FP&A in Five Years: Why Your Future Starts Now
Across finance circles, the conversations are changing. CFO roundtables, LinkedIn feeds, industry events — everywhere you look, the same themes keep surfacing. Finance leaders are being asked to do more than close the books and deliver reports. They’re being asked to provide foresight, not just hindsight. At the same time, the technology world is moving at breakneck speed, promising tools that can transform how we analyse, decide, and act.
The result is a growing sense of momentum. On one side, the pressure to deliver sharper insight and agility. On the other, an avalanche of innovation led by artificial intelligence. Between those forces lies the future of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) — and it’s approaching faster than many teams realise.
This isn’t about the next six months.
It’s about the next five years.
The Inflection Point
he true inflection point wasn’t the rise of remote work during COVID. That changed our context, sure, but not the essence of how FP&A teams operated. Most of us simply moved our spreadsheets into home offices and kept grinding away. The real shift came later, in 2022, when ChatGPT crashed the party.
Seemingly overnight, artificial intelligence leapt out of research labs and into everyday conversations. Our inboxes filled with hot takes predicting the end of work as we knew it. Schools scrambled to ban ChatGPT, then unban it, then ban it again. And while the education sector twisted itself in knots, Big Tech quietly launched an arms race. Microsoft, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI all charged toward the same deceptively simple goal: helping people interact with the digital world the way they interact with each other.
That moment mattered because it signalled more than just another shiny tool. It demonstrated, at scale, that interacting with technology could be conversational, intuitive, and immediate. And if that’s true for students writing essays or marketers drafting campaigns, it’s only a matter of time before it reshapes how CFOs, controllers, and FP&A teams make sense of their businesses.
Fast forward five years and the way we work with financial data will be unrecognisable. You won’t be building pivot tables or begging IT for a new extract. You’ll be talking to an intelligent agent that understands context, knows your business drivers, and can act on your behalf.
Imagine saying: “Model the impact of losing our biggest customer.” Or “Run a worst-case scenario and show me the top five levers we can pull to protect EBITDA.” Instead of waiting for another static report, your agent will connect signals across people, processes, and systems — and then make changes in real time.
An inventory delay will automatically update the project timeline. That timeline shift will trigger a resource reallocation. The knock-on effect in cashflow will flow straight into the forecast and the board pack. No Excel gymnastics. No endless back-and-forth emails. Just decisions made at the speed of information.
This is the agent era — and it’s coming faster than most finance teams are prepared for.
Build Now for What’s Next
So what does that mean for today’s CFOs and FP&A leaders? The obvious temptation is to rush toward the AI itself — to find the best new tool, experiment with pilots, or wait until a vendor bakes it neatly into the next upgrade cycle. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the AI isn’t the hard part.
The hard part is your digital house.
To get value from these new agents, your business needs a foundation of clean data, clear definitions, and shared language. What exactly qualifies as “marketing spend”? What counts as an “active project”? Which drivers actually move the needle in your model? These questions are often treated as minor bookkeeping irritants, but in an AI-driven world they become existential. If your definitions are fuzzy, your agent will be fuzzy too.
The organisations that will thrive in this new landscape aren’t necessarily the ones with the deepest budgets or the flashiest tech stacks. They will be the ones that can articulate their business in structured, unambiguous ways. They will be the ones that can feed an AI the clean signals it needs to not just analyse but act.
That means the time to prepare is now. Start small but start deliberately. Define your core business drivers. Standardise your metrics. Invest in the digital plumbing that makes tomorrow’s agent possible. The companies that take these steps today will move faster, operate smarter, and create less friction when the real disruption arrives.
The future of FP&A is coming. It won’t wait until you’re ready — which is why the work starts today.
About the Author
Peter Nitschke is a global leader in OracleNetSuite EPM and one of only 20 developers globally trusted by Oracle to be involved in product development.
Peter has delivered hundreds planning, reporting, and analytics projects across the globe using the Oracle suite. With experience spanning Mining, Oil & Gas, Telecommunications, Services, Manufacturing, Retail, Government, and Universities, he brings deep, cross-industry insight to every engagement.
Peter is a trusted advisor to some of Australia’s largest companies, known for his expertise in strategy, transformation, and digital innovation. He is at the forefront of OracleNetSuite Cloud EPM implementations in Australia – involved in product development, beta testing and product enablement across the entire stack.
He is also an award-winning speaker and international panelist, regularly sharing EPM insights on global stages.
Connect with Peter on LinkedIn
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