Too many companies still rely on manual forecasting because they think AI requires better-quality data than they have available. Nowadays, that’s a costly mistake.
Not All Excel Forecasts Are Created Equal
CEO’s know what a “good” forecasting process looks like: but how it is usually executed on can be drastically different.
Excel spreadsheets are repeatedly shared back and forth and finally end up with finance, where they have to be manually sifted through, validated, and merged. This process takes up an enormous amount of time for a CFO, usually requiring multiple rounds of revisions, and is an error-prone process with an accuracy rate far lower than you’d like. By the time it reaches the CEO or board meeting, that data is likely outdated and tainted by human biases and errors.
According to McKinsey, who surveyed 130 CFOs, assessing their satisfaction with their forecast accuracy, some 40 percent said their forecasts are not particularly accurate and that the process takes far too much time.