Episode 56: Predictive Planning for Finance

Guest: Justin Croft

How can Artificial Intelligence (AI) help the Office of Finance? Since most of the AI use-cases in the media revolve around intelligent assistants (like Siri and Alexa), or self-driving cars, it can be hard for those of us who support businesses in quantitative functions – such as Finance – to see where AI is relevant to our jobs.

But Predictive Analytics is a sub-topic within the broader field of AI! Predictive Analytics – which encompasses familiar mathematics like linear regressions – is all about using the patterns of the past to project the future. One benefit comes from reducing manual effort while minimizing subjectivity and bias in getting to a starting point for your plan or forecast. This takes care of the easily predictable parts of the plan, while freeing up more time for deeper scrutiny of the strategically important ones, for example new product introductions, or new market expansions.

Our guest this week is Justin Croft who leads QueBIT Solution Architecture and Data Science group, but whose career started in Finance. Justin will share concrete, relatable examples of now Predictive Analytics has been successfully deployed in financial planning and forecasting use-cases, and how QueBIT’s prescriptive and repeatable methodology can deliver meaningful results in as little as 6 – 8 weeks!