At Anaplan, we’ve been quietly building AI capabilities into our platform through what we call Anaplan Intelligence. While others choose to make grand pronouncements, we’ve focused on building practical applications that reduce total cost of ownership and increase productivity. The kind of outcomes that actually matter to businesses running at enterprise scale.
Over the past two years, we’ve transformed the way we approach innovation. We’ve rearchitected the platform, scaled performance, and layered in cutting-edge AI. We’ve also done this without disrupting the 2,500+ companies and two million+ planning models already running on it. It’s now the most advanced planning platform on the market, all with AI at its core. We believe that for AI to be truly effective in business planning you need a platform has the following:
- Real-time data orchestration to ingest and manage massive, constantly changing datasets
- A high-performance calculation engine grounded in the same mathematical foundation as AI, to perform extremely fast calculations over large, complex datasets
- An agent framework built into the core of the platform, enabling autonomous processes to operate safely and effectively
AI has reached a turning point
AI isn’t new. What’s new is that it’s become dramatically more accessible. It’s not remarkable because it’s complex; it’s remarkable because it’s ubiquitous. AI is becoming like electricity. You can use electricity to as charging your toothbrush or something as groundbreaking as powering a research lab searching for a cure for cancer. The technology is the same — it’s the application of it that makes all the difference. And it’s the same for AI. Think of AI as a utility that anyone can now access. The real question isn’t whether you can use AI, but how thoughtfully you apply it to solve meaningful problems in your business. This is how AI can be truly transformational.
Why predictions matter in planning
Nowhere is this shift more valuable than in business planning where the right prediction, made at the right time, can mean the difference between seizing an opportunity and missing it entirely.
AI excels at prediction. That’s its fundamental capability. This matters enormously for business planning because predictions are central to decision-making, and AI has changed the economics of predictions. It has made them highly affordable. As a result, predictions can be used on a much larger scale and for many more different use cases.
And that is what Anaplan is built to do — sense your business environment for signals that could impact your operations, analyze different scenarios and their potential outcomes, then choose the best course of action to allocate your assets, resources, and capital. Anaplan has always been about helping companies make better decisions, and AI doesn’t just accelerate that work — it fundamentally expands what’s possible.
How AI is transforming planning
Companies that want to lead won’t just adopt AI — they’ll reimagine how they plan.
First, AI scales your analysis exponentially. AI can analyze orders of magnitude more variables than traditional methods. As Adam Their wrote in his blog, our new calculation engine now works with millions of times more data points than before, enabling hyper-granular forecasts with many more dimensions and far greater detail.
Second, AI makes probabilities actionable. Instead of working with best guesses, AI calculates the actual probabilities of different decision outcomes. This is why we’ve invested in advanced algorithms and maintained an open architecture that can run computations anywhere. It’s also why we’re adding advanced simulation capabilities because understanding probability distributions beats point estimates and simple intuition every time.
Last, AI responds in real time. AI can monitor the smallest of changes in your business patterns over short time intervals, faster and more granular than humans. Through anomaly detection, event-based planning, and automated monitoring agents, Anaplan Intelligence responds to business events as they happen and takes immediate action, as necessary.
How AI is transforming planning
Our goal is to make AI work for you. Anaplan Intelligence provides you with new tools that make your work more productive and more impactful.
The businesses that thrive in this new environment won’t be those that simply adopt AI, but the ones that integrate it thoughtfully into their core planning processes. They’ll use AI to see changes in the business environment more clearly — and before competitors do. They’ll use AI to decide more confidently by better understanding the likelihood of outcomes, and they’ll use AI to respond more quickly to changing conditions.
Anaplan Intelligence is ready. The only question is: how will you apply it?
Missed our last blog in our Anaplan Intelligence series? Check out: How Anaplan AI helps you make better decisions in a world of imperfect choices
