CFOs adopt AI finance tools to speed reporting

CFOs at EuroTeleSites, PostHog, Emergn and Liberty Global are deploying AI-enabled finance tools to automate reporting and forecasting, accelerate month-end closes and reduce planning errors across multiple markets.

EuroTeleSites added FP&A platform Farseer last year on top of an SAP backbone. The company manages more than 13,800 mobile towers across six central and eastern European countries, including Austria, Croatia and Slovenia. Lars Mosdorf, EuroTeleSites CFO, said Farseer consolidates and standardises data from many sources to create a single source of truth. The company reports reporting and planning run about 30% faster and planning errors have fallen by more than 40%. Mosdorf said Farseer’s AI Analyst helps controllers spot the main drivers of deviations during time-sensitive reporting periods.

Developer platform PostHog runs a mix of commercial and in-house systems. It uses Brex for expense management, Stripe for customer billing and has added Campfire, an AI-native ERP, alongside FP&A tool Abacum. Fraser Hopper, PostHog’s ops and finance lead, said Abacum links ERP data with HR headcount and enables faster scenario modelling for hiring, marketing and product spending. After deploying the tools at the start of 2026, PostHog shortened its month-end close to under 10 days from about 20–25 days. Hopper said AI tagging and coding agents have allowed a smaller finance team to process higher volumes of analysis and deliver near-real-time accounts.

At software consultancy Emergn, NetSuite is the core ERP that provides the data foundation. Anjana Mistry, who serves as both CFO and COO, said moving to NetSuite shortened month, quarter and year-end closes from roughly two weeks to a few days. Emergn combines NetSuite with an in-house time and project tool called Pulse, Power BI for dashboards and Excel for detailed analysis. Mistry said recent adoption of AI features in Excel and automation through Microsoft Power Platform has cut time on rules-based tasks such as transaction coding and invoice processing, allowing analysts to focus on reviewing results rather than building reports. “Having an AI tool in Excel does not make you an accountant,” she said, adding that human judgement remains necessary to validate outputs.

Liberty Global is replacing Oracle Hyperion with OneStream after assessing group consolidation needs and noting that two units, VodafoneZiggo and Telenet, were already using or planning OneStream. Alex Johnstone, divisional CFO, said OneStream will act as a financial system of record by linking management accounts from operating businesses into a single repository. He said automation of routine workflows, including journal entries and eliminations, will free finance teams to spend more time on scenario analysis and strategic work.

Across the four firms, CFOs report measurable gains in close speed, more timely management accounts and fewer manual errors. The deployed tools include dedicated FP&A platforms, AI-native ERPs, automation suites and AI-enabled features within existing software, often combined with tagging and coding agents to speed data preparation. Finance leaders emphasised the need for clean, consistently structured base data and ongoing human oversight to interpret and verify AI outputs.