AI Just Reinforced Excel’s Staying Power: What 20 Years of CPM Got Wrong

Microsoft Excel has always been the backbone of FP&A.

For years, finance teams have turned to it for their planning, budgeting and modeling needs—often even when other tools were available to them.

Despite this loyalty, many corporate performance management (CPM) vendors designed their software solutions as Excel replacements. For the past 20 years, they've tried to free finance from “Excel jail,” looking to convince them to leave their intuitive spreadsheet environments and learn completely new proprietary formulas and logic.

While some finance teams have done exactly that, FP&A professionals have widely stayed faithful. The result: 90% of finance professionals rely on Excel alongside their primary planning platform for at least some models and reports.

And with the direct integration of AI solutions like Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft 365 Copilot into Excel, finance users can build impressive models without writing a single formula themselves. The characteristically user-friendly platform becomes even more accessible now that deep Excel knowledge is no longer a prerequisite for performing complex tasks.

So what does this mean for the CPM landscape writ large? At Vena, we see AI integration as confirming something we’ve always known, that CPM vendors who spent years foretelling the death of Excel will now be coming to grips with.

And that is, Excel is where FP&A work gets done.

Why AI Platforms Are Betting on Excel

Anthropic and OpenAI’s decision to integrate their AI models directly into Excel workbooks reinforces just how tethered finance professionals are to the platform. With a track record of over 40 years, Excel is the universally accepted language of finance.

Rather than having to toggle between their spreadsheets and an external platform, these releases mean finance professionals can benefit from AI directly in their flow of work. When announcing their Excel add-in, ChatGPT stated: “Teams can run data analysis, reporting, inventory management, budgeting—all while preserving structure, formulas, and assumptions in a formatted, Excel-native workbook.”

For FP&A professionals in particular, the availability of AI-driven workflows directly in their Excel sidebar is an exciting prospect.

As AFP’s 2025 FP&A Benchmarking Survey Report found, spreadsheets are used far more frequently by FP&A teams than purpose-built planning software. The report found that 96% of FP&A professionals use spreadsheets daily or weekly, whereas only 51% use enterprise performance management software at the same frequency.  

It's no surprise, then, that AI vendors have determined that their path to increasing value for the office of finance is through Excel.  

What You Need To Get the Most Out of AI in Excel

While there’s no question AI makes FP&A teams even more proficient in Excel, it still doesn’t solve many of the data limitations that have always been inherent in Excel. Limitations that can impact FP&A, including:

• Limited version control that makes it impossible to maintain a single source of truth.

• A reliance on manual data entry that can lead to errors and inconsistencies.

• Poor auditability, with no way to automatically track data changes.

• Security concerns, including limited ways to control user access to data.

• Data silos, with no central data repository to draw from.

For all its power, Excel simply wasn’t designed to be a centralized database. And while AI native in Excel may add robust new capabilities, it doesn't solve these issues. In fact, it only adds to our need for proper data governance and workflows.

To work effectively, FP&A teams must feel confident in their data integrity, knowing they’re accessing data that’s secure, compliant, accurate and centralized. And modern AI models need that same data foundation to provide outputs we can trust.

To understand why this matters, consider a real-life example. Your finance team emails files, exports data from disparate systems and compiles a large 50 megabyte Excel budget file with 25 tabs for Claude to analyze. But then your CFO comes back with changes to the data.

Suddenly, any time savings you gained through AI are lost as you manually go through your data to make sure it’s edited correctly, in every version, before you run your model again. And if you miss one pivotal change, the accuracy of that entire model is impacted.

That’s not an efficient way to run FP&A. So what’s the solution?

“To work effectively, FP&A teams must feel confident in their data integrity, knowing they’re accessing data that’s secure, compliant, accurate and centralized.”

How CPM Fits Into the New AI Order

Excel is powerful when paired with embedded AI, but it still lacks the underlying context of your business.

The right CPM platform will provide that missing layer of financial and operational context, data governance, and the structured foundation modern AI models require. This way, your FP&A team stays confident that they’re always applying the reliable data they require to do their jobs effectively.

What’s more, with a CPM solution designed to work closely with Excel—not move teams away from it—you don’t have to choose between scale and ease of use.

But even then, there's still a catch. 

Many CPM solutions that purport to work alongside Excel limit functionality to reporting and analysis. Planning is not simply analysis.

It requires capturing inputs from across the business and feeding them back into a source of truth to inform the overall plan. This means writing data back into governed models where permissions are enforced, and workflows update dynamically across the business.  

Unlike many other CPM solutions (even those with Excel plug-ins available), Vena has the unique advantage of bi-directional write-back with Excel.

This creates a two-way flow of data between Vena and Excel. That means users not only access data from all their core systems via Vena to manipulate in Excel, but can also record data outputs created in Excel, right back into their data model.

This ensures data remains up to date, no matter how you use it. It also eliminates the need to update data in a separate system.

For users looking to benefit from AI tools like Claude in Excel, this ensures you're always working with reliable, up-to-date data, creating a stronger foundation for FP&A as a whole.

The Benefits of Using AI in Excel and Vena Together

To deliver insights at the speed their business requires, FP&A teams need powerful tools they can trust. AI in Excel offers promising productivity gains, but without reliable data, it won’t support decisions at scale.

By introducing a data governance and workflow layer, a CPM platform can fill that gap—allowing teams to take full advantage of the benefits AI in Excel offers.

But not any CPM solution will do.

You need one that works with Excel, adding to its capabilities rather than trying to compete with it. And you need a vendor that truly believes in the power Excel offers—not one that has been telling you for years to put Excel in your rearview mirror. 

With Vena's 15-year partnership with Microsoft, we’ve always believed Excel is a foundational tool for FP&A teams and have been under no illusion that it's going away. And now, the introduction of AI in Excel has us even more excited about all the possibilities ahead for our customers.

Learn more about how Vena uses AI to extend the capabilities of Excel.