Kouros Behzad 0:00:11.2: 

Well, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us. I know we're between you and snack. I know we've just had lunch, but. The session Future of Workforce Planning at Anaplan, I think the earlier slide was all about AI-driven workforce planning. We talked about where, I think, just the general market is going, how AI is driving changes within the organizations, where AI is coming in and how it's impacting workforce planning. Here we're talking about what's - again, going back to a little bit of the trends, why workforce planning, what's the importance? And then driving into the components of Anaplan for workforce planning applications and solutions overall. So my name is Kouros Behzad. I drive a solution marketing for our HR workforce planning solutions here at Anaplan. I've been at Anaplan for just over five years, and my focus has always been on workforce planning. I say HR and workforce planning because HR does workforce planning, finance does workforce planning, and operations they do workforce planning. Sales, they do workforce planning. In contact centre, they do workforce planning. Everybody does workforce planning, and we really talk about how this whole thing comes together across the organization, and how it ties to your financial planning, to your supply chain planning, to your sales planning.  

Kouros Behzad 0:01:26.3: 

It's always one, two. You never start with the workforce. You start with the business. Where's the business going? How's the business changing? And then, who do I need? Where do I need them? What's it going to cost me, and how am I going to close those gaps? So it's always a one, two between what happens in a business and what happens in the workforce. With me, I have two of my colleagues, John Pitstick and Bashir. I'll let them do a quick intro.  

John Pitstick 0:01:49.7: 

Yes. Thanks. Is this thing on?  

Kouros Behzad 0:01:51.5: 

Yes.  

John Pitstick 0:01:52.8: 

For those that were in the last session, I'll do a different intro this time. There was a bunch of you in here. Yes, I'm John Pitstick. I lead up our apps teams for workforce planning. I used to be all about financial planning, and I just got so tired of spreadsheets and everything in that world, and got really excited about workforce and how it's different. A few years ago, I was - and I've also been a massive fan of the idea of applications. Why start from scratch? Why is everybody starting from scratch with these tools and having to maintain all their own stuff? I love the idea of applications. Was at a couple of application vendors and about three - between two and a half, three years ago, I saw what was happening at Anaplan, and I'd been here once before, and it was largely driven by Adam Thier, who was a boss early in my career back in the '90s, dating us a bit. I saw what they were doing, and I was like, 'Oh, you're building apps, can I come help build apps for HR and workforce leadership teams?' That's why I'm here. So I'm super excited to see everybody out there, and yes, kick to Bashir.  

Bashir Bashir 0:03:03.1:  

All right. Thank you so much, John. That excitement that John just shared with you all is also why I joined Anaplan. I was at Anaplan about eight years ago and came back when I saw that John, two years, three years ago, decided to go on this journey of building workforce apps. So my name is Bashir Bashir. That's not a typo. My parents weren't the most creative group when it came to naming. It's funny, I have a twin and he got the cool name. He got a Japanese name and I just got copy, paste. I am based in Minneapolis, and we're going to get into a lot of really cool stuff here. My role is primarily around making all the pretty things he builds available to you all and sharing those stories. So thanks for having us. Over to you, Kouros.  

Kouros Behzad 0:03:49.3:  

All right. So we're going to start with trends. There's four or five slides. I'm not going to spend too much time on them because I think everybody is facing that today. Then we get into just what the overall landscape looks like, and dive deeper and deeper into the applications with that. All right. So when we talk about workforce challenges, there's two aspects. One is the internal view of things, a little bit more on the technical side, there's the external. Starting with the external. Everybody's facing AI. That's everywhere. Everybody is looking at how am I going to leverage these technologies to cut my costs, drive efficiencies, bring in new business, different types of business. How can I do things differently? So it's not just about cutting costs, but it's just how can I grow better, faster with less people perhaps? So those are some of the big things. Digital transformation has been around for some time now, and that always has an impact on your workforce, where you need them, what you need. Changing workforce, the dynamics. Again, it's the - there's the hybrid, remote, then on premise, and then there is the whole aspect of contingent workers and employees and temps and contracts. All of those. What's the right mix? What's the right balance? Where do you bring in people? Where do I let them go again, to really optimize your costs within the organization?  

Kouros Behzad 0:05:12.9: 

So there's a lot of different things. Skills gaps, again, it comes back to a few years ago, it was all about data scientists and data. AI is the next evolution of that. It is still based on the data, but it really fundamentally changes how everybody is working. So before, finance organizations or financial institutions, they were looking out for these set of people. If you were building appliances, it was this set of people. Automotive was looking at a totally different set of skills. Now everybody is going after the same people. Everybody is looking for AI because it's coming into - whether it's your fridge, whether it's your phone, whether it's… Whatever you're looking at, AI is being a part of. So everybody in this room is looking and competing for the same set of talent, and we still don't have that. There's a big gap. So how do you take your current workforces and not just say, hey, I need to cut costs by 10 per cent because I'm bringing in AI, but how do you bring them along? Then how do you, again, upskill them and then where you need to make changes. So those are all the big questions that you really need to address. We did a research paper with Sapient Insights Group at the end - we published at the end of last year. There is a QR code at the end of the deck that you can download this.  

Kouros Behzad 0:06:28.2: 

Again, it goes back to the business priorities. Everybody is trying to cut costs, but everybody's trying to, at the same time, grow the business. So how do you balance this? Increasing revenue, you have to rethink how you use your workforce. So that's forcing you to think about what kind of skills do you need? Where do you need them? What's it going to take you to get into these new markets, new models, whatnot? On the other side, there is efficiencies that you're bringing in optimizing processes and how you reduce costs, and there is a whole bunch of different levers on the left side in terms of bullets, and each one of those, it's got an impact on your workforce. Again, whether you're bringing it in investments in agents or AI assistants or a guidance. That's gotten - the other side you're looking at, well, who am I going to let go, because this is going to allow me to do more things. Versus the other side is just conducting the workforce reductions, supporting that, reducing the overall investment in spending, hiring freezes, digital transformation. All of those ties back into, okay, how do I balance this cost thing against the growth that I'm going to reach?  

Kouros Behzad 0:07:37.7: 

It always comes back to your ability to do this, the six-piece plus now the bot thing that's coming up. In the past, you just throw money at hiring. You needed people, you threw money at it. It was much easier to get things done. Now, because of the gaps that are there, because everybody is competing for the same set of skills, you are not - that's not as effective and it's going to cost you more and more. Yes, you can, if you throw a [unclear word 0:08:07.6] on, you throw $200 million as one person, you can get what you need, and that person, seven months later, is out the door. Not everybody can afford, because the cost aspect is huge. So this idea of where do you balance this between hiring and bringing a contingent workforce? Who do you upskill, train? How do you bring them along? Again, do you want - you've got this workforce that you've invested heavily in, how do you leverage them? How where are the opportunities that allows you to have this better engagement within the workforce, as people see the opportunity, instead of having this fear of I'm going to get cut every day, come into the office with that. So that changes the dynamics.  

Kouros Behzad 0:08:51.6:  

Obviously, AI is huge. Where can you use it? How do you use it to do more efficiently? I use it in my job, every day. I think our teams, develop, uses it, everybody uses it to some capacity, and that's just going to get more and more. On the other side is, yes, at some level you do have to let some people go. So who are the right people that you - it's just not a good fit, that you need to let go. As opposed to just blindly say ten per cent. Okay, these hundred people. Without seeing how they're tied back to your strategic objectives, driving the business. What are the key people, key roles? Whatnot. Then having to hire them back at higher costs, whatnot. So knowing that transparency is huge in being able to balance across these things. If I was to ask everybody in the team, do you know exactly what your headcount is today? How many of you can, with certainty, say this is what my number is? There's a few handful of hands that are up. If I ask you, what's your annual workforce costs? Can anybody tell me that? Again, handful of people. So the majority are not quite there yet. So how do you get there? I think transparency. This reporting of headcount is just that's the foundation, and then you just build on layers on top of that to be able to get here.  

Kouros Behzad 0:10:18.8:  

Why does it matter? How does it help? So for organizations that do some level of workforce planning, you can see there, that has been doing this survey for a good number of years, and without an exception, they're always showing improvements and gains based on that. So these numbers on the right, and again this is probably for the best of the organizations. but it makes a difference. It makes a difference for the people that are feet on the ground, that are doing the work, makes the difference for HR in terms of their outcome, and it makes a difference in terms of the business outcomes. It's always about the business outcome. It's always about the business impact, having those people. So again, the numbers show that it makes sense to invest in this capability for the organization. Technology certainly supports that, enables that, but it's a capability for an organization. It's an institutional knowledge and capability that you need to build out. This is also part of the same research report. Again, a lot of fine print on here. So you can, when you download, if you have a chance to read through it comes back.  

Kouros Behzad 0:11:30.9: 

There is something in it for everybody. CEO cares because things are getting done. CFO cares because the costs are at check, CHO cares because you're balancing the right workforce, are working on the right people, are working on the right things, and you're managing within your costs, and your people are engaged. CIO cares because your data is safe, secure, and all the systems are integrated well and flow, data is flowing. They're not spending - again, going back to that first slide, that manual effort in terms of bringing in all that data and synchronizing across all of these, which is a big challenge. COO cares because what they define as demand for their business, how that translates into capacity, you can actualize that by passing it along to finance and HR to actually execute on that. It's this order fulfilment that's going on. All these different departments every year that say, I need X number of people, and then spreadsheets get passed on, finances, okay, here's the budget. Okay, HR finally gets to go into recruiting. Now, if you've got that live system, it's an ecosystem, that as fine as your operations teams across the business, they say, okay, here's my demand. Here's how it's shifting up, down.  

Kouros Behzad 0:12:46.7:  

Whether it's a contact center, it's a distribution center, it's people in retail, branch in a bank. How the demand is changing, how that translates to how many people I need. Okay, what is finance? Here's what's coming, can you earmark the budget? HR, are you ready for it, to actually go on higher for these people? The talent acquisition. Where are we? So knowing and seeing how it all comes together removes those bottlenecks. Is it finance that didn't approve the budget? Is it that we're short on recruiters? Where is the challenge? What's the holdback if somebody's not showing up? So when you pull it all together, it really makes a difference for your business, and really drives those impacts. You can really start with any one of these. You can start in operations. You can start with the finance headcount expense. You can start an HR. But how you bring it all together is absolutely key. So with that, we're jumping into what's now available to you with Anaplan, in terms of the solutions. John.  

John Pitstick 0:13:50.2: 

Is it back there?  

Kouros Behzad 0:13:53.1: 

Yes.  

John Pitstick 0:13:54.9: 

Okay. So, yes, what you're seeing is not my math, right? That's not all 26 or 28. I think after noon, we went up to 29 apps, if you're keeping track, 30 tomorrow, I know these are the core ones that we see as really interacting with workforce planning. At the center we have - it's kind of off center - but operational workforce planning is available today. We have recently improved our integration with our flags-, that's our flagship workforce planning application that does your annual plan or your budget, facilitated by finance. It does your quarterly financial cycles for the workforce, for that year. It then does a handshake or handoff with your HR team, because everybody knows that your annual workforce plan is usually out of date by month two. Things start changing. I like to say, the workforce - can we use adult language in here? Is that all right? Yes. Okay. The workforce doesn't give a shit about your financial cycles when you do your reporting and any of that, right? People leave, people join. Strategies change. All of that shifting around.  

John Pitstick 0:15:17.2:  

That's the continuous position plan, sometimes called continuous forecast, which is - that's where you can have financial and HR governance over what needs to change and happen in the year. That's really a significant chunk of OWP as well as there's some scenario modelling and org design modelling, that is also part of that. Workforce budgeting, same thing as I mentioned. The annual, that's deeply connected to our integrated financial planning application. The other two hand-in-hand applications here are project resource planning and project cost planning. These are announced today. I think official GA might be next week, but these are also partner apps. They can be - they were built to run seamlessly together. One is more focused on the people in the skills aspect. Do I have the right people on the right project? What's utilization, all of that aspect? Then the finance component of project cost ties out those expenses as well as everything else that gets involved with project planning. Then yes, there's a lot of demand planning applications. We have contact center, is our currently available one.  

John Pitstick 0:16:30.9: 

There will be many more demand-based applications. In fact, I did this in the last session. We'll do it again. When the roadmap comes up, we'll take a vote and you guys can help influence our strategy. Another demand application, go to market sales capacity, that's been out for a little while. That has integration to OWP. Again, we're building on that connected planning story that Adam talked about earlier. Yes, same thing in supply chain. You have these distribution centers. You have logistic networks. They involve people, as well, facilitating the operations through those is a source of demand that will connect with OWP. Oh, I only have two. I had four slides thirty minutes ago, now it's two. Okay. This is my favorite slide. I can't get enough of this. That's an inside joke. I'm so tired of this slide. We've been using it for my entire time here. Sooner or later, Chris and I will update it. This is the big picture, right? People say workforce planning can mean so many things. People say strategic workforce planning, it can actually mean two or three different things.  

John Pitstick 0:17:49.6:  

This is just our lens on it and what it is. So, typically, in smaller organizations for sure, it takes HR a while to get going. They're focused on the execution, the tactical. They're not necessarily initially - hopefully there's nobody offended by this - but it's usually just a maturity cycle for HR teams. You get to bigger companies, they're more strategic. They're starting to invest in people, analytics and workforce planning as a process. Smaller companies, they're not there yet, and finance is doing everything. Maybe that describes your company, or maybe you've been with one in the past. When finance is running everything, it's really finance-driven and finance-led, and that's really about headcount and personnel expense planning. The biggest - 70 per cent on average - expense for every company, and arguably one of the most important drivers, for all other operational expense with headcount. It's very focused on the GL cost center structures, financial reporting structures. OWP is like the - it's moving from the one-person show or crawling, to hey, let's walk together. Let's hold hands. Finance and HR working together on a single plan, single version of the truth. I like to say a single source of truth for the workforce of tomorrow.  

John Pitstick 0:19:08.9: 

So OWP was built for finance and HR to interact and have that singular plan. Because of that, it needs to adapt to other changes. Not only do we have cost center structures, but we have the management structures, or supervisory org. If you know, your HCM systems usually call it that. This is in the 12 to 18 month, obviously it's covering your annual plan and then all that in-year stuff that's changing, and if you're doing a rolling 12, it can support as well. But it's not quite getting to strategic. Strategic is when it gets beyond two years. Again, it's like I said earlier, some people say strategic workforce planning, and they mean this very by the book definition of it. It's definitely five years or more at super high level. Other people will say strategic workforce planning, and they're talking the two-to-three-year range. We want to do business drivers. We want to take strategic initiatives and determine where our workforce needs to be over those next two or three years. We do not care. We'll solve both of those problems with Anaplan. I think our strategic workforce planning application that is coming later, when you see the roadmap, is probably going to be more in that two-to-three-year focus, because we understand what organizations are going through right now in terms of AI in this future disruption that's happening there. But we would define it at that level.  

John Pitstick 0:20:32.5: 

Also, aspects of skills transformation, big change in your organization. Those are things that we want to support with strategic workforce planning. Then last but not least, on the bottom, you have the concept of the demand, the operations. What's the work that needs to get done? What critical tasks need to be performed? How do we have the staff in place to support that? I will respond to demand planning, capacity planning, staffing, modelling, all of those things are basically that lower level one, the capacity planning and optimizations. Again, you're trying to balance the business need with what your first workforce can deliver. Then of course, there's other little aspects to support all of this workforce planning, like the ability to see analytics on the workforce in its current state, whether that's talent and recruiting, or even sentiment can be quite useful in decision making, location, what's going on as well. Then we've recently introduced more org design capabilities in the platform. So that is workforce planning. In terms of applications, right now we have OWP. Really, we check the box on headcount expense planning with OWP. The workforce budgeting aspect of that. Prior used to be some of that in IFB, but to not overlap and not confuse customers, we change that with our 2.0 versions.  

John Pitstick 0:22:01.0: 

Again, deeply integrated finance and workforce. So yes, that's how we see it. Probably will change. There's probably a few extra use cases that are event-based that happen, that are a little less interesting to us. There's other companies, niche players that do some of that. But we want to be the critical system of record for the workforce of tomorrow for your organizations. Oh, this is me. Okay, I got three slides. Just changed. This is more on that demand. How to think about demand. So I mentioned we have a go-to-market capacity application. That's sales. We're working with our supply chain team to build out something there. More connectivity. We have a project resource planning app. That is actually the demand from the project lens that feeds into the supply of what's available in OWP. Retail, other field service. If you have repair teams or you're out there with logistics teams working on site, on locations, that represents demand. All of this feeds into - or any of those can be plugged into OWP, which is your single version of supply. I think I made the point earlier; it really is a system. I would say - I would put it at 60/40 HR. We're trying to - again, some of the planning tools are harder to get into these HR teams over time, and so we have definitely optimized a little bit for those guys to get what they need out of OWP.  

John Pitstick 0:23:43.3: 

So supporting them in the execution, hiring, dealing with the change in the organization. But everything finance needs in terms of visibility and that cost lens on what's going on with the workforce. I'm just curious, of everybody here, do you ever - does your organization suffer from a disconnect between the finance systems and the HR systems? Show of hands? Nods? Yes, pretty much everybody. Yes, okay. That's why we built OWP. It has both things. It has that GL cost center world, and it has the supervisory org and compensation world as well. So all the mapping is there. So again, you can have one place to - one view of the workforce plan. Bashir.  

Bashir 0:24:38.6: 

All right. Perfect. This is on.  

John Pitstick 0:24:40.8: 

Yes.  

Bashi Bashir 0:24:41.7: 

Thank you, John, I really appreciate it. So we're going to [signal breaks up 0:24:45.6] a little bit here. There we go. We're going to get into a little bit more of the features now, of what John just described. So he mentioned finance HR, the business. On the far right-hand side, how many people have heard of our integrated financial planning application? How many people have heard of it? It looks like most people have heard of that. So when we went on this journey of apps, we started with finance building their own application to do the traditional P&L balance sheet, statement of cash flows, traditional planning for it. Within the 70 per cent of the P&L you had, the labor costs that come up. So we started building headcount planning. We realized that the headcount planning was too simple for most folks. They wanted to go beyond salaries, wages, benefits, taxes. Listing out the cost. They wanted to get more FTE position, job location, the granularity of the workforce. So we took that application and we bridged, we created a bridge to move into operational workforce planning. So that middle layer, that is your HR executioners who know and understand what's going on within that system of record, and the financial plan, of course, is setting that guidance.  

Bashir Bashir 0:26:03.6: 

How much money are we going to spend next year and what is that? What are the guardrails, the top-down budget? So that's what this slide is saying. If we go to the bridge. So when I say bridge, we are essentially just talking about two things. Finance is setting that top-down budget. That's a guidance that's coming from finance. Most of you do top-down budgeting within your organizations. Do you do an annual top-down budget? Most companies do. Take that and start to build it at a lower level beyond just headcount. So that's bottom-up budgeting. How many folks do bottom-up budgeting in their organization, where they have business leaders go in and submit where they're going to spend those dollars at the lowest level? Do people go down to the position level position? Okay, I know some companies are still doing job-based, job-staffing models. Others are going down this journey of position management. So this application does that. It will take the guidance from finance, from that integrated financial planning application. It will map it to an experience of a top-down budget first, and then those bottom-up planners, they'll come in, into the application and they'll start filling out where do they want to spend their dollars.  

Bashir Bashir 0:27:19.6: 

There are merit and promotion assumptions that are baked in. You are going to have some attrition naturally, that's going to be in there. Some of that is going to be finance-driven, and a lot of it might be HR-driven. HR is going to say, well, the average time to hire for your bottom-up budget, we actually need HR and talent acquisition to put those assumptions in there. Finance is not going to have that information. So think of this as the handshake. This is where a lot of the relationship building between finance and HR is happening. Translating the top dollar to that lower-level bottom-up budget. Now, when we talk about - the reason why I had asked that question, how many people are doing job versus position? It's a sensitive topic for some companies because it's an investment, to go from we were hiring at the job level. We used to use PeopleSoft, or we've never really done position management, we think it's too complicated. To all of a sudden, oh, your workforce budget has to go down to that level. That is a change management. It's not a tool issue, sometimes. It's more of we're just not used to it. We're not used to hiring at the position level.  

Bashir Bashir 0:28:31.3:  

So we picked position management because we realized, from an early design standpoint, most companies are already heading down there. With the workforce costs going up and up, with competition for more workforce, being able to plan at the position level, whether you're a retailer, banking company, they all ultimately find that the value of position management outweighs some of the challenges that come with standing it up. So that's why we picked this staffing model. How many people are aware of this staffing model or have seen it within their own organizations? The idea of you create the position, the position has a worker. They come in, they sit in that seat. When that position is ultimately filled, that worker is going to be in there, but at any point in time, that person can leave that position. The position remains, so they don't close that position. Like in job management, we close the job and open up another one. That's not the case here, which can add a lot of complexity, right? Because this person, maybe we created the whole position for this individual. So what do we do? Do we backfill it? For how long? What does finance think?  

Bashir Bashir 0:29:42.3: 

Well, finance has already budgeted for this to continue. So you can already see the complexities of position management and a system that's needed to manage the position at the Oracle, SuccessFactors, Workday level, versus here, what we're talking about, which is the position budget. So that's why we built for this system, operational workforce planning. Which takes us then into our flagship. So we put a tremendous amount of time into this application. When I joined, about nine months ago, it took me three or four months to really grasp how much this application can do beyond the budgeting. The budgeting is what we talked about. This application can go look at the requirements of the job, the requirements of the position, as well as look at the requirements of talent. So talent is in here just as much as finance HR. We have compensation teams that live in this application. Because when you create a position plan, there are assumptions about what you pay for that position that you may not have inside of your spreadsheet. You may need to go call comp teams and figure out what do I budget for? They're in there as well, setting those guardrails at the pay component level. We have our strategic components that are in here.  

Bashir Bashir 0:31:04.9:  

It's not full strategic workforce planning, but we have demand and strategic initiatives that you can tie to those positions that we were just talking about. So I would say, on average, we find seven core personas across finance, the business, HR and talent all living in one central application. So there's a lot happening here. This is just a quick visual of what I mean by a flagship application. We went through it, so I won't spend too much time on it, but you'll see org modelling lives in here. So that means for those individuals who plan their positions, put together a budget for next year, and want to visualize how these positions roll up to each other, they can do that in OWP. For folks who want to do talent modelling, and want their recruiters to live in here and do recruiter capacity planning, that is available also in this application. Recruiter capacity forecasting and so on. So there are features in here that cover those seven main personas that I talked about. So we talked also about this connected experience. So over the last two years, as OWP was being built and we had more customers asking us what else can it do? We realized there are some objects, some major objects that were not in there. Projects was one of them.  

Bashir Bashir 0:32:37.2:  

So hey, we've got 70 per cent of our workforce out there creating revenue for us via projects, like a professional services company, or it's an internal project-based organization, but we spend a tremendous amount of time in IT, and they are a large workforce cost to us. So we created this application, project resource planning. It will do a couple of things. It will help you with understanding where your resources are spending their time. So that's number one. And plan for it. So think resource capacity utilization. Who's on the bench? Why? Why are they on the bench? Maybe they don't have the skills. Maybe there's no demand for their project role. So being able to, as a resource manager, full details of your project resources. Then on the portfolio side, being able to step back and take a look at all of the projects and have some trade-offs. So if you are running a couple million-dollar projects and you've got to make some tough decisions, your resource managers are dealing with the day-to-day planning ahead. You're dealing with more of the strategical, I need to move 50 people from this project to that project because there's an upcoming customer contract.  

Baashir Bashir 0:33:54.4:  

That's what you get here. It is not separated. It is not siloed. It ties back to that operational workforce planning that we talked about. So anytime you need another resource, guess what? Position place planning back in OWP. You're not creating another area of position budgeting here. That is all tied back to your operational workforce plan. These are the features. So maybe - I know folks always want to know what do I get out of the box? As I mentioned, you get two main persona views. You get your resource capacity planning at that resource-specific level, which is a project role. It's not necessarily your position. You could be in this project in that role, tied to that position. You can do that in here. The benefit of that is you get your flexibility in your modelling for your projects, but you also get your governance and your guardrails tied to that position budget. So you don't go over budget on either side. That naturally transitions into - so you can see the theme. We start with finance budget. We go into the HR Operational Workforce plan. We go into specific needs on the project, and now we're ending at a really granular level, which is why? Why do we have folks doing what they do?  

Bashir Bashir 0:35:17.6: 

One of the examples is because they're answering phone calls. So to some of you, this may be relevant if you have contact centers. How many people have contact centers? Okay, that's probably a good chunk of your population, answering phone calls, dealing with customers, and maybe it's not a huge percentage of your workforce, but maybe it's a critical component to your operations, meeting the customer needs and satisfaction. So we built this application where you can track demand week-to-week, understand what drives the need for another agent. Also, within that week-to-week forecast, there are specific triggers of demand and hours and things like that. Every application that I'm going through, you can have demos of this. Of course, we can show you the world of all of these applications. We just wanted to give you a flavor of these four core applications today. So again, another feature list for folks who I think we're taking screenshots of what do you get out of the box? Here's our contact center feature list.  

Bashir Bashir 0:36:20.0: 

All of this will also be available to you, and we've got documents on our website about all of the applications and what they do. Just want to make sure we give you all some time to talk about what's coming next. So here's where I'm going to hand it back over to John and talk about some of the amazing roadmap items.  

John Pitstick 0:36:38.6:  

Thank you, Bashir. Okay, so we saw this one, right? The current landscape. I want you to also remember, you remember the slide where I started talking about demand and we had sales and used a retail example and the contact center example. I think we're heavy in FSI in terms of industry here, but there are retail examples. There's hospitality, there's health care. There is all of that demand potential in terms of applications. I just want you to hold that thought in your head for a second. This is the current landscape in terms of what's available. I hinted that we're doing strategic workforce planning. That one, like I said in the last session - so one orange one with the bolded text there - lock it down, it's happening, it's coming. There will be a strategic workforce planning application delivered before the end of the year by our team. The other application that we have planned is merit cycle planning, and this is where we all get to work together as a collaborative team. Speaking of my good friend Bashir, he - I don't know when it was maybe a month and a half ago or something - he's like 'John, this OWP is great, this and that, but I need to tell a better demand story, man. This is what's going on with the business. They're thinking about what they're doing, and that's evolving, and we need to improve that.'  

John Pitstick 0:38:19.3: 

I gave him a short-term solution for that. This brings us to this moment in time. This other application up here is the idea of maybe the annual merit and promotion cycle in an organization. This is something that your HCM vendors like Workday can do, but maybe not with a lot of flexibility. This is something that Anaplan does on Anaplan. We were thinking of this as an application, but we're agile. We're an agile organization. If you guys had a vote and the choice was between this merit cycle planning and us building this foundational demand that you could plug into hospitality, retail or even government, banking, insurance. We already have contact centers and sales organizations. But an out-of-the-box staffing foundation that you could then extend for your industry. Would that be more compelling, or would something to facilitate the annual merit cycle process be? So let's go. Hands up for merit cycle. Hands up. Okay, we got one. Hands up for starting to build out for the demand, the staffing needs in the organization. Okay, thank you. I think we can pretty much lock in on that, so I'll save you, I won't edit it right in front of you. Trust me. I'm tempted to, because I noticed that on the big slide, even though we're already talking about it with EJ. EJ is my boss in this whole apps world.  

John Pitstick 0:40:00.6: 

Yes, that's our plan in terms of new apps. We're becoming an apps-first organisation, and it's it makes everything easier in terms of the rest of the platform. AI. I love the message that Adam, in the keynote, talked about, that common ontology, to really unlock connected planning, things need to be consistent across your organization, and we can help you better with that if we understand this is product data and that's people data and that's financial data. So a lot of power in this strategy. Yes, those are the two apps that we have this year. We'll also do updates OWP effect. We have some significant plans for the flagship, for OWP later this year. There will be a series of feature updates to that. As well as the second half of the year, we'll have some updates to contact center planning and project resource planning. Those are early. So what we're doing with those is let them get into customer hands, and then start to base what we do next based on early customer feedback.  

John Pitstick 0:41:05.2: 

So slightly different version of a roadmap. I think that's going to take us to Q&A.  

Audience 0:41:12.2:  

Thanks, guys. Great presentation. I think this is just a quick question for Bashir. On your slides, at the top left, you said Q1 FY 27. Can you tell us which calendar year is that? Is that '27 or is that '26? 

Bashir Bashir 0:41:29.9:  

'26. So FY 27, that's Anaplan's fiscal year, which starts end of January goes - so we are in FY 27. So this is actually calendar year '26, is what the plans are.  

John Pitstick 0:41:43.8:  

We used to communicate in our fiscal year. We're not supposed to do that anymore because nobody cares about our fiscal year. 

Bashir Bashir 0:41:51.5:  

So whatever the fiscal year it is this year, '26. was that for strategic workforce planning? Was that primarily… 

Audience 0:42:00.4:  

Decision making?  

Bashir Bashir 0:42:03.8: 

Other questions? 

Audience 0:42:17.1:  

This is maybe a question about your future roadmap for the strategic planning app, but as we look at a planning-based model for AI transformation, many companies are looking at deconstructing even further from position down to task-based planning, re-engineering task flows and then looking for productivity gains there. How are you thinking about that as part of your strategic planning portfolio? 

John Pitstick 0:42:39.3: 

Where were you an hour ago?  

Audience 0:42:41.6:  

Stuck in engineering meetings. 

John Pitstick 0:42:42.9: 

Okay. We - yes, that was - in our AI for workforce planning, we were talking about that. Yes. We'll get some slides shared with you for - yes, so we were thinking about that is that is the future. It is. You have to move from thinking about the job or the function, to then thinking about the skill, and then what are the tasks that are actually at hand. I think a huge part of AI modelling - modelling the impact of AI is going to be on these tasks and starting to categorize them, which of these can be automated, which become human augmented? Which you're always going to be human? Which can be eliminated? Yes, that's the future. That's how we're thinking about it, is it has to start becoming more about tasks than roles. 

Audience 0:43:30.6: 

Thanks so much.  

Kouros Behzad 0:43:31.9: 

All the sessions are recorded, so you will have access to them on demand after, as well. Well, thanks everyone for joining us. We've got a couple more sessions coming up after the break, so make sure to join us. Cheers. Thank you.