AI in Finance
AI Just Reinforced Excel’s Staying Power: What 20 Years of CPM Got Wrong
The integration of AI in Excel opens up serious possibilities for FP&A teams—no existing Excel skills required. Learn what this means for the CPM landscape.
A reasonable assumption is that the rise of AI should eventually reduce the extent to which finance teams depend on Excel. Formulas give way to purpose-built planning platforms. Workbook sprawl shrinks as more of that planning work shifts into those platforms.
But according to new data, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Vena surveyed 364 finance professionals across the US, Canada and the UK to see how much of that shift has actually happened. AI already touches almost every finance role. Only 5% of respondents said they don't use AI in their role at all, or use it only rarely, and much of that adoption is happening right inside Excel.
86% of respondents now use at least one AI tool directly inside Excel, whether that's Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or some mix of the three.
Excel itself hasn't lost any ground in the process. AI has landed inside Excel itself, becoming part of the same workflow it was expected to replace. Finance professionals who use AI inside Excel are more than twice as likely as non-users to say their reliance on the spreadsheet platform will grow over the next year (55% vs. 26%).
And at companies that already own dedicated corporate performance management (CPM) software, nearly two-thirds of VPs and CFOs still open Excel every day, more than the managers who report to them.
The reality is that AI hasn't reduced finance's dependence on Excel—in fact, it’s made their affinity for the tool grow. Finance leaders' priority now is to ensure that Excel and the AI running inside it have the right layers of governance and data controls.
Within Excel specifically, three tools account for most of the AI activity, and only 14% of respondents say they don't use any of them.
Microsoft Copilot leads in adoption at 62%. It's built directly into Microsoft 365, so it's available the moment someone opens Excel, with no separate download or license required. ChatGPT follows at 57%. That's notable since it isn't part of that same package, which means finance professionals are bringing an outside tool into the grid on their own. Claude usage sits at 29%, used through an add-in or integration.
Nearly half (49%) of Excel users who rely on AI run two or more of these tools at once, which amounts to 42% of the full survey sample. No one tool has cornered the finance use case yet, so many people are assembling their own stack of AI tools.
The survey also asked what finance professionals use those AI tools for, allowing them to select every applicable use case. Here's how the responses ranked, from most to least common:
Data cleaning requires the least judgment of the eight options, more rule-following than interpretation, yet it still ranks seventh of eight. Summarizing and modeling, both of which require a fair amount of judgment calls about what matters, rank first and third. So, in practice, finance teams trust AI to both interpret the numbers and to clean them up.
That trust in AI's judgment shows up in the satisfaction numbers, too. Nearly 85% of respondents reported satisfaction with the quality of AI output and 44% calling themselves very satisfied. Finance teams aren’t cautiously testing AI in a low-stakes corner of a workbook. They’re relying on it for work that traditionally required a trained analyst.
If AI is pulling finance teams away from Excel, prolific AI users should be the first to expect their reliance on Excel to shrink. But the survey data show the reverse.
Among the 314 respondents who use AI inside Excel, 55% expect their team's reliance on the spreadsheet tool to increase over the next 12 months. And among the 50 who don't use any AI tool in Excel, only 26% say the same, meaning AI users are more than twice as likely to expect that growth.
And it makes sense: an embedded AI assistant removes some of the expertise Excel used to require. Building a complex model no longer means mastering formulas first, so more people can do that work inside the spreadsheet instead of looking for a way out.
When you zoom out to examine the full sample, the same pattern holds. 51% of the 364 respondents expect their reliance on Excel to increase over the next year, compared with just 8% who expect it to decrease. So more than six times as many finance professionals see the spreadsheet becoming more central to their work as those who see it fading.
This dependence on Excel may also point to a tech stack that isn't meeting finance teams' needs elsewhere. We saw this further illustrated in the fact that 54% of respondents said LLMs led them to consider replacing an existing finance software investment in the past year, and 60% of those people followed through, or 32% of the full sample.
CPM and financial planning software topped the replacement list (41% of those who considered a swap, 22% of everyone surveyed), ahead of BI tools (26%), data prep software (17%) and spreadsheet-based processes (15%).
Usability is a common thread behind that shift. Among respondents whose company already owns a CPM platform, 29% say the reason why they go back to Excel is that other planning systems are difficult to use, and a similar share say those systems don't flex to match how their business runs.
But those companies who find themselves ditching their planning software in favor of an LLM will likely find themselves returning to that platform or adopting a different one in the end.
Standalone AI can draft a model or summarize a variance report. But it can't provide the audit trails, workflow controls and data validation that a governed planning platform is built to maintain.
None of this means finance teams want to leave Excel behind. The CPM tools drawing the most replacement interest are the hard-to-use, rigid ones. A CPM platform that brings governed data and AI capabilities directly into Excel, lets finance teams keep working in the tool they already know while gaining the controls they're missing.
If seniority meant less time inside a spreadsheet, VPs and the C-suite should be the last people opening Excel every day. Instead, they're doing it more than the managers that report to them.
Among the 259 respondents whose company already owns a CPM or planning platform, nearly two-thirds (64%) of VP and C-suite respondents use Excel daily outside their planning platform, compared to 44% of managers and 47% of directors. The C-suite alone hits 61% in terms of daily use.
Excel proficiency is nearly flat across all role levels. 73% of respondents rate their own Excel skills as moderately high or high, and that holds whether you're looking at managers (74%), directors (73%), or the C-suite (71%). That consistent baseline suggests Finance as a function has a solid foundation of spreadsheet competency to build on, regardless of one’s job title.
Time pressure offers a more likely explanation for why senior leaders keep opening Excel instead of the platform their company already pays for. VPs and CFOs are among the busiest people in a finance department, so they are likely to default to the interface they already know rather than learning a new one just to check a number themselves.
If a company wants its C-suite to engage with the data directly, keeping that reporting inside Excel is the safer bet, since the people with the authority to replace Excel are also the ones opening the file every morning.
Most of the organizations in this survey already own the kind of platform that’s supposed to make Excel obsolete. Seventy-one percent of respondents' companies have a dedicated CPM or financial planning platform in place, so this survey isn't a deep dive into teams that skipped the investment.
Within that group of 259 respondents, 92% still use Excel at least weekly outside the platform, and not a single person answered “never.”
Looking ahead, these CPM users expect to lean on Excel even more. 53% of this group expect their Excel reliance to increase, compared to 8% expecting a decrease, nearly seven to one. When asked what use cases Excel covers that their platform doesn't, the answers spread wide rather than clustering around a single missing feature. They included:
No item on that list drops below a third of respondents, and the tasks range from modeling to scenario planning to pulling in stakeholders outside finance. Excel is clearly filling a wide set of jobs that their CPM platform simply doesn't handle.
Familiarity is the top reason finance teams cite for returning to Excel for this work, at 63%. But 42% also point to business unit leaders outside Finance who struggle with other planning systems, and 36% say their system isn't flexible enough for how their business runs.
Nearly nine in ten (89%) finance professionals say a platform's ability to work with people outside finance matters when evaluating CPM software.
When you put those findings together, Excel remains practical for a reason: It's the one tool every stakeholder outside finance can already open.
AI already exists inside Excel, where finance teams live day in and day out. Governance needs to live there, too. It can't sit siloed in a system that finance only visits occasionally.
Finance teams already prioritize the right things, even if the software landscape hasn't caught up. Among the six criteria finance professionals ranked when evaluating planning software, ease of use came out on top (with a score of 4.47 out of 6), ahead of price to value (3.77), depth of integrations (3.60) and breadth of features (3.48).
Feature count landing in the fourth position tells us people aren't shopping for the longest capability list. They want a platform that their whole team, including people outside Finance, can pick up and actually use.
The importance of usability also shows up in how finance professionals value Excel compatibility when evaluating CPM software. 86% call it important or very important, and 47% very important.
Finance teams are building AI workflows on top of the spreadsheets they already trust, rather than waiting for a replacement that would ask them to leave those spreadsheets behind. What's missing is governed data and context AI can't generate on its own, the layer that surrounds the spreadsheet rather than replaces it.
Vena extends Excel with that very foundation, amplified with AI, so finance teams can keep working in the environment they prefer, without sacrificing scale or control.
The survey was conducted via Centiment for Vena. The survey was fielded between July 16, 2026, and July 18, 2026. The results are based on 364 completed surveys. To qualify, respondents were screened as finance professionals (Finance Manager and FP&A Manager through the Director of Finance, VP of Finance, and CFO) at organizations with 200 or more employees across the U.S., Canada, and the UK. Data are unweighted, and the margin of error is approximately ±5 % for the overall sample at a 95% confidence level.
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