The AI trends and offerings shaping the tech sector right now
With a majority of the tech world ending their fiscal year in January, February has become known as “SKO season”. Our teams had the pleasure of attending the new-year kickoffs for many of our partner technology companies, learning alongside them, and hearing their plans for the new fiscal year ahead.
While our expertise reaches across many diverse platforms and touches the offices of CFO, CRO, and CDO, one common theme has emerged across every kickoff this year and from every executive office – “what should we be thinking about with AI?” It’s still too early to guess which specific AI offerings will emerge on top, but companies do need a strategy. Early adopters will reap the benefits while those who wait for a winner will find themselves behind. So how to get started?
From my perspective, too many executives still see AI as a way to cut costs, asking “what jobs can AI replace?” From our experience, the winners thus far are using AI as a multiplier instead—using AI to make their teams and their data more efficient and more effective. Yes, AI does eliminate some mundane tasks and other non-value-added steps, but the real winners are those who see AI not as a replacer, but as a multiplier.
The series of sales kickoffs throughout last month shows just how many interesting advances are being made, and where companies can get started with AI. It’s also made me even more confident in our multiplier-based philosophy.
Take the Salesforce annual kickoff for example. Right now, Salesforce is prioritizing AI-powered agents and agentic transformation. Our teams already have in-production examples of customers using AgentForce to improve the performance of their sales teams and customer service teams using AI for coaching—great examples of how we can help managers become more effective and efficient. Just as elite athletes study game film to improve their on-field performance, we help them use Agentforce to improve their day-to-day customer interactions.
The results are impressive: more revenue per rep, higher customer satisfaction, improved closed rates, and shorter sales cycles. By using AI not to replace sales reps but to empower them, we’re helping our customers become more profitable. It just goes to show that a multiplier approach to AI delivers better results.
Snowflake was also focused on agents at their sales kickoff. They provided a sneak peek at Cortex Agents, their own agentic offering focused on automating workflow management and turning data into insights. Our Snowflake-using clients understand how smarter data management leads to smarter decisions, and now as AI capabilities become more and more accessible, those clients will have the chance to do more with that data.
AI delivers stronger analysis on two fronts. It becomes easier, as agents gain the ability to set up reports and answer questions in response to plain-language questions. But it also allows more people to benefit from analysis—because when your data is only a simple query away, more of your employees can use better information in their work. As a result, AI becomes a multiplier for almost everyone at your company.
As a consultancy with a strong finance focus, we were excited to see what OneStream had to offer. OneStream is currently debuting an offering they’re calling Sensible Machine Learning (SML). SML pairs backward-looking predictive modeling with forward-looking business intuition—an AI model that can account for weather, pricing, competitive information, and more when producing daily or weekly forecasts.
AI-powered forecasting and projections were among the first business-ready use cases to emerge from the past few years of AI innovation. We’ve been early adopters of these offerings specifically because of their multiplier effect, letting finance teams spend more time on analysis and decision-making and less time on generating the forecast. SML has the potential to make these offerings even better, addressing areas where companies have previously needed to manually adjust their forecasts and freeing up even more time for decisions. That’s the multiplier effect in action.
In addition to a $500 million investment in a product roadmap for AI, Anaplan shared other exciting plans at their SKO. Their focus is on building AI into their core product to enable smarter decisions, especially in rapidly changing business environments. Spaulding Ridge has been an Anaplan partner since the company’s beginning because we see the benefits of a connected view of finance. Making AI directly usable within your planning tool means even more connection.
We’re excited to see how these new additions play out, but what they’ve shared is promising: faster decisions, smarter decisions, and more profitable decisions with the help of AI. Here too, a multiplier effect occurs: Your finance team gets more power to drive smarter decision-making, improving performance across your business.
The new AI capabilities we’ve seen this SKO season are just a taste of what’s in store in the year ahead. No matter what your business goals, you owe it to yourself to get started. Meanwhile, as we learn more about the new AI capabilities that emerge, we’ll keep our eyes on the multiplier effect to determine what will have the greatest impact. Curious about how AI can multiply your own business? Reach out—we’d be happy to discuss.
