As an FP&A professional, you’ve been here before: it’s ten minutes before a stakeholder meeting. You’re flipping between spreadsheets, rechecking formulas, hoping the numbers in your deck are still accurate. A last-minute question comes in, and you need an answer. Fast.
This isn’t just a one-off scramble. It’s the daily reality for FP&A teams balancing real-time decision-making with labor-intensive manual reporting. And while expectations have evolved—with business leaders expecting faster insights, deeper analysis and always-on availability—the tools often haven’t.
That’s why we built Vena Copilot: an AI assistant purpose-built for FP&A.
And now, it’s grown even more powerful. Today, Vena Copilot introduces a new level of autonomy through AI agents that can take more manual work off your plate.
These aren't generic AI tools repurposed for finance—they're deeply integrated into the Vena platform, designed to work with your data and for your workflows.
At the heart of this evolution are two agents:
The Analytics Agent, which helps you analyze trends, spot anomalies and surface the insights you need, right when you need them.
The Reporting Agent, which builds ad-hoc reports for you automatically—so you’re never scrambling for the latest variance analysis or month-end numbers.
Instead of toggling between multiple reports, files and formula audits, FP&A teams can now engage with these agents conversationally and contextually inside the Vena interface and Microsoft Teams.
In this post, we’ll walk through how each agent works, what sets them apart and how real teams are using them to accelerate decision-making.
Featuring an intuitive conversational interface, Vena Copilot lets you use simple chat prompts to interrogate your existing organizational data within Vena to accomplish tasks in minutes that previously would have taken hours. Tasks like gathering data, generating reports, analyzing trends, optimizing forecasts, and answering complex business questions.
What’s more, it’s easy to set up without the need for IT, data scientists, or AI engineers.
We designed Vena Copilot to be flexible across business needs, even outside of finance. That means Vena Copilot can surface insights not just from your financial data, but the operational data unique to your business.
Vena Copilot can also be used by anyone in your organization, not just FP&A—letting executives and other business departments draw their own insights when and where they need them, saving your team time that can be spent on more strategic activities.
Vena Copilot’s AI agents live inside the Vena platform, connected to your existing models and data. So when you ask a question or initiate a report, you’re building on a foundation that already knows your business.
As a user, you’re simply engaging with Vena Copilot—typing your question or selecting a prompt. Behind the scenes, Vena Copilot’s Agent Orchestrator routes your request to the most relevant agent, whether that’s surfacing insights or generating a report. As a result, you get the answers you need without toggling tools or switching context.
Here’s what each agent brings to the table:
Think of the Analytics Agent as the colleague who always has the answer—without needing time to “dig into it.” It’s like asking your sharpest analyst to sit beside you during every meeting, proactively surfacing insights and handling ad-hoc questions in seconds.
Built directly into the Vena platform, the Analytics Agent works with your real-time models and actual business data—not a static snapshot or generic output. It helps you move from wondering what’s going on to knowing exactly why it’s happening.
Here’s what the Analytics Agent helps you do:
Investigate anomalies in real time by comparing actuals against trends, forecasts, or thresholds. Say during month-end review, you notice operating expenses are unusually high, so you investigate with Vena Copilot. It flags an unexpected jump in facility costs across two locations and attributes it to a vendor billing change, which explains the anomaly. Or, you might compare your revenue against seasonal trends.
Drill down across dimensions like time, region, product line, or cost center—with zero manual slicing. For example, when sales leadership asks for product-level performance by region, you can simply ask the Analytics Agent—and it returns a breakdown that shows Q3 underperformance was isolated to one SKU.
Surface key drivers behind movements in revenue, spend or margins. Say your gross margin has dipped. You ask Vena Copilot what the cause could be, and the Analytics Agent immediately identifies rising freight costs tied to overseas suppliers as the primary driver.
Model scenarios on the fly. In Vena Copilot, you can even ask “what if” style questions and get response immediately of how that scenario may play out—without the need to spend time in spreadsheets.
Generate insights in multiple languages. To support global teams, Vena Copilot can digest questions and produce answers in over 100 languages.
Get an explanation of how the AI arrived at the answers. Vena Copilot provides transparency into how it came up with its responses, explaining what its methodology and source numbers were, so you know you’re getting answers you can trust.
If the Analytics Agent is your go-to for immediate answers, the Reporting Agent is the teammate who builds your reports before you’ve even finished your morning coffee.
The Reporting Agent connects directly to your existing templates and data models to build reports dynamically in Excel (fully connected back to Vena), based on the information you specify.
Here’s how it works in practice:
Generate reports in seconds based on your prompt, reflecting your most up-to-date data.
Analyze your data further by selecting exactly what entities you want to see. Vena Copilot generates a starter report for you through Vena’s Ad Hoc Reporting tool, which then makes it easy for you to toggle between which data entities you want reflected and simply hit “refresh”.
Lean on Excel’s built-in tools for further analysis. Because Vena reports are built in native Excel, you can make use of further analysis tools that are available in the tool, such as Excel’s “Analyze Data” feature, and visualization features.
Speed up recurring reporting like month end close. By building reports to your exact specifications with just a simple prompt, you can drastically speed up time-consuming processes like monthly reporting, allowing you to deliver insights to the broader business faster, and spend more time actually analyzing that data.
Share reports and save them for future use. After creating a report with the Vena Copilot Reporting Agent, you can share it with anyone in your organization as you would any Excel file, and also save reports for future use. Because the report is connected to your Vena database, any changes to your underlying data will be reflected back to the report you’ve built once you hit “Refresh”.
Agentic AI has the power to help organizations do more with less. And Vena Copilot does exactly that, effectively extending your FP&A team’s capacity by taking over many of your team’s routine jobs and empowering stakeholders across the business with self-serve data insights.
Here’s how to get started with Vena Copilot to accelerate your decision-making:
When first launching Vena Copilot, you can easily onboard yourself, then build your own AI model—or multiple AI models if you choose. Your own company data, which resides in Vena, will inform those models, so you can have confidence that the results you receive are based on your own business context.
While Vena Copilot is already trained on a robust set of questions specific to FP&A, you can customize its output by applying your own personalized training. Train your Vena AI model with typical questions you and other stakeholders within your business would ask it.
If you have a Vena license, you can engage with Vena Copilot’s chat interface, wherever you sit as a Vena user (for instance, whether you’re a modeler or a contributor). That way, you can ask for assistance no matter what you’re working on and what part of the business you work in.
And now with Vena Copilot integrated into Microsoft Teams, you can engage with your data directly in chat or during a meeting.
Vena Copilot allows you to interrogate your data through natural language prompts and ask follow-up questions to dig deeper. You can also give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to indicate whether the answer is helpful, allowing you to train the model on your preferences.
This applies to reports built with Vena Copilot too. You can give feedback on the report it generated, which it will remember for next time you have a similar request.
You have full visibility and control over what’s informing your Vena AI model at all times—further building transparency into the answers it provides you.
How AIR Went From Manual Reporting to Strategic FP&A, Powered by Vena Copilot
When the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) rolled out Vena Copilot in spring 2024, their two-person finance team faced big demands with limited resources.
Using Vena since 2022, they’d built solid budgeting and forecasting workflows. But as they added more reporting and stakeholder requests, manual tasks were consuming precious time. AIR needed a smarter, faster way to operate—without hiring more help.
In just 30 minutes, Charles McCumber, AIR’s Director of Finance, completed the technical setup of Vena Copilot—no IT team required.
The results were dramatic:
25–50% reduction in time spent on recurring reporting—giving Charles time back to focus on higher-value work like scenario planning, budgeting and “thinking strategically about the future”.
Faster audit season and stakeholder responsiveness—Vena Copilot helped Charles and the team complete their audit season faster than ever before and eliminatethe usual 15‑20 minute delays in pulling data for leadership requests.
The role of FP&A has never been more critical—or more complex. Stakeholders expect answers on demand. Boards expect airtight reports. And finance leaders are expected to drive strategy, not just track spend.
Vena Copilot’s AI agents are here to help you meet that moment. Whether you’re surfacing insights in real time or generating polished reports in seconds, the Analytics Agent and Reporting Agent give you the tools to move faster with confidence—without sacrificing accuracy or control.
And stay tuned—we’re just getting started.
See how Vena Copilot fits into your workflow, your models and your strategy. Take the product tour.