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, and 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 FP&A is relying on often haven’t.
Finance teams need a better way to keep pace with growing demands—without adding more manual work. That’s where Vena Copilot comes in.
Vena Copilot brings AI directly into your FP&A team’s flow of work to help you uncover insights faster and gain time back to focus on strategic priorities.
Vena’s AI agents act as specialized virtual teammates that automate key tasks, surface insights and support better business decisions.
With the latest updates, Vena Copilot now includes:
Together, these AI agents extend your FP&A team’s capabilities—reducing manual work, accelerating analysis and enabling more confident planning across the organization.
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 also from the operational data unique to your business.
Anyone in your organization can use Vena Copilot, not just FP&A—letting executives and other business departments draw their own insights when and where they need them, giving your team more time for strategic activities.
Vena Copilot’s AI agents work directly with your existing Vena models and workflows. Each agent performs a specific role—automating planning, data access, analysis or reporting—to help finance teams move faster with greater accuracy and control.
Meet Vena’s full suite of AI agents:
Vena’s Planning Agent removes friction from the most time-intensive part of FP&A: building and adjusting plans at scale.
Budgeting and forecasting are not conceptually difficult. The challenge is operational. Teams must repeat driver logic across entities, rebuild formulas inside templates and then translate business assumptions into spreadsheets. Each step introduces delays and inconsistencies.
The Planning Agent brings greater speed and intelligence to the budgeting and forecasting process by enabling finance teams to quickly create driver-based plans without relying on complex formulas or manual mappings.
Whether rolling forward prior-year OPEX actuals, forecasting revenue using seasonal trends or planning future expenses based on headcount, Vena’s Planning Agent can execute these calculations seamlessly within the spreadsheets your team already uses—all with simple natural language prompts.
Here’s what the Planning Agent can help you achieve:
Applying growth assumptions, distributing values and updating templates manually introduces delays and increases the risk of inconsistencies.
The Planning Agent helps FP&A teams avoid this by:
For multi-entity organizations, even small time savings per entity add up to significant efficiency gains during the budgeting cycle.
Planning complexity increases with organizational growth. Finance teams must coordinate inputs across business units, regions and operational stakeholders while maintaining control over the model.
With the Planning Agent, however, you can quickly apply updates across entities and revise assumptions without rebuilding templates. Plus, operational contributors can participate in the planning process without deep spreadsheet expertise, and finance teams can manage larger planning scopes without increasing operational effort.
Driver-based planning requires translating business assumptions into financial logic. When this process is slow, forecast cycles lengthen, and decision-making lags.
Vena’s Planning Agent is expressly intended to shorten this cycle. Finance teams can update assumptions, generate revised outputs and evaluate the impact of specific drivers faster. As a result, plans reflect changing business conditions sooner, enabling more frequent forecast revisions and faster scenario evaluation.
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:
Let’s say during your month-end review, you notice operating expenses are unusually high, so you investigate with Vena Copilot.
By comparing actuals against trends, forecasts or thresholds, the Analytics Agent will flag the unexpected jump in facility costs across two locations and attribute it to a vendor billing change, which explains the anomaly. Or, you might compare your revenue against seasonal trends.
2. Drill Down Across Dimensions
With the Analytics Agent, you can drill down across dimensions such as 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 Vena Copilot—and it returns a breakdown that shows Q3 underperformance was isolated to one SKU.
3. 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.
In Vena Copilot, you can even ask “what if”-style questions and get responses immediately about how that scenario may play out—without the need to spend time in spreadsheets.
5. Get Full Visibility Into Where an Answer Came From
Vena Copilot provides transparency into how it came up with its responses, explaining its methodology and source numbers, so you know you’re getting answers you can trust.
What’s more, to support global teams, Vena Copilot can digest questions and produce answers in over 100 languages.
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.
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.”
Because Vena reports are built in native Excel, you can make use of further analysis tools that are available in the platform, such as Excel’s “Analyze Data” feature and visualization features.
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.
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.”
Designed especially for teams that frequently work with model query language (MQL), Vena’s Query Agent simplifies data extraction by converting plain-language requests into ready-to-use queries.
Simply describe the data you need, and the Query Agent generates precise queries with the appropriate hierarchy references—removing the need for manual lookups or complex syntax.
You can then copy and paste the generated query into a data export request or your data model configuration, increasing user autonomy and speeding up day-to-day workflows.
Here’s how it helps finance teams:
Your teams need to understand dimensions, hierarchies and syntax to create reliable financial models. Even for experienced Vena users, writing queries can take 5-10 minutes each. For occasional users, it can create a barrier to accessing data.
Vena’s Query Agent removes this friction by automatically generating queries based on user prompts. Instead of constructing expressions manually, users can describe the data they need and retrieve results immediately
Vena’s Query Agent makes your outputs more precise by translating requests directly into structured queries aligned with the Vena data model. This helps you ensure the right data is retrieved consistently across every use case, and eliminates any additional filtering needed in Excel to tailor the data.
This helps reduce manual verification and strengthens your confidence in outputs to support workflows such as:
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'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 agents 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.