Is the 2027 AFP FP&A Forum Right for Your Finance Team’s Priorities?
The AFP FP&A Forum helps finance professionals address issues such as budgeting and forecasting, AI adoption, reporting effectiveness, business partnering and leadership development through real-world case studies, practitioner experiences and peer learning.
Use this page to find the AFP FP&A Forum content most relevant to your objectives. For dates, location, pricing and registration, see the 2027 AFP FP&A Forum program.
Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting
Are you working to improve forecast accuracy, strengthen planning assumptions or connect budgeting to strategy?
The AFP FP&A Forum features sessions where finance practitioners share how they are improving forecast accuracy, refining planning assumptions and responding to changing business conditions through approaches such as driver-based planning and AI-assisted budgeting and forecasting.
This section may be particularly relevant if your organization is:
- Looking for stronger connections between operating plans, cash outcomes and financial decision-making.
- Exploring how AI can be applied to budgeting, forecasting or management reporting in practical, real-world ways.
- Building more structured, driver-based forecasting capabilities to support planning and analysis.
Common Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Challenges
| Common Challenge | Relevant AFP FP&A Forum Session | What Attendees Will Learn |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership expects us to use AI in budgeting and forecasting, but we haven't seen many real-world examples that actually work. | How I Budgeted Faster — and More Accurately — Using AIHands-on session. Bring a laptop, browser access and an LLM of your choice. | How a finance team applied AI to budgeting, forecasting and management reporting using detailed instructions, business rules and organizational context rather than relying on generic AI outputs. |
| We know driver-based forecasting is important, but we don't have a practical method for building repeatable forecasting workflows. | Prompt to Forecast: Build a Driver-Based Model with AIHands-on session. Bring a laptop, browser access and an LLM of your choice. | How finance practitioners identify business drivers, structure planning data, perform variance analysis and build driver-based forecasting workflows using AI-assisted tools. |
| Uncertainty is everywhere, but we don't have a consistent way to track financial risks, assign ownership or plan mitigation. | Beyond Forecasting: A Hands-On Financial Risk Register Workshop for FP&A | How to build a financial risk register that tracks likelihood, impact, ownership and mitigation, using case studies and a template to develop a first draft tailored to your organization, and how to use an AI assistant to populate and maintain it. |
AI, Data & Automation
Are you working to use AI in finance, improve data quality or reduce manual finance work?
The AFP FP&A Forum features sessions where finance practitioners share how they are preparing their organizations for AI, improving data quality, streamlining recurring reporting and using AI agents to support analysis and automation.
This section may be particularly relevant if your organization is:
- Preparing its data, business rules and financial logic to support AI outputs.
- Spending a significant amount of time cleaning data or performing repetitive tasks.
- Exploring where AI agents can add value and how to govern their use in finance workflows.
Common AI, Data & Automation Challenges
| Common Challenge | Relevant AFP FP&A Forum Session | What Attendees Will Learn |
|---|---|---|
| We want to use AI, but we need to make sure it understands our business definitions, financial logic, relationships and rules. | FP&A's Next Job: Owning Enterprise Context | How finance, data and engineering teams at Cross River Bank partnered to build an AI-ready foundation, without replacing existing ERP, planning or BI systems, and how FP&A can help define and govern the business context needed for accurate, auditable AI outputs. |
| We want to use AI to speed up financial reporting, but we need to make sure our processes are clearly defined and don’t depend on knowledge that lives in people’s heads. | Technology Can’t Fix Broken Processes: Building an Operational Framework for Growth | How an Automation Readiness Framework can help finance leaders audit and stabilize legacy data workflows, and discover the structural guardrails needed to audit workflows for stability — all before capital is deployed. |
| We want to use AI to build financial models, but we need to know we can trust the results when presenting them to our CFO. | AI Meets Excel: A Liquidity Modeling WorkshopHands-on session. Bring a laptop, browser access and an LLM of your choice. | How to apply a practical framework that combines LLMs, Excel and FP&A judgment to build reliable financial models. |
| We see the potential of AI agents, but we're not sure which finance processes to tackle first. | Reimagining Finance Workflows through the Lens of AI | How FP&A leaders are integrating AI agents into variance analysis, forecasting and scenario modeling, along with a framework for identifying and prioritizing opportunities within their teams. |
| We want hands-on experience building AI agents and establishing rules for how they operate. | Finance Agent HackathonHands-on session. Bring a laptop, browser access and an LLM of your choice. | How to use AI-assisted tools to build agents, connect them to a workflow and develop governance rules, and apply these skills to account reconciliations, activity analysis or board reporting in a live case study. |
Reporting & Decision Support
Are you working to make reporting more useful, reduce production effort or give leaders a clearer view of financial risks?
The AFP FP&A Forum features sessions where finance practitioners share how they are making management reporting more useful, streamlining recurring reporting processes, and helping leaders identify financial risks and areas that require action.
This section may be particularly relevant if your organization is:
- Producing lengthy reporting packages without a clear connection between the content and the decisions it supports.
- Spending significant amounts of time preparing data and maintaining dashboards or recurring reports.
- Looking for a more structured way to identify, prioritize and communicate financial risks.
Common Reporting & Decision Support Challenges
| Common Challenge | Relevant AFP FP&A Forum Session | What Attendees Will Learn |
|---|---|---|
| Our reporting packages keep growing, but we aren't sure which metrics, pages or reports help people make decisions. | Less Is More: Retiring Reports That Don’t Drive Decisions | How to apply a four-question test to determine what reporting content to keep, redesign or retire, and introduce shorter formats while preserving essential detail and stakeholder trust. |
| Preparing and maintaining recurring reports takes too much time, leaving us with less capacity for analysis and decision support. | From Messy Data to Smarter Dashboards with AI | How a finance team uses AI coding agents to streamline data preparation and build a BI dashboard from vendor billing data. Includes workflow examples and practical lessons attendees can apply to recurring reports. |
| We have plenty of data on past results, but we need to understand what drives those results so we can judge whether our strategies and investments will deliver. | The Curious Case of the Stalled Strategy | How to differentiate between lagging financial metrics and the leading indicators of execution capability that influence business performance. Includes practical approaches for identifying execution risks earlier to improve forecasting and decision-making. |
Business Partnering & Influence
Are you working to strengthen business relationships, communicate financial insights or increase FP&A’s influence?
The AFP FP&A Forum features sessions where finance practitioners share how they frame business problems, communicate recommendations, navigate difficult financial conversations and build trust with business partners across the organization.
This section may be particularly relevant if your organization is:
- Strengthening FP&A’s role as an adviser to business leaders.
- Looking to translate financial analysis into clear options and recommendations.
- Working to communicate financial constraints while maintaining productive relationships with business partners.
Common Business Partnering & Influence Challenges
| Common Challenge | Relevant AFP FP&A Forum Session | What Attendees Will Learn |
|---|---|---|
| We want FP&A to play a stronger role in shaping business decisions. | Think Like a Consultant: FP&A Skills to Advise, Influence and Drive Superior Business Results | How to apply the mindset of an internal consultant to frame business problems, identify underlying performance drivers, test assumptions and turn analysis into options and recommendations that help leaders decide where action is needed. |
| Budget cuts, rejected investments and missed forecast targets can put us at odds with business leaders. | The Business Partner's Playbook: Difficult Conversations When the Numbers Say No | How to use narrative storytelling and behavioral techniques to de-escalate tension, explain financial constraints and guide collaborative discussions that preserve trust when delivering difficult messages. |
| We’re expected to influence decisions that shape business performance, but we have limited opportunities to experience the operational realities behind the numbers. | Finance Simulation: Understand the Business. Influence the Decision.Hands-on, interactive session. | How decisions in pricing, production, inventory, working capital, financing and investment affect financial outcomes, and how to turn financial insight into persuasive business recommendations. |
| We’re expected to deliver accurate forecasts, guide strategy and lead through change, but we need to understand how uncertainty and personal challenges affect our teams’ judgment, communication and performance. | Beyond the Numbers: The Human Side of Decision-Making in Finance | How uncertainty affects decision-making and small communication shifts create significant leadership impact. |
Finance Leadership & Team Development
Are you working to become a better leader, strengthen hiring decisions or develop your team?
The AFP FP&A Forum features sessions where finance practitioners share how they develop leadership skills, make more informed hiring decisions and modernize finance operating models to support AI adoption, transformation and the evolving role of FP&A.
This section may be particularly relevant if your organization is:
- Helping high-potential individuals develop the skills needed to effectively lead and coach others.
- Strengthening its approach to interviewing and evaluating finance candidates.
- Assessing how its talent, governance, data and technology support finance transformation and AI adoption.
Common Finance Leadership & Team Development Challenges
| Common Challenge | Relevant AFP FP&A Forum Session | What Attendees Will Learn |
|---|---|---|
| I aspire to move from an individual contributor to a finance leader role and need help developing leadership skills. | Beyond the Numbers: Pivoting from Top FP&A Performer to Exemplary Leader | How to navigate the shift from producing answers to developing people, with practices for delegating, coaching, building credibility, influencing executives and leading through change. |
| We need a more consistent way to evaluate candidates and verify the experience behind polished applications and interview responses. | The Hiring Lab: Interview, Evaluate and Choose with Confidence | How to translate role requirements into targeted interview questions, use follow-up prompts to assess candidates’ actions and judgment, and apply a consistent decision framework that accounts for AI-assisted applications and the need for additional verification. |
| We are investing in AI and transformation, but our structure and ways of working might be limiting the value we achieve. | The Operating Model Has Become the ConstraintExclusive to the Leadership Track. | How to assess finance operating model maturity and AI readiness across strategy, talent, governance, data and technology, identify organizational constraints and develop priorities for transformation using the Strategic Finance Operating Model (SFOM), a practical framework for building a modern finance organization. |
| We’ve been trained to get the numbers right, but we need to learn how to influence decisions, develop talent and lead teams through uncertainty. | Indispensable: The Leadership Skills Finance Never Taught You | How to build credibility, develop future leaders, and lead with confidence when the stakes are high through practical lessons and proven approaches. |
Ready to Join Your Peers at the 2027 AFP FP&A Forum?
See the full schedule, dates and location, then register to secure your spot.