New features help the CFO office get data and answers quickly with Generative AI

July 15, 2024

CFOs, FP&A professionals and other finance users can now run increasingly complex queries against financial systems and data, while still using simple, natural language.

Vianai added several finance-focused features to its Conversational Finance application today, building on robust capabilities already delivering value for enterprises globally.

Variance Analysis

The key feature for this release is enhanced variance analysis — comparing revenue performance or expense actuals over time to understand the health of a business. By asking Conversational Finance to compare different attributes of revenues and expenses, such as by product, by customer, by profit center, by time, and by GL account, finance users can quickly drill into the change for each.

By using a simple "compare" command, a user can see the amounts side by side

Multi-Faceted Questions and Responses and Short Questions

In addition to variance analysis, Conversational Finance now supports ongoing questions and responses. The system uses the knowledge of previous questions that someone asked when providing an answer into follow up questions. This enables for the rapid drill-down into a topic and simple follow-up questions, removing the burden of  providing additional context for every query.

In addition, the latest enhancements in Conversational Finance enable users to ask their questions naturally with how we use technology, with crisp messages. While typical genAI applications rely heavily on the quality and detail of the question, Conversational Finance is built to enable finance users to be brief and succinct in their questions, and still get accurate, reliable responses back.

Users can ask simple follow up questions that provide additional context.

Visualizations and Summarization

Finally, there are a series of features to further enhance the broader use and simplicity of outputs in Conversational Finance, including for management meetings, board meetings or other stakeholder reviews that drive decision-making. These include greater explanations around the table displayed in the result, additional explanations about the query, and various features such as showing the state of the answer and error identification. That means it’s not just an output that a finance user can understand but business and other finance stakeholders as well.

The features work together, with simple commands that visualize comparisons based on previous context

Enhanced Platform Capabilities

The hila platform underpins all features of Conversational Finance. These include, anti-hallucination, the ability to deploy on premises or any cloud, as well as robust security features.

These features are based on feedback from users on what they love about Conversational Finance as well as additional capabilities they want, to unleash new productivity levels in their work. We’re excited to see Conversational Finance being adopted into organizations globally and showing value for finance teams including those at Dr. Reddy’s Lab, Medidata and Legion.

Our customers and partners, such as Boomi, KPMG and Cognizant, have access to these features today.

To see a demo or learn more about how Conversational Finance can transform your company’s finance function, get in touch here.