Robert Kugel's Analyst Perspectives

OneStream offers a platform designed to serve the needs of accounting and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) organizations. The software handles financial close and consolidation, planning and budgeting, analysis and reporting. OneStream recently held its annual user conference, Splash, in Las Vegas. In attending this meeting, my focus was on progress the company has made in the areas of predictive artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) over the past year, since the technology will be the greatest source of product differentiation in what has been a mature software category through the end of the decade.

AI and GenAI became a major theme in business software providers’ customer events beginning in 2023, although OneStream has been investing in AI and machine learning (ML) for years. Office of Finance software providers’ focus on AI and GenAI at these events is driven by the opportunity that the technology presents for differentiation in what otherwise is a highly commoditized and mature market, as well as to encourage customer adoption in a risk-averse and technology-backward buying community. ISG Ventana Research asserts that by 2027, almost all providers of software designed for finance organizations will incorporate AI capabilities to reduce workloads and improve performance. Increasingly, providers of software aimed at the Office of Finance will differentiate offerings by the capabilities and accuracy of AI functionality. The main objective of AI-enhanced software is to have the applications do more low-value work so people can contribute more. Organizations will adopt this technology to attract and retain the best talent because there’s more time for workers to focus on tasks that require their expertise, experience and judgment.

At Splash, OneStream highlighted advances in its Sensible AI portfolio. Even before ChatGPT created AI frenzy, Ventana Research selected OneStream Sensible ML for our Office of Finance Digital Innovation Award in 2022, which at the time reflected our assessment of its potential to significantly contribute to the improved performance of an organization. OneStream has continued to enhance its AI offerings, further refining Sensible ML’s ability to improve forecast accuracy and accelerate planning cycles, enabling enterprises to build agility into their responses to evolving business conditions. Its Sensible GenAI can assist in analysis and reporting processes, saving time in handling basic chores so that business analysts have more time to use their experience and expertise to provide deeper insights and recommendations. Rubix allows users to use natural language processing (NLP) to interact with and analyze data. Executives and managers can use this to do their own data exploration, increasing the business value of planning. The enterprise’s future direction is introducing more automated narrative reporting as well as the ability to perform planning driver analysis. Both Sensible ML and GenAI are supported by the Sensible AI library of built-in techniques. For example, an anomaly detector that, when applied to planning and analysis, highlights exceptions to improve accuracy or where breaks in trends are happening. In consolidation and close, the technology speeds up, and increases the accuracy of, account reconciliations and transaction matching.

All of this is a great start with considerable promise. Yet, decades of experience with software and technology have taught me that we have yet to sort out all of the snags that enterprises and software providers are likely to encounter over the next few years. That noted, it's worth repeating that most of the early gains in productivity from the use of AI and GenAI embedded in business applications will be bottom-up and small scale in nature. This gets little attention because there are no stunning headlines to be had from small-scale gradual improvements. And the idea that people will save five minutes here and 15 minutes there isn’t exciting—except to those millions of people who are doing the work today.

AI, both predictive and generative, will be an increasingly important feature of business software through the end of this decade, but it’s necessary for buyers and users of the technology to understand what a particular provider’s software can and cannot do. Especially for larger organizations, the ability of the software architecture to support high-volume, model training operations as well as its data orchestration and management will define how well and how completely the software will provide the scope and performance of AI and GenAI features claimed in its applications. My key takeaways from what the company demonstrated at Splash are its early technical leadership in embedding AI in its software and its ability to illustrate practical, high-value, low-risk applications of AI in the Office of Finance.

Despite the promise of AI, two issues are likely to challenge adoption of the technology. One is cost, which will test the willingness of CFOs to invest, while the other is risk aversion. ISG asked participants in its AI Buyer Behavior Study how much more they would be willing to spend on AI capabilities. The research provides insight into how enterprises currently expect to gain value from using AI and, therefore, their propensity to pay for AI capability in applications. The research finds the greatest inclination to spend is in sales performance management, which I interpret to mean that the participants see this area as having the greatest potential to generate profit through gains in sales productivity and therefore greater revenue. Those offerings that promote productivity without a direct connection to higher revenue or cost savings, or where the cost savings are perceived to be limited or difficult to achieve, will not make the cut. Having attended multiple software company events over the past year, there’s a clear indication that basic AI features will be included at no additional cost in subscription fees because the incremental cost to the provider is relatively small. Features that require expensive compute fees, such as a co-pilot, are likely to result is those costs being passed along.

On risk aversion, one characteristic of AI is the ability to start small and build confidence over time. The ability of a software provider to demonstrate customer success will be important to sales and adoption of the technology. One of the customer-led sessions on AI provided perspectives from one of the largest corporations in the world as well as a midsize services company. The former had more data scientists on staff than the latter had in its entire FP&A organization. When asked by the moderator for their advice to the audience, the midsize company replied, “Just do it,” which was echoed by the other. Both pointed to success beginning on a small scale, with experimentation to discover what works and what doesn’t. The midsize enterprise was able to increase its forecast accuracy in its staffing requirements, increasing the frequency of forecasts to adjust faster to conditions, increase the granularity with which it was forecasting and increase the accuracy of those projections, enabling it to save money by having the right people at the right place at the right time. The large company is finding value in having a purpose built-for-finance tool, augmenting its own efforts in mining its vast datasets to find opportunities.

Beyond the realm of AI, there were several important announcements related to improving capabilities and performance. Although OneStream’s software is highly adaptable to the needs of enterprises, many buyers prioritize achieving a rapid time to value. The company’s CPM Express offering is designed to simplify and accelerate deployment of the system in a relatively generic configuration. Dynamic Cube Services enable analysts to integrate internal and external data without having to load data, which accelerates their ability to deliver better informed insights that drive more agile decision-making. The company has been improving its user experience with a modern browser experience that streamlines user interactions across browsers including Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Safari. Its Power BI Connector is especially useful for the many organizations that use that software as a foundation for reporting and analysis. To support a growing trend in enterprise software, Genesis provides a no-code framework so that power users can translate their experience and expertise into working applications to enhance the planning, accounting close, analysis and reporting functions in the department.

OneStream Splash also featured sessions on enhancements to its core financial consolidation offering. Our recently released Financial Consolidation Buyers Guide classified OneStream as Exemplary, receiving an overall grade of A- with an 85.4% performance. OneStream was designated a Leader overall, in Product Experience and in Customer Experience. OneStream’s best grouped results came in Customer Experience with an 87.8% performance and an A grade, due in part to its A in Validation. In Product Experience, OneStream received an A- grade, with an 84.6% performance due to its 91.4% performance in Manageability. OneStream was designated a Leader in six of seven categories, including Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, TCO/ROI and Validation.

I recommend that organizations looking for software for forecasting, planning, budgeting or managing the close, consolidate and report cycle (or both) include OneStream on the list of providers for consideration.

Regards,

Robert Kugel