Good morning. There’s a dirty little secret in finance—and maybe even in your own organization: A lot of planning is happening in Excel spreadsheets, a technology that’s roughly 40 years old.
I recently sat down with Ben Pierce, general manager of Workday Adaptive Planning. He has spent 20 years in the industry watching the same cycle repeat itself in the finance department at many companies: someone pulls data from a planning system, dumps it into a spreadsheet, shares it, someone else creates a copy, and then no one knows which version is the source of truth.
“Quite frankly, Excel is still the number one planning and analytics solution for the majority of FP&A professionals,” Pierce said he’s hearing from customers. But Workday, No. 430 on the Fortune 500, is betting that Adaptive Decision Intelligence, a new feature within Adaptive Planning—its FP&A and enterprise planning platform—will break that cycle for companies.
Adaptive Decision Intelligence pulls together data from Workday’s own HCM and financials products, but also from external systems like Salesforce and Snowflake and even personal file storage like Google Drive or OneDrive. The idea is simple: give FP&A teams a governed, auditable, collaborative environment to do the work they’re already doing, just without the Excel challenges.
FP&A transformation is underway across industries, driven by AI, autonomous finance, and hyper-personalized workflows, according to Deloitte. That means static reports and reactive forecasting are giving way to AI-driven, real-time scenario planning.
Pierce posed the question: what does an FP&A analyst actually spend their time on? The answer, he says, isn’t building budgets— it’s wrangling data to figure out why something is off, and what to do about it. “The majority of the time our users are spending is on things like this,” he said. “Not actually on creating the budget.”
That’s where the AI piece comes in. Using natural language prompts, users can ask the system to pull actuals, combine them with uploaded CSVs, detect mismatches, and build out a financial model—all while showing its work step by step. In a demo he showed me, the system flagged that EMEA revenue was $187,000 below plan and offered to investigate further. The interface itself is generated on the fly based on what the user is asking, rather than relying on pre-built dashboards.
Pierce made a point of emphasizing that none of this happens outside the platform’s governance guardrails, which is a key distinction from simply feeding data into a public large language model.
Workday acquired Adaptive in 2018 for around $1.5 billion. Today, the product serves more than 7,000 customers, roughly 4,000 of which run Adaptive on top of non-Workday systems. Adaptive Decision Intelligence is currently in early adopter testing, with a broader rollout targeted for this fall, Pierce said.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Leaderboard
Elaine Shen was promoted to CFO of the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers. Shen will oversee all financial aspects of the Lakers, including shaping strategic growth. She succeeds Joe McCormack, who will shift to an executive advisory role as SVP of finance for the Lakers. Shen joined the Los Angeles Lakers in 2016 and has held a variety of strategic roles across the organization in both business and basketball operations. Most recently, Shen served as the Lakers associate CFO. Before being hired by the Lakers, Shen worked at Aon and Wachovia Bank.
Ashlee Weisser was promoted to CFO of First Watch Restaurant Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: FWRG), a daytime dining concept restaurant, effective June 8. She succeeds Mel Hope, who announced his planned retirement earlier this year and will continue to serve in an advisor role. Weisser joined First Watch in 2023 as SVP of financial planning and analysis, with over 15 years of experience guiding financial strategy and success at several national restaurant concepts, including most recently as CFO at Maple Street Biscuit Company. Earlier in her career, she held several finance roles of increasing responsibility at Bloomin' Brands, Red Robin and Darden Restaurants.
Big Deal
Deloitte has released its latest M&A Trends Pulse Survey, which provides current global data based on responses collected in April 2026 from 500 senior corporate and private equity dealmakers, with particular focus on cross-border transaction sentiment and intentions.
Sixty-seven percent of dealmakers expect the number of deals they close to increase over the next six months; 69% expect aggregate deal value to rise.
Three key takeaways from the survey:
—Volatility is the new normal. Tariffs, geopolitical tensions, and a drop in business and consumer confidence are weighing on dealmaking, even as equity markets and corporate earnings remain relatively strong.
—Mega deals are carrying the market. Large-scale deals accounted for more than 40% of total U.S. M&A value in Q1, while overall deal volume stayed flat — suggesting a bifurcated market where large transactions dominate but mid-market opportunity remains.
—Cross-border appetite is cautious but present. Forty-five percent of respondents cited increased interest in cross-border transactions, but just 20% expressed significant interest. Where interest exists, growth and expansion are the top motivations, with corporate dealmakers focused on a narrow list of target countries compared to the broader reach of private equity investors.
Going deeper
Hilton has released a new report, “The Hospitality Mindset: A New Blueprint for Culture and Performance for Any Industry.” It makes a straightforward argument: the workplace is missing hospitality.
Drawing on research from Ipsos and Morning Consult, the report finds that what workers want most in 2026 isn't perks or game rooms—it's purpose, recognition, human connection, flexibility, and support navigating AI. Nearly half of early-career workers report feeling lonely on the job, 92% say a good relationship with their manager is critical to happiness, and 88% say purpose influences their career decisions.
The report also finds that 52% of workers surveyed say they feel anxious about AI's impact on their jobs and 87% say on-the-job training is critical to their overall happiness. Hilton's advice is for leaders to model what it calls a "hospitality mindset,” which means being visible, listening actively, and treating flexibility as an act of care rather than a concession.
Overheard
“It is not a badge of honor to be in 120 countries. We were in 190 countries, [but] catch this: 40 countries made up 85% of the revenue and 125% of the profits.”
—Meg Whitman, former CEO of HP and eBay, recalled the peak of HP's expansion during a panel session at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen this week. Whitman added the better strategy was the one she pursued at eBay, which expanded to only around 30 countries. “That was a really smart thing to do, but anyone who’s, like, excited about your 60th country is sadly misinformed,” she quipped.
