IBM TM1, Agentic AI & Finance Transformation Insights

TM1 / IBM Planning Analytics | Modernisation | AI in finance What I told the Sydney TM1 User Group about modernising TM1, and why it decides whether finance is ready for AI. By Amendra Pratap, Founder and Managing Director, Octane | October 2026 You can’t ignore AI. If your TM1 models aren’t AI-ready, something else will be, and it won’t only replace TM1. It will replace the people who run it. That was the message I left with the room at our Sydney TM1 User Group on 21 October, hosted by IBM on George Street. It’s a blunt way to put it, but every finance team using TM1 needs to hear it now, ...

Octane launches enterprise agentic AI across six business functions 84 AI agents. Six departments. One control plane. SYDNEY, 21 October 2026. Octane today launched its enterprise agentic AI solution. It is a team of 84 AI agents that work across Finance, Procurement, HR, Banking, IT and Legal. Every agent runs on IBM watsonx Orchestrate. It acts as one control plane, so leaders can run, watch and govern every agent from a single place. “Most companies are past asking whether AI works. Now they want to know how to run it safely across the whole business,” said Amendra Pratap, Founder and ...

Finance teams don't stall on AI because of the technology. They stall on governance, data and capacity. In my keynote to 220 finance leaders in Auckland, I gave three tests to check whether your team is ready. Presenting "AI readiness: why does it matter?" at the Forefront Finance Transformation Summit NZ 2026. On 15 October I gave the keynote at Forefront's Finance Transformation Summit NZ 2026 at the Hilton Auckland. The room held about 220 CFOs and senior finance leaders, and the message clearly struck a chord. The event at a glance Event Forefront Finance Transformation Summit NZ 2026 ...

At our recent CFO roundtables in Perth and Melbourne, one theme surfaced faster than any other: governance isn't a nice-to-have for finance AI projects, it's the reason most of them stall. Finance teams don't operate under the same rules as the rest of the business. Data handling in finance carries obligations most other functions never have to think about — audit trails, regulatory reporting, materiality, segregation of duties, and a level of scrutiny that assumes every number will eventually be checked by someone whose job is to find the problem. That's a very different starting point to a ...

Over the past few weeks, Octane Solutions ran AI roundtables with finance leaders in Perth and Melbourne. No decks, no slideware, no "AI 101." Instead, we sat down with CFOs and their teams, showed them real AI models solving real finance problems, and let the conversation go wherever it needed to go. That last part mattered more than we expected. These sessions weren't a pitch delivered at finance executives — they were a conversation with them. And what came back was some of the most candid, useful feedback we've heard on where finance actually stands with AI today. The format: show, don't ...

The third theme from our Perth and Melbourne CFO roundtables was the one every finance leader recognised instantly: Copilot is already in place, it's genuinely useful — and it hasn't moved the needle on the business. Copilot works. It just isn't wired into finance Almost every finance team we spoke to has Copilot rolled out. People use it to draft emails, summarise documents, get a first pass at a memo done faster. Nobody in the room disputed that it helps. What nobody could point to was a case where it changed how the finance function actually operates. The reason came up repeatedly once we ...

When your finance team spends more time wrestling with data than analysing it, your planning software is working against you. For enterprise transportation and fleet operations leaders, selecting the right planning analytics software directly affects everything from route optimisation decisions to fuel cost forecasting. This guide walks you through the evaluation criteria, integration requirements, and automation readiness factors that matter most when choosing a platform for IT-led financial planning. The planning analytics market has matured significantly. According to Gartner Peer ...

“Your finance team today is probably the largest it's ever going to be.” That statement sparked plenty of discussion during my presentation at the Finance Transformation Summit Victoria 2026 at Marvel Stadium in Melbourne. For many years, finance transformation conversations have centred around automation, process improvement and digitalisation. This year felt different. The conversations were no longer about whether AI will impact finance. They were about how quickly organisations can implement it, where to start, and how to do it safely while maintaining governance and control. With more ...

AI in Finance : Governance Is Not a Feature. It Is the Foundation. Why ungoverned AI in finance is an audit risk, a compliance risk, and a strategic liability — and what a properly governed agentic finance stack actually looks like. There's a question I get asked at almost every CFO event I present at. It comes in different forms, but it's always the same underlying concern: 'If the AI is making decisions, who is accountable?" It's the right question. And the fact that so many senior finance leaders are asking it tells me that the governance conversation around AI in finance is still ...

Octane Hosts Auckland AI in Finance Summit: Why your next hire should be a AI agent ! The conversation around AI in finance has changed dramatically over the last 12 months. Finance leaders are no longer asking whether AI will impact their teams. They are asking how quickly they can implement it, how they govern it, and how they prepare their organisations for a future where AI becomes embedded into everyday finance operations. That was the focus of the recent Octane AI in Finance Summit, hosted at the beautiful Sofitel Auckland Viaduct Harbour, where more than 50 senior finance and business ...

How AI Transforms Your Financial Close — End to End Month-end close consumes 6 to 10 days of your finance team's time every single month. Here is what it looks like when AI takes on the heavy lifting — across all five phases of close. Let me start with a number that should bother every CFO: 6 to 10 days. That is what the average mid-to-large organisation loses each month to close activities — data loading, reconciliations, journal entries, intercompany matching, commentary, board pack production. Over a year, that is between 72 and 120 days of your most skilled finance people doing work that, ...

The AI Bill Shock Coming for Every CFO Token costs, uncontrolled AI spend, and the governance gap that will cost your organisation — if you don't act now. Every CFO I've spoken to in the last 12 months has signed off on at least one AI initiative. Most have signed off on several. Claude, Microsoft Copilot. ChatGPT Enterprise. AI features bundled into your ERP, your FP&A platform, your HR system. It's everywhere, it's accelerating, and for most organisations the cost of it is currently invisible. That invisibility is about to end. I'm not writing this to slow down your AI adoption. I'm ...