CFOs adopt AI tools to speed planning and cut close times

Three companies say they have cut planning time, reduced errors and shortened month-end closes after adopting AI-powered finance platforms. EuroTeleSites, PostHog and Liberty Global use tools such as Farseer, Abacum and OneStream on top of existing ERPs to consolidate data and automate routine tasks.

EuroTeleSites, which manages more than 13,800 mobile towers across six central and eastern European countries, layered Farseer over its SAP backbone to standardise inputs from multiple systems. Lars Mosdorf, EuroTeleSites’ CFO, said the platform centralises financial control information and “gives us the transparency we need to take swift decisions.” The company reports reporting and planning about 30% faster and planning errors down more than 40% since the tool’s adoption. Farseer’s AI Analyst has been used during internal reporting periods to identify drivers of deviations across business units.

PostHog uses a mix of Brex for expenses, Stripe for billing, Campfire as an AI-native ERP and Abacum for FP&A. Fraser Hopper, PostHog’s ops and finance lead, said Abacum pulls ERP data together with HR headcount information to allow rapid scenario modelling and faster tagging of financial data. The company reports its close time falling from about 20–25 days to fewer than 10 days. Hopper said tagging with AI is a key factor in producing accounts fast enough for teams across the business to act on near-real-time information, and added that automation and coding agents have let the finance team remain lean.

Liberty Global replaced Oracle Hyperion with OneStream after judging Hyperion inadequate for the group’s structure as it moved from a cable group to an integrated communications business across several countries. Alex Johnstone, divisional CFO at Liberty Global, described OneStream as a potential financial system of record that will link management accounts from operating businesses into a single platform. The company plans to automate repeatable work such as journal entries and consolidations so finance staff can spend more time on analysis and decision support.

Emergn uses NetSuite as its ERP core, an in-house Pulse tool for project and time tracking, Power BI for reporting and Microsoft’s AI features in Excel plus Power Platform for automation. Anjana Mistry, Emergn’s CFO and COO, said clean base data is necessary for downstream tools to work correctly and noted that AI accelerates modelling and variance analysis while experienced finance professionals remain essential.

In each case firms report the same types of operational changes: consolidation of dispersed data, automation of rules-based accounting tasks, and faster variance analysis and scenario modelling. Companies provided the reported figures on faster planning, fewer planning errors and shorter closes as direct results of adopting the named AI platforms.