional services firms expect that at least 75% of their revenue will come from digital by 2025, according to a report by PwC and Workday.

As an additional sign of the changing times, a growing proportion of firms are investing more than $50 million in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and advanced analytics, according to the report. And with recent advances in generative AI, investments are likely to continue to grow. That’s further blurring the line between professional services and digital services—a distinction that will only get fuzzier in the future. 

“Digital first is our new reality. That isn’t going to change,” shared Joe Golden, vice president of services, IBM, at a Workday event.

Yet, despite how adroitly many professional services firms adapted to wide-scale changes brought on by the pandemic, some lack visibility around past behavior and likely future outcomes. “Professional services organizations can be surprisingly opaque when it comes to insight,” IDC reports.

To succeed, firms must solve their data, talent, and technology challenges. But many have yet to embrace this new reality. Among professional services leaders, 57% say there’s a growing gap between where their business is and where it needs to be to compete, according to a recent Workday study on digital transformation. And only 23% say their digital strategy allows them to keep pace with or exceed the demands of the business.

Firms will need to bolster their access to high-quality, always-available data, along with having staff with the necessary data literacy skills to make sense of it all. Of companies with fully-accessible data, 76% say they are well-equipped digitally to ensure business continuity in times of crisis, Workday finds. Small wonder, then, that advanced analytics and data visualization are the skills most sought after by IT leaders (35%) and finance leaders (34%).

“Access to data is the crux of most technology issues in any company,” says Jennifer LaClair, CFO, Ally Financial.

To better understand what the future might hold for professional services firms, industry thought leaders shared their predictions for three of the biggest trends the industry will face. The following excerpt focuses on how professional services firms can benefit from more sophisticated forecasting.

Data Silos Disappear as Organizations Race to Future-Ready Forecasting and Adaptability

To drive productivity and profit and to forecast accurately, future-forward professional services firms will need more integration and less separation of their people and systems. “Today’s professional services organizations simply cannot operate with functional silos as the lines between sales, delivery, and finance become blurred,” SPI asserts.

Unfortunately, these organizations’ data too often sits trapped within silos. “The reason most companies can’t forecast their revenue more accurately is because they have different systems and data across their lines of businesses and services,” Joseph says. “And all those different systems mean that you have data that’s going to be wildly inconsistent.”

Almost half (49%) of business leaders—and almost two-thirds (62%) of professional services leaders—say their inability to connect operational, people, and financial data to business outcomes impairs the organization’s agility, according to a Workday survey of senior business executives. 

But firms with accessible data tell a different story, the Workday survey reveals. A towering 85% of leaders whose companies enjoy fully accessible data say the organization can embrace change readily. All of which points to the urgent need to overcome siloed data sources.

For ERPA, a consulting and enterprise application managed services firm, adopting professional services automation slashed the time needed to calculate revenue from a full day to just 15 minutes. And the firm gained a stronger forecasting ability in the process. 

“From week to week, we’re able to get a really good sense of our forecasted revenue for projects in the next four to 12 weeks,” says Jon Milkovich, director of Workday financials at ERPA. “So it’s really provided a lot better real-time insight into what our forecasted revenue will be.”

That’s a need that best-in-class firms are meeting head-on. They’re 82% more likely than other firms to be able to share financial and operational data with the extended enterprise through a central repository, Aberdeen finds in its report: “Leverage Demand Planning and Forecasting for Best-in-Class Performance During Volatile Times.”

Learn more about how professional services firms can adapt and change in our recent webinar, Streamlining Professional Business Services with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Enterprise Planning Helps Professional Services Firms Adapt to Changes

FP&A Done Right: Trends in Accounting and Finance

Leveraging IBM Planning Analytics for xP&A

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