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You have made the decision to migrate to IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) in the Cloud. You have mapped the architecture, and you are ready to leave your legacy spreadsheet grids behind. But for both IT and the CFO, the most critical bottleneck in a 2026 migration isn't getting the data into the cloud—it's getting it back out. How do you connect a multi-dimensional TM1 cube directly to a modern visualization tool like Microsoft Power BI, without breaking the reporting layer or relying on brittle, overnight batch scripts? Here is how the fastest-moving FP&A teams are solving the reporting ...

If you are a CFO or an IT Director managing an on-premise financial reporting system in 2026, you already know the pain. IT is spending a disproportionate amount of the week maintaining local servers and dealing with version control conflicts in legacy Excel add-ins. Meanwhile, Finance is battling the exhausting "double-close risk," manually reconciling data across disparate systems and praying a massive VLOOKUP macro doesn't break on day three of month-end. When leadership asks "what is IBM Planning Analytics?", they are usually looking for a better spreadsheet. But the reality is different: ...

The Close as the Definitive Proof of Concept Month-end close is the most complete use case for Agentic AI — requiring end-to-end workflow orchestration, complex reasoning, cross-system integration, and nuanced human-inthe-loop exception handling. It transforms the close from a manual, end-of-month scramble into an autonomous, continuous process. For decades, the financial close defined the rhythm of every finance function: a month-end sprint of chaotic reconciliations, chased approvals, and late-night journal entries consuming the entire controllership team for days. Finance professionals ...

“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 ...

The Cost of Siloed Planning: Why Integrated Planning Matters The case for integrated planning — and why AI makes the absence of it more dangerous, not less. There's a story I use when I'm talking to CFOs about integrated planning. It's not a hypothetical. It's a company called Cochlear — a publicly listed medical device business. In a single trading day, the company lost approximately 40% of its market value recently. The reason wasn't fraud. It wasn't a product failure. It was a disconnect. Sales were declining. Inventory was building. The two facts were sitting in different systems, owned ...

Your Finance Team Is Already at Peak Headcount Three shifts reshaping finance — whether your organisation is ready or not. I've spent the better part of the last two decades inside finance functions — as an accountant, a systems architect, and now as someone who helps CFOs use AI to work smarter. I've sat through a lot of keynotes about the future of AI. I've also watched a lot of organisations be caught completely off-guard by shifts they could see coming but weren't prepared for. So let me be direct with you — peer to peer — about three things I believe every CFO needs to sit with right ...

Why the planning engine, the AI co-builder, and the orchestrator finally belong together, what the new operating model demands from finance leaders, and what every CFO should do about it in the next twelve months. Part 1. The twenty-year trade-off has just ended Every FP&A leader I talk to is living the same contradiction. The board wants faster scenarios. The audit committee wants more rigour. The chief executive wants insight by tomorrow morning. The CFO wants the number to survive an external audit. The business partners want a model that bends to their question. Finance wants a model ...

The Problem Every C-Suite Recognises but Few Have Solved Your organisation is not short on information. After a decade of digital transformation, most enterprises have built expansive repositories: policies, contracts, procedures, compliance frameworks, knowledge bases, operational runbooks, HR documentation, supplier records, regulatory filings. These assets represent years of institutional knowledge and millions of dollars of accumulated investment. And yet, when an employee needs an answer, a real, accurate, contextual answer, they still open a search bar, scroll through folders, send an ...