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Planning reimagined: What AI means for the way we model, decide, and act

Unifying intelligence and action: What role-based AI means for modern planning

A woman leading a presentation in front of a display filled with analytics charts and performance data, while a colleague in the foreground listens attentively.

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.

We believe that for AI to be truly effective in business planning you need a platform that has AI at the core. For us, that means:

  • Real-time data orchestration to ingest and manage massive, fast-moving 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

In 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 2 million+ planning models already running on it. It’s now the most advanced planning platform on the market, all with AI at its core.

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. You can use electricity to charge your toothbrush or power 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. Think of AI as a utility that anyone can 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 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’s 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 really good at, helping companies make better business decisions by sensing your business environment for signals that could impact your operations, analyzing different scenarios and their potential outcomes, then choosing the best course of action to allocate your assets, resources, and capital.

Anaplan has always been about helping companies make better decisions. AI doesn’t just speed that up — it fundamentally changes what’s possible.

How AI is transforming planning

Companies that want to lead won’t just adopt AI — they’ll reimagine how they plan. 

AI makes scale possible. AI can analyze orders of magnitude more variables than traditional methods. 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.

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.

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.

The evolution of intelligent planning

We’re approaching this transformation through five distinct phases, each building on the last.

We started with machine learning capabilities for forecasting and optimization — the foundation that handles computational heavy lifting. Then we added conversational AI through Anaplan CoPlanner, initially embedded in our applications but designed to be extensible to your own use cases.

The next phase gets even more interesting. We’re evolving Anaplan CoPlanner into domain-specific expert agents. Instead of generic AI assistance, you’ll work with AI specialists: a financial analyst agent if you’re in finance, a supply chain agent for operations teams, and a modeler agent for the technical builders.

From there, we’re adding autonomous agents that handle the routine but critical work: detecting anomalies in your data, checking data quality, monitoring workflows. These agents work together within a unified framework, reducing the manual workload of human analysts and making them more productive with higher value analytics activities.

Finally, we’ll deliver Agent Studio for you to create, manage, and connect your own agents tailored to your specific business needs.

Built for the next era of productivity

Our goal is to make AI work for you. Anaplan Intelligence provides you with new tools that make you more productive in your work. 

The businesses that thrive in this new environment won’t be those that simply adopt AI tools, but those that thoughtfully integrate AI capabilities 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 AI technology is ready. The only question is: how will you apply it?


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