Planful Launches Planner Assistant to Deliver Financial Forecasts Using Natural Language

Planner Assistant generates anomaly detection and forecasting insights grounded in the customer’s own planning models and the Planful Predict engine.

• Planner Assistant is built on the Planful Predict engine and the customer’s own financial data, which means every forecast and anomaly signal is fully explainable and can be traced back to actual financial data.

• Planner is Planful’s second major persona-based AI Assistant, following Analyst in October 2025. Together they form a continuous loop. Analyst explains what happened; Planner predicts what comes next.

• Planner Assistant will be featured at Perform26 On the Road with hands-on demos to unveil the Planful operating model for AI-powered finance that Planner Assistant brings to life.

Planful Inc., the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software, announced the general availability of Planful AI Planner Assistant. This conversational interface surfaces forward-looking planning and forecasting insights. Finance leaders can ask Planner Assistant to model scenarios, detect anomalies, and generate forecasts, receiving natural-language responses and visualizations in real-time.

Planner Assistant is the second in Planful’s growing team of assistants, following the release of Analyst Assistant in October 2025. While Analyst Assistant delivers natural-language insights from historical data, Planner Assistant looks forward, powered by the Planful Predict engine and grounded in the customer’s own financial data. Together they create a continuous planning loop, empowering finance teams to understand what happened, predict what’s next, and model their best path forward.

“Our leadership team is aligned around leaning into AI, and tools like Planful’s Planner Assistant make that more practical for finance instead of theoretical,” said Avra Mouzakis, Associate Director of Enterprise Financial Performance Management at TerSera Therapeutics.

Planner Assistant is natively embedded across the Planful platform, so finance teams can prompt it directly from the workflows they already use, generating projections in seconds instead of configuring models manually, discovering cost center variances before month-end close, and turning analysis into action without switching context. The handoff from analysis to planning becomes one continuous, context-aware workflow, shifting the work of finance from data preparation to strategic decision support.

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Planful AI Planner Assistant key capabilities:

• Generate projections: Instantly explore forecasts and scenarios in natural language (“What does CAPEX look like if we increase headcount by 15% in Q3?”).
• Detect anomalies: Surface unexpected signals in your forecasts (“Detect anomalies in my current forecast for sales and marketing expenses”).
• Analyze variances: Compare current performance against predicted outcomes (“What’s driving the difference between our forecast and actuals for IT spend?”).

“Finance teams spend too much time explaining what happened, and this limits their focus on shaping what comes next. Planner Assistant changes that ratio. It sits inside the work finance is already doing, uses the data they already trust, and gives them an accurate, confident view of what’s likely to happen, not a black box assumption. That’s what it means to build AI that accelerates what our customers do, rather than competing with it,” said Rowan Tonkin, Chief Marketing Officer at Planful.

Planner Assistant is built on a core principle: every forecast must be explainable. Unlike generic AI tools, it doesn’t generate projections from public training data. Financial decisions require evidence and context, so every Planner Assistant output can be traced, validated, and defended.

Planner Assistant applies the same robust security posture as all Planful AI products. Customer data and prompts are never used to train models, are encrypted in transit and at rest, and are only accessible to authorized users.

“Finance teams have mastered looking backward with Analyst Assistant. Planner Assistant shows them what’s likely to happen next and what they should do about it, no additional training or context switching required,” said Sanjay Vyas, Chief Technology Officer at Planful. “This is the next step in our roadmap to deliver AI-enabled assistants that augment human effort across the full finance workflow: from analysis to prediction to planning to decision.”

Planful will showcase Planner Assistant at Perform26 On the Road, with the next stops happening in NYC (May 14) / SF (May 21), following the roadshow’s kickoff in Houston on April 21. Attendees can explore hands-on AI use cases, from natural-language forecasting to early risk detection, and Planful leaders will walk through the 2026 roadmap in the product innovation sessions.