Demo: AI-powered scenario modeling

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are. Welcome to our webinar and demo of AI-powered Scenario Modeling at OneStream.

Today as part of our webinar and demo we're going to take you through a quick introduction and then go through an overview of how OneStream sees the world of Scenario Modeling. Finally we're going to go through a demo and with that we're going to conclude with an overview of OneStream on our platform and a Q&A. So just for a quick introduction my name is Prash Chaharji. I'm a Global Director of Product Marketing for Planning and Analysis at OneStream and I'm joined by my colleague Jeff Priest, a Senior Solution Consultant who will take us through the demo.

So with that in mind let's go through an overview of Scenario Modeling. Now what we know is let's start with a simple question. When was the last time your business environment felt predictable with tariffs shifting overnight, interest rates moving in ways nobody forecasted, supply chains that looked stable six months ago suddenly aren't, and geopolitical events that nobody modeled.

This isn't really a temporary rough patch, it's the permanent operating environment for finance teams now. And the problem is most of our planning infrastructure was built for a world that no longer exists. It was built for stability.

And here's a stat I think that captures this better than anything else. Based on our research with FP&A trends, 61% of organizations today can only forecast six months ahead. Six months. That means the majority of finance teams are essentially flying blind mid past year. And in a world moving this fast, that's not a forecasting problem, that's a strategic problem.

Now at OneStream we spend a lot of time studying where finance teams actually are, not where they say they want to be, but where they are. And earlier this year, I had the chance to present findings from our 2025 FP&A trend survey, one of the most comprehensive annual studies of FP&A function globally. What the data shows is a profession that is incredibly ambitious, but generally constrained.

Only 2% of FP&A teams consider themselves fully optimized. 2%. Over 60% are still fighting manual processes and inconsistent data every single day. Only 11% of organizations have fully aligned their strategic, financial, and operational planning. The rest are still planning in silos. Finance over here and operations over there. And strategy is somewhere else.

And here's what that means in practice. Just 31% of FP&A time is spent on high value work. Insights, analysis, decision support, the rest is data wrangling.

Finance teams are being asked to do more strategic work than ever. But the systems and processes they're working inside weren't designed for that. That gap between ambition and execution is exactly the context for why scenario planning matters so much right now.

So let's talk about scenario planning specifically, because I want to reframe how most people think about it. For a long time, scenario planning was treated as a nice to have, something the more sophisticated finance teams did, a bonus capability. That framing is now completely out of date.

The survey shows and identifies scenario-ready forecasting as one of the five pillars of best-in-class FP&A performance. Not a feature, a pillar. That's the industry saying, if you can't do this, you're not operating at the level the business needs you to. And the payoff is measurable. Organizations can run scenarios quickly, are three times more likely to base decisions on data. Three times. That's not a marginal improvement in forecasting. That's a fundamentally different relationship between finance and the business.

The question has shifted. It's no longer whether your organization needs scenario planning. That debate is settled. The question now is whether you can do it fast enough to actually matter.

And here's where I want to be honest with you, because I think the audience has heard scenario planning pitch before. And you know the reality of trying to do it. The intention is there, but the infrastructure often isn't.

You know, based on our survey, only 17% are using fully driver-based models, which means the vast majority of teams are building, you know, scenarios by manually changing assumptions and spreadsheets. That's not scenario planning. That's a copy-paste exercise dressed up in a different tab name. And speed? 29% of organizations need more than 10 days to produce a new forecast. Think about that. If a major market shift happens on a Monday, nearly a third of finance teams won't have a revised forecast ready until the following month. And by then, the window for the decision is closed.

So what does it look like when you close that gap? The data is pretty clear. Organizations using dynamic driver-based models, 77 % of them rate their internal forecasts as good or great. Organizations still on basic or no models, 27%. Same profession, but a completely different outcome. The difference is in the infrastructure.

Scenario-ready doesn't mean running three versions of a budget once a year. It means being able to pressure test assumptions, flex your key value drivers, and model what if in hours, not weeks. It means finance leads a conversation instead of catching up to it. That's why we're going to show you today inside of OneStream. Not the concept, the actual capability. And with that, let's get into it.

So at this point in time, I'm going to hand it off to my colleague Jeff Priest to take you through a demo of AI Power Scenario Modeling. Thanks much. Let me go ahead and share my screen and we'll get off and go here.

All right. So let's set some context here in terms of the demo. I think it's very important, but I'd also ask you to think about it, how you're doing these things today. So, you know, how something significant has just happened. Think about all the changes and all the volatility in the economy. How do you go through a process of readjusting or redoing a forecast or creating a new scenario today?

Now, I am in the application right now and I'd like to set some basic context here. The first context that I'd like to sort of showcase here is within the application, different users can have different home screens or starting points. I'm in as a user that has full access to everything. Realistically, if you're just creating a new scenario or a new forecast, you may have access only to that specific screen. I'm going to do two things here. The first thing I'm going to do is when I go into my strategy here, I'm going to create a high level plan and I want to do this very quickly.

So as I'm coming in here, again, I'll explain this very quickly. I've got multiple scenarios. We talked about the ability to create new scenarios. As we go through this, I'm going to create a new scenario, flex a few drivers and see what effect that has on us from an organizational perspective. You can see here with simple drop downs, I can change the focus. Baseline, what if one, what if two, upside, downside, etc.

I can also do this for differing parts of my business. In my case, I'm looking at the equipment division, but I've got some other division as well, my properties, my motors and my software division. So the ability to do this very quickly. I'll also point out if I scroll out here to the right, as my time horizon goes out, in this case, I'm doing my forecast or my scenario all the way out to 2030. But as the time horizon goes out, the frequency goes down.

2026 is by month, 27 and 28 are by quarter, 29 and 30 are yearly. Again, you can do them all monthly if you'd like to go that route. But what we find in practice is as the time horizon goes out, it makes more sense for the frequency to go down. Now, a couple of other things as I explain this here.

What I've got is the simple drivers for my business. And these are configurable based on how you want to model or, you know, do your forecast. Here, I've got a revenue growth factor year over year.

My revenue growth is driving many things, gross profit, margins, salaries and wages, other operating expenses, etc. You can also see here I've got capital expenditures, and my DSO and my DPO. Do I want to get more aggressive or let things slide a little bit? But the idea here is that I'm doing this at a very high level, because I want to do it quickly, I want to be able to ingest information that I have and create a new scenario very quickly, model the business and see what effect that has on us from an organizational perspective.

Let's go in and create a brand new scenario. So I'm going to drop down here to my what if one. And when I drop to what if one, what you'll now see is I don't have anything in here. So I'm going to create a new scenario, flex a few drivers, and we'll see the effect that it has on the organization.

Simple buttons over here allow me to do this. So if I come in here, let's copy it. And let's take my what, let's take my baseline, and let's copy it over to what if one. So let me go ahead and make a copy of that scenario.

I've got some new information, I want to flex some drivers and see what the effect is on us from an organizational perspective. You can see here with simple drop downs, I can do that. And as I'm looking at this now, I've now got data here in my what if one. Also, if I look at my variances here, you can see that I don't have any variances at this point. Baseline and what if one, they are indeed identical. So what we're going to do now is we're going to go in and we're going to make a couple of changes.

Let me come in here and get pretty aggressive with my revenue growth. So let me come in here, we'll make just a couple of changes here. Again, I'm going to get pretty aggressive with these changes. And then we're going to save and calculate.

And when I do that, there's a ripple effect. Because as you're looking over here, you can see that things like my gross profit margin, my salaries and wages, these are all driven off of a percent of revenue. So by changing three numbers, I have a ripple effect down through my P&L in this case. So I'm doing this very quickly, flexing this, and we'll see what the effect is here in just a moment. Again, I'd ask you to think about how you go about doing this today.

If I look at here, my what if variances to baseline, I'm now seeing the effect of that. So here, as I look down, I can see my total revenue, my cost of goods sold, etc. So I've seen the effect of that one change, or those three numbers that I changed here, of what it's done to me from an organizational perspective.

Important to realize that what we have up here is configurable. And again, a lot of these metrics, or a lot of these items can be calculated based on data that exists in an ERP. You could also use AI to forecast some of them. But again, it becomes surfacing them up here from a visibility standpoint and making changes or adjustments.

I've also got the ability here, if I look at my variances to baseline, I can come in and make some adjustments here to these numbers. Whereas a moment ago, I was adjusting the drivers, I can now come in and let's say, for instance, I know in April, we're going to be signing a rather large contract, I can come in here and make a change to that number. Let's bump that up to 200,000.

Yellow indicates that there's been a change there. My simple drop downs up here allow me to do a save and calculate. So again, the idea here is that I want to be very fast, I want to do this very quickly and see the effects on my organization. So as I'm doing this, I'm creating this model. And again, I keep kind of pounding on a little bit, but think about how you do this today. Many times, this is a distribution of Excel spreadsheets, or I'm collecting information from the field.

If I come back now here to my what if variances, you can see that I continue to have those variances showcasing here exactly what we've done or what's changed within the organization. Now, if I come in here, I can look at some other things as well.

As I'm looking at this, let's look at our cash flow. So I'm calculating my cash flow, and let's sort of filter out the noise. As I'm looking at here, I'm going to focus on just those two scenarios, my baseline and my what if one. You can see here now, I can see the effects all the way out to 2030. By making a few changes here, I changed these three numbers, and I changed one month, I bumped up the revenue number for that one month, and I can see the effects all the way out to 2030.

Now, I can continue to flex these drivers, make changes, make updates, do all of those things. But the idea here is that I'm doing this very quickly here and seeing what this does to us organizationally.

Now, because I've done this at a high level, now what I want to do is I want to release this into the wild. And essentially, what I want to do now is I want to take this high level assumption, my what if one, and I want to allocate it or make it available out to the field setting a corporate target.

Basically, the premise here is that I've done some modeling at corporate, I've ingested some new assumptions and whatnot. And now I want to release it out into the wild or release it out into the field and tell them, here's your number, you figure out how you're going to get there. From a target perspective, I set a corporate target, I now can solicit input from the field. And again, highlighting the advantage of OneStream as a platform, because I can make that available to my users out in the field, they can go in, make changes, make updates, and I can revise that forecast very quickly.

So this is an example of what I'll call a high level or strategic plan, creating drivers, making some adjustments, see the ripple effect down through the organization. And then once I've done that, releasing it out. If I come back here now to my main screen, let me just showcase very quickly how that would potentially be made available to my folks out in the field.

If I come in here now, if I go to my planning, and again, I'm in as that all powerful user, the ability to sort of see and do anything go anywhere within the application, realistically, there would be security applied, allowing the users to see or not see things as they need to.

This is an example of an input here. And you can see that I've got that target scenario now coming in and making it available to my users. So the ability for my users to do their budget or do their forecast based on that corporate target that was created for them.

That's an example of doing scenario modeling there at what I'll call a high level. So I created that very quickly at a high level and released it out into the field or out into the wild. What I'd now like to showcase is the ability to have initiatives.

Think about the initiatives that you have within your organization. So from an initiative perspective, it could be things like remodeling a plant, introducing a new product line, doing some capital expenditures, etc. Again, this is a great example of some things that a lot of organizations struggle with because many times they're doing this out in Excel or they're doing it outside of the system. Within one stream, I've got all of this brought together here.

And what I mean by that is here, I've come now into my scenario modeling. So very similar to what we were looking at before. But what I have here on my modeling tab is I've got some initiatives, things like a back office SG&A reduction, maybe a global price increase. This could be the modeling of tariffs, as an example, increasing marketing spend, etc.

So I've got these different initiatives here. The other thing that I can do with these initiatives is I can include and exclude them. And what I mean by that is think about how you do initiatives today. Hey, we're going to remodel that new facility or we're going to open a new facility.

We may want to do that earlier in the year, bring that back, for instance, into June, or we may want to push it out into August based on marketing conditions. So what I have here are some modeling items. You can see here, as I'm looking at these modeling items, when I create them, I have down here the effect they have.

In this case, if I do a global price increase, it's going to prompt my product revenue by 5% and my adjustments to revenue by 5%. Increasing marketing spend here. I've got some things down here as well. So once I've created these initiatives, I can then determine if I want to include them or exclude them across my various options.

In this case, I've got option A, option B, and option C. Again, it's configurable, but you can see here that I can flex the dates a little bit as to when these initiatives are going to be included.

If I come back here now to my scenario analysis, now this is where I start to get into that. And I'd ask you to think about this, how you go about doing this today.

I've got my version of the budget here. And then, as I said, I've got option A, option B, and option C. If I look at one of these, I can see exactly what's included. So here are those initiatives being included and when they're effective.

So the ability here to calculate the impact very quickly, whether I'm including or excluding initiatives, pushing them out, or bringing them back and seeing the effect immediately on my various options, option A, option B, option C. Also commentary. This is kind of an ancillary thing here, but comments are key within the OneStream application because as you're doing many of these things, if you think about initiatives as an example, or even going back to that long-range strategic plan that I had, the ability to have commentary or explanations. It's just key within the OneStream application.

And these comments are kept within the application. They're not living outside in an ancillary Excel spreadsheet or written down in a Word document or a piece of paper. The comments are part of the application. They can be reported on. They can be analyzed and really used as an explanation or justification for when I'm pushing these particular things around.

Very similar to what we saw before, I'm looking at my different lines of business here. In my case, Rocky Mountain Clubs is the only one that I have access to, so I've got that here.

But I'm taking my budget, I'm flexing it, option A, option B, and option C. So I've got that full ability to have all of those things here pushing out those initiatives or potentially pulling them back as well. Now, once I've gone through this process of doing that, if I click on the copy button here, what this is going to allow me to do is now, once I say, aha, that's the one that I like, that's the model that we want to utilize, simple things here allow me to copy that. So I can now take that revised budget, make a copy of it, make it available to my folks out in the field.

So the ability to really model things very quickly, do those initiatives, see the effects. I can see down here the effect, option A, if I look at that, option B, et cetera. So I can sort of see exactly what's happening, the initiatives that were included, and I can run through very quickly making these changes and adjust the organization.

What we find in practice with our customers is they're able to model things very quickly to the point that we talked about earlier with all the volatility in the economy right now, being able to shuffle and shift these things around. We're going to remodel a facility. We're going to do that earlier. We're going to push that out a little bit based on things that are happening. It's just really key within the OneStream application, bringing everything all together.

So that kind of is what I really wanted to showcase today. I wanted to just walk you through very quickly and give you a sense, but I'd ask you to kind of think about how you do this today.

There's also the ability here to model these multiple initiatives all at the same time. So you can see when I went back to my modeling tab here, I can begin pushing them around, including and excluding them. March 2026, option B, this one is not active, and it's not active for option C. So the ability to model these different scenarios, all sort of or multiple initiatives, including and excluding them. I can take my working budget, flex it, and then once I come upon one that I like, I can take that, make a copy of it, and solicit field input as well.

So that kind of is what I wanted to go through from a demo perspective. What I'd like to do now is turn it back over, and we're going to go through just a little more on the OneStream platform, and then we'll have a little time for some question and answer as well.

Thanks so much, Jeff. Thanks for such a great demo. And with that, I'm going to spend some time now going through an overview of OneStream and our platform. So at OneStream, we really have three pillars that our customers leverage based on our vision of OneStream and what our customers have been doing. We have financial management, where you manage the essential functions of the business. We also have operational planning and analytics, where our customers steer the business. And finally, all powered by sensible AI, where our customers predict the business.

So when it comes to financial management, it's a foundational pillar of OneStream's unified platform, designed to deliver end-to-end financial control across consolidations, close, planning, reporting, compliance, and audit. This core is where trust in numbers is established. This is your slower changing data, monthly, quarterly, yearly, actuals versus budget. It's a financial backbone that ensures everything else, from agility to AI, is accurate, aligned, secure, and auditable. These are the functions that the business must do.

This is really the number cruncher function of your business. And once you build this core, you can do so much more.

Now, operational planning and analytics is a pillar that allows you as a finance team to really become the storyteller of your business.

This pillar connects transactional and fast-moving operational drivers to financial intelligence, enabling finance teams to monitor performance daily and weekly, model scenarios really quickly, and respond to changes with precision. We're not really replacing any data warehouse, such as Snowflake or Databricks. What we are is, we're the financial intelligence segment of your data warehousing strategy. We only pull the least amount of information required to run the calculations.

This information is fast-changing, so it's not retained once it's replaced with the latest data, saving on data storage costs. And if I asked you the three statistics were to steering your business, this pillar allows you to answer those questions. Really, operational analytics empowers finance to steer the business in real time without compromising on audit, control, or platform trust.

And finally, we have sensible AI, the third pillar of OneStream's vision, helping you leverage AI with their no-code plug-and-play architecture.

Trying to meet the demands of more analysis, faster decisions, and better forecasting with the same tools and resources is a very heavy lift. And it's not necessary with the exponential opportunity the AI provides. The key is finding a way to get the results from AI in a timely, impactful way, in a cost-effective manner.

That's why our finance AI pillar is such a critical unlock. It's what finance teams need now to shift from reactive reporting to intelligent proactive forecasting, insight, and action, all accelerated by AI and delivered with speed, confidence, and context.

OneStream's sensible AI capabilities are unified directly within the platform, not bolted on as an extra tool. They surface naturally within the workflows our customers use every day. First, you can improve the accuracy and reliability of your forecasts.

With sensible AI forecasts, you can deliver the most accurate, bias-resistant forecasts much faster than traditional planning cycles, but with full transparency to the results. Our customers typically build out this in weeks. Second, you can unlock insights faster across every workflow. AI-powered automation helps streamline analysis, detect anomalies, summarize commentary, and surface what matters most, to surface optimal areas for your teams to focus on versus digging for this or never knowing at all.

And third, our AI agents accelerate your decision-making. Instead of chasing down reports or paging through documents, users can ask questions in natural language and get instant contextual answers.

This empowers more people across your organization to make better decisions faster. This is how AI becomes more than just a buzzword for you. It's how you can advance your business with intelligence built in to every forecast, workflow, and decision, all within the unified OneStream platform.

And finally, with this all in play, we have the OneStream platform. With plug-and-play architecture across financial management, operational planning and analysis, and sensible AI, all allowing our customers on the OneStream platform to bring this all together with financial intelligence built directly in to help take your business further. So with that, it's time for some Q&A, and we can get started.

So we've got a bunch of questions. So one of the first questions I see is, if I change one driver, like revenue growth, does that automatically flow through the entire model?

Jeff? Yeah, if you think back to what I showcased with changing that, I flexed, I think, three things there with the revenue piece.

And by changing my revenue year-over-year growth, there was a ripple effect down through the model. Now, that really is based on configuration. Of course, your model may be more complex or simpler than that, but the ability to change one thing and see that ripple effect down through the P&L, as an example, but that's where the scenario modeling piece comes into play. What if my revenue goes up?

What if my revenue goes down? I want to be able to flex those drivers very quickly and ultimately get me through, if you think back to the demo, ultimately get me through to that cash flow calculation. What does this do to us organizationally?

Fantastic. And I think the next question is along the same lines as well, but can we model multiple initiatives at the same time and see the combined impact?

Yeah. So some of those initiatives, again, a couple of things there is, one, the ability to model those multiple initiatives, pushing them out or pulling them back, but also create those initiatives.

You know, if you think back to when I was on that modeling tab, you know, what if I had a price increase? So it's going to increase my revenue. It's going to increase a few other odds and bits. So the ability to create the initiatives within one stream, those can be loaded from external sources as well, but then push them out or pull them back. Again, multiple scenarios and flexing my budget based on those differing time horizons on the initiatives.

Fantastic. And the next question is, how long would it realistically take to build out a new scenario like this?

It really is. I wouldn't say it depends. I know that's a bad answer, but, you know, creating the new scenarios, once you've got the infrastructure in place is pretty quick. You saw me take baseline and create what if one. And it's more a matter of, you know, thinking about how you model your business and configuring one stream to match that model, I would say. Fantastic. I think the next question is something that's always on everyone's mind. How does this integrate with our existing ERP and data sources?

Yeah, great, great point there. I mean, one stream becomes sort of the, I'll call it the umbrella, which might not be a good term, but the ability to ingest information from ERP, from other sources as well. If you think about across your organization, ERP many times is your official book of record, but you may have other things, Salesforce, other systems as well.

We talked a little bit about operational data as well. So one stream becomes an ingestion point for multiple sources of data, surfacing it up and allowing you to do things like scenario modeling, potentially marrying data from multiple sources.

Fantastic. Fantastic. And finally, our last one, what does it take to get started if we're coming from Excel? I bet a lot of customers are thinking about this because, you know, so many are working in an Excel environment right now.

Yeah. So great, great question. So if you think about it, you know, your Excel models, the advantage of Excel is it's very flexible, but the disadvantage of Excel is you tend to have a lot of these Excel spreadsheets laying around and you've got to link them together. So if you're utilizing Excel today, it's a matter of really sort of looking at that Excel model and bringing forward into one stream, all of the good things, the calculations, the formulas, et cetera.

But the interconnectivity, having to link multiple spreadsheets goes away because the one stream platform just facilitates that very nicely. So it's really just sort of, and if you think about those, that input schedule I had where I was inputting the revenue lines, it looks very much like an Excel input sheet, but it is within the application.

So it's a matter of really sort of taking apart Excel and mirroring it then into the one stream application.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jeff. And thank you everyone for joining us on this webinar. If there's any further questions, please do contact us directly through onestream.com or through the email address below. You can follow us on many different social media channels of your choice where you can get the latest and greatest updates on one stream, as well as thought leadership from us and other items. And to find out more, please do click on this QR code here. And again, thank you so much for joining us. And we look forward to seeing you all next time.