Guide · March 26, 2025
AI Built for Finance
Under Pressure: Why Forecasting Needs to Change
Today, finance and operational teams are under increasing pressure to drive efficiency, improve accuracy, and enhance forecasting capabilities. Yet traditional methods of planning and forecasting can no longer keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions.
Those dynamics leave finance with a unique vantage point, facing a diverse set of challenges simultaneously: external forces, internal complexities, and siloed operations.
Traditional Challenges in the Office of the CFO
External forces
- Macroeconomic impacts
- Supply chains
- Prices
- Competition
Internal complexities
- More enterprise systems
- Integration challenges
- Inefficient reporting & analysis tools
Siloed operations
- Siloed decision-making
- Limited decision support
- Lack of agility
As captured in OneStream’s recently released survey Finance 2035: Return to Investment, the role of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is more important than ever today. In fact, CFOs overwhelmingly agreed on why that’s the case:
The survey also revealed significant barriers to the Office of the CFO’s success: siloed approaches, limitations of legacy tech, and a talent crunch.
| Barrier | Share citing it |
|---|---|
| Siloed approach — limited cross-functional collaboration | 70% |
| Legacy tech — legacy systems and technology limitations | 72% |
| Talent crunch — skill gaps in the finance department | 78% |
These survey results underscore the enormous opportunity for finance to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). With AI and ML, finance can transform forecasting and planning processes across the enterprise, making them more efficient and effective.
Transforming Financial and Operational Planning with SensibleAI Forecast
Transformation is where OneStream’s SensibleAI Forecast comes in. With this transformative, AI-powered solution, organizations can unify the power of machine learning with enterprise business planning.
SensibleAI Forecast is purpose-built for finance teams, offering the following:
- Unified ML-powered financial and operational forecasting within OneStream, enabling real-time, AI-driven insights. This single source of truth eliminates silos and enhances cross-functional collaboration between finance and other departments (e.g., sales, operations, marketing, and HR).
- Scalable AI-driven planning platform that future-proofs organizations by adapting to evolving financial and operational needs.
- No-code AI adoption empowers finance and operational professionals without requiring expensive and limited data science expertise.
The Challenges of Traditional Forecasting
With traditional forecasting, many finance teams struggle with outdated forecasting methods that rely heavily on manual processes and a very narrow set of historical data. Here are some of the common challenges:
Lack of external variables
Traditional forecasting methods typically rely on historical data and only incorporate a few drivers or variables. By ignoring external variables like macroeconomic data, demographic data, or weather, finance is not generating the most accurate forecast possible.
Manual effort & scale
Legacy tools require significant human intervention, leading to inefficiencies, biases, and inaccuracies. These manual methods lack the scale to model at a granular level and across all areas of the business.
Data overload
The increasing volume of enterprise data makes it difficult to extract meaningful insights.
Market volatility
Static forecasting models fail to adapt to rapid economic changes.
Reimagining AI-Powered Planning with SensibleAI Forecast
SensibleAI Forecast addresses the outlined challenges by using AI-driven automation to generate more accurate, scalable, and agile financial forecasts. Here are some of the key value distinctions:
Built-In Data Management
No-code ingestion, cleansing, and manipulation of detailed operational data is possible from any source. Sources include point-of-sale (POS) systems, data warehouses (DW), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and multidimensional cube data.
Dynamic Models Adapt to Changing Data
Models re-build as data changes, and an AutoML model engine handpicks individual models for each prediction. Models even adapt down to the lowest level of forecast granularity (e.g., by product-location-customer) — ensuring unmatched accuracy for each forecast at each intersection, at scale for hundreds and thousands of intersections at once.
Auto-Ingestion of Internal and External Variables
Built-in connectors automatically retrieve external data such as weather, interest rates, and other macroeconomic indicators. These variables can be used to improve the accuracy and efficiency of a prediction.
No-Code AutoML Forecasting
Purpose-built AI for finance and operations enables no-code forecasting. For the entire ML-forecasting process, business planners independently create ML-backed forecasts — from data ingestion and quality to model building, utilization, and consumption.
Accelerated Time to Value
SensibleAI Forecast’s AutoML solution is purpose-built for the Office of the CFO. With the solution, AI-driven forecasting and predictive insights take weeks — not years — compared to traditional “do-it-yourself” (DIY) AI projects.
SensibleAI Forecast eliminates the complexity, cost, and delays associated with building AI models from scratch, ensuring a faster, more efficient path to value.
| Tenet | Average improvement |
|---|---|
| AI-Driven Forecasting Accuracy | 25%+ more accurate |
| Automated & Scalable Predictions | 85%+ faster to produce |
The Five Key Tenets
- AI-Driven Forecasting Accuracy — SensibleAI Forecast automatically analyzes past trends and both internal and external factors, delivering, on average across all customers, 25%+ accuracy improvements over traditional forecasting methods.
- Automated & Scalable Predictions — With OneStream’s proprietary AutoML engine, finance teams produce forecasts in a fraction of the time required by legacy models, reducing the time needed to create a forecast by an average of 85%+ across all customers. This improved efficiency enables organizations to run more frequent forecasts, model different scenarios, and proactively prepare for the future.
- Built-In Trust & Transparency — The “black box” problem common in AI applications is eliminated by ensuring full visibility into data sources, modeling assumptions, and forecast drivers. Out-of-box transparency dashboards highlight the influence of each variable across the portfolio or on individual predictions for each product-location combination.
- Democratized & Agile Forecasting — AutoML brings the power of ML forecasting to business users, accelerating development of use cases within SensibleAI Forecast. With rapid model deployment, users create diverse forecasting use cases — from rolling 12-month profit and loss (P&L) projections to short-term demand sensing — maximizing the value of AI across the organization.
- Unification — ML is natively unified within OneStream and functionally unified across business planning processes, ensuring consistency, alignment, and ease of adoption across the business.
Real-World Impact: Stake Center Locating
Customer Story: Stake Center Locating
Stake Center Locating, a leading professional services company in the locating industry, struggled with creating forecasts due to the variable nature of projects and client demands. Similarly, the company faced challenges in predicting workload and resource allocation for underground utility locating services.
With SensibleAI Forecast, Stake Center Locating achieved the following:
- 15–20%
improvement in forecast accuracy of ticket volumes, which translated into millions of dollars in savings
- 10M
work orders evaluated each year
With AI-driven insights, the finance team gained confidence in its ability to proactively manage financial risks and opportunities. The staggering numbers Stake Center Locating realized show that SensibleAI Forecast delivers accelerated time to value and millions in savings for customers.
“How do we get started?”
“Just do it.”
Getting Started with SensibleAI Forecast
OneStream’s SensibleAI Forecast ensures finance professionals can harness the power of AI without needing specialized technical knowledge. As a result of this democratization of AI, the barrier to entry is significantly lowered when implementing SensibleAI Forecast. The goal is to start small and gain quick wins to deliver the most value in a short period.
To help achieve that goal, OneStream’s AI team partners with customers to find the right use case to start using SensibleAI Forecast before expanding to other areas. We see customers starting with the following use cases:
- Any area within the organization that represents a significant percentage of revenues or margins
- Any area within the organization with the biggest forecasting variances compared to actuals
- Any area within the organization with the cleanest data
Finance leaders who adopt AI-driven forecasting today will gain a competitive advantage and improve business resilience in an unpredictable market.
Conclusion
AI and machine learning are no longer futuristic concepts — they are essential tools for modern finance teams. With SensibleAI Forecast, organizations can move beyond manual forecasting and DIY AI projects, achieving unprecedented accuracy, efficiency, and agility in a fraction of the time and cost of standard processes.
Schedule a demo → Are you ready to transform your finance function with AI? See how SensibleAI Forecast can empower your team today.FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is SensibleAI Forecast?
SensibleAI Forecast is OneStream’s AI-powered, no-code forecasting solution. It unifies machine learning with enterprise business planning, giving finance and operational teams real-time, AI-driven insights within a single source of truth — eliminating silos and improving cross-functional collaboration with sales, operations, marketing, and HR.
Why do traditional forecasting methods fall short?
Traditional forecasting relies heavily on manual processes and a narrow set of historical data. Common problems include ignoring external variables like macroeconomic data or weather, manual effort that can’t scale to a granular level, data overload that obscures meaningful insight, and static models that fail to adapt to rapid market changes.
How much faster and more accurate is forecasting with SensibleAI Forecast?
On average across OneStream customers, SensibleAI Forecast delivers 25%+ accuracy improvements over traditional forecasting methods and reduces the time needed to create a forecast by 85%+. While most do-it-yourself AI projects never reach production, 100% of SensibleAI Forecast models do.
What results did Stake Center Locating see with SensibleAI Forecast?
Stake Center Locating improved forecast accuracy of ticket volumes by 15–20%, translating into millions of dollars in savings, while evaluating 10 million work orders each year. The company also shifted from quarterly and annual forecasts to a daily forecast for the following two weeks, updated weekly.
How should finance teams get started with SensibleAI Forecast?
OneStream’s AI team helps customers pick a starting use case — typically an area that represents a significant share of revenue or margin, has the biggest forecasting variances compared to actuals, or has the cleanest data — before expanding SensibleAI Forecast to other areas of the business.
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