The interface has become the cheapest part of the planning stack. What remains — the model, the engine, the agents — is where the future of FP&A will be decided.
read the article →Fifteen-plus years of TM1 taught me what makes a complicated financial model survive its builder. It turns out the same principles decide whether an LLM can understand your model, and whether an AI agent can maintain it without wrecking it.
A deadline nobody believed in, a modeling language, and a month of 14-hour sparring sessions — how I built my own FP&A agent whose token bill dropped 10–100x while the results got better.
Thirty years in IT, fifteen in FP&A — and one problem I couldn't solve: how to hand my modeling knowledge to another human. The answer turned out to be a language.
Infrastructure got Terraform. Data got dbt. BI got LookML and TMDL. Planning — the discipline where a wrong number costs the most — is still clicking. It's time for FML.