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Board 15: Where Continuous Planning Becomes Agentic
Planning has entered a new era, and it’s not only because of AI.
Volatility is no longer episodic. It’s constant. Forecast credibility has become a career risk. Boards and investors do not want more data; they want more confident answers. And yet, despite decades of enterprise planning innovation, 90% of organizations still rely on spreadsheets for core financial planning.
Something must change.
To address these enterprise planning realities, Board 15 is one of the most meaningful releases in Board’s history. It brings together:
- Board Agents, an intelligent network of domain-specific, persona-based AI agents
- A robust, redesigned Microsoft 365 integration and next-generation planning interface (Flex Grid) that meets users where they already work, enabling faster adoption, higher productivity, and a near zero-training experience for teams familiar with Excel
- Unified econometric modeling and operational forecasting capabilities, so finance, operations, and merchandising teams operate from the same reconciled signals and see its financial implications in real time.
These are not isolated features. This is an agentic enterprise planning platform empowering confident, aligned decisions.
Board AI Will Take Your Planners’ Jobs to the Next Level
AI is everywhere. But not all AI is created equal.
Many organizations are discovering that “agentic” promises will fall apart under scrutiny. In fact, Gartner predicts, “over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls.”
Board is taking a different approach.
Board Agents are not generic copilots or chatbots. They are domain-specific, persona-based AI specialists that operate directly inside your enterprise planning model with the same multidimensional structure that your financial logic, allocations, and hierarchies already have. They do not sit on top of planning. They work within it.
Agentic AI for the Office of Finance
On March 31, 2026, our first Board Agents for the Office of Finance reach general availability (GA): the FP&A Agent and the Controller Agent. Their arrival marks a significant shift in how the Office of Finance operates.
The Board FP&A Agent removes the mechanical burden of three-statement modeling, variance validation, revenue & margin planning, adaptive forecasting, and root-cause analysis. The P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow no longer need to be manually reconciled and re-validated before insight can begin, and the integrity of the model is continuously maintained.
What changes is not just speed, it is posture. Office of Finance teams move from checking linkages to interpreting implications. From assembling narratives to refining them. From proving the numbers to advising on what they mean.
And our early Board Agents customer advocates agree:
“The Board FP&A agent gives me new ideas beyond my usual patterns with genuinely out-of-the-box insights that challenge my experience in a good way.” —Chris Xu, Chief Accounting Officer APAC, Ammega
And as Adam Hancock, Vice President, Financial Planning & Analysis at EBSCO Industries said, “What impresses me most is the FP&A Agent’s ability to triangulate. It takes our detailed balance sheet and income statement and synthesizes everything into clear, actionable insights — incredibly valuable for us at EBSCO.”
That is not just incremental productivity. It is a reallocation of expertise.
The Board Controller Agent extends the same intelligence into financial close, consolidation, and reporting. It applies accounting-aware logic across entities and reporting structures, surfaces only true exceptions, accelerates intercompany matching, and recommends general ledger mappings based on learned patterns.
The result is not simply a faster close. It is a calmer one. One where expertise is applied to judgment, not just investigation.
In case you missed it, check out our recent webinar, “From Planning Cycles to Continuous Planning: Delivering Finance Transformation with Board Agents,” to see a demonstration of these AI agents in action.
Agentic AI for Operational Planning Is Next
This agentic continuous planning evolution does not stop with the Office of Finance. Coming soon, the Merchandiser and Supply Chain Agents will extend Board agentic intelligence into commercial and operational planning domains.
The Merchandiser Agent connects demand signals to assortment, pricing, and inventory decisions making trade-offs visible before they are executed. While the Supply Chain Agent operates as a real-time S&OP partner, continuously evaluating service-versus-cost dynamics and testing scenarios before disruption turns into margin loss.
The model is straightforward. Board Agents perform complex analysis continuously, at scale and at speed on your governed data. Correlating the most impactful industry-specific signals with your internal time-series data, all while your planners remain accountable for decisions, trade-offs, and outcomes.
That is the essence of agentic continuous planning.
Excel Isn’t Going Away. Board Embraces This.
Let’s be honest: Excel still runs the world of planning.
In fact, 57% of FP&A professionals bypass enterprise planning systems entirely in favor of spreadsheets. Not because they distrust platforms but because they value Microsoft Excel’s flexibility.
Board 15 does not fight that reality. It embraces it.
The new Board for Microsoft 365 Add-in is not just a connector. It is a fully governed extension of the Board platform.
End Users can:
- Pull live, governed Board data directly into Microsoft Excel
- Build pixel-perfect reports
- Perform ad hoc analysis
- While IT maintains full security, permissions, and governance
Governed, controlled enterprise data stays centralized while Microsoft Excel becomes a new window into your continuous planning platform, not a parallel universe.
For CIOs focused on reducing tool sprawl and enforcing one definition of truth, this new capability should matter to you.
Flex Grid: The Planning Surface Itself
If you are new to Board, you might ask: what is Flex Grid?
Flex Grid is the core planning interface inside Board. It is where planners build, analyze, adjust, and compare plans. Think of it as a powerful, multidimensional planning workspace that combines the familiarity of spreadsheets with the governance and scale of an enterprise platform.
In Board 15, Flex Grid takes a significant step forward:
- Docked Charts allow live visualizations directly inside the grid.
- Full flexibility in pivoting dimensions, measures and KPIs to easily cover both operational and financial planning use cases.
- UX enhancements to reduce planning friction and facilitate adoption.
The result is not cosmetic. It represents a step change in productivity. As one McKinsey & Company study shows, organizations that move from fragmented, siloed planning to integrated planning environments report improvements such as:
- Up to 20% greater planner productivity
- 15% lower freight costs
- Significant reductions in delivery penalties
Flex Grid is where your aligned strategy meets operational execution. A continuous planning destination where Board Agents monitor, predict, analyze, and simulate, while human planners validate and act.
Forecasting That Delivers Decision Coherence
Forecasting has not become less important. It has become more consequential.
Demand volatility is structurally higher. Errors move faster into execution. And yet 65–70% of enterprises operate with multiple, conflicting demand signals, and only a quarter successfully reconcile top-down and bottom-up forecasts.
That fragmentation creates inventory distortion, service volatility, and internal debate. And frankly, it destroys enterprise value and creates substantial executive-level risk.
Board Foresight delivers a reconciled enterprise demand signal by connecting strategic, financial, and operational forecasting in a single continuous planning environment. And because Board Forecasting happens natively inside the Board Enterprise Planning Platform, your demand signals directly inform financial plans, operational decisions, and executive reporting without reconciliation outside the system.
Strategic and Operational Forecasting, Working Together
Board is the only continuous planning platform to deliver both:
- Econometric forecasting, which models macroeconomic and market drivers for strategic and financial planning
- Operational forecasting, which drives execution-level decisions at the demand unit level
A “demand unit” is simply the most granular level at which demand occurs, for example, a specific SKU in a specific store on a specific day. That is where replenishment, allocation, and service decisions happen.
Board automatically routes demand units to the most appropriate forecasting method: whether it be stable, high-volume demand, or sparse and intermittent demand.
In production environments, Board has forecasted more than 40,000 demand units simultaneously at daily granularity, achieving extraordinary accuracy across diverse categories and store formats.
Forecast accuracy is necessary but insufficient. What differentiates Board is that forecasts drive planning, simulation, and financial reconciliation in the same environment.
Forecasts roll up across hierarchies so that operational plans, financial targets, and executive reporting all reference the same numbers. That’s forecasting with decision coherence.
Why It Matters Financially
The stakes are significant.
For a $5B retailer, even a 1% reduction in inventory distortion can translate into tens of millions in working capital and margin improvement. Overstock ties up capital. Stock-outs erode revenue and consumer trust. When your forecasts live inside your continuous planning platform, decisions inherently align before execution happens.
One national retail organization reduced inventory from 4 months on hand to 1.5 months through improved forecast confidence and scenario planning with Board, freeing more than $50M in working capital and generating $11–13M in recurring annual P&L benefit.
And it’s not just about numbers. Increased trust emerges when finance, operations, and merchandising operate from the same reconciled signal and see its financial implications in real time.
From Retroactive Reporting to Continuous, Agentic Planning
Crucially, Board is not a point solution. It is a unified enterprise planning platform that supports planning maturities from spreadsheet-driven planning to fully agentic, continuous planning.
Board 15 brings that progression into focus:
- Agentic AI that operates inside your enterprise planning models
- Excel integration without governance compromise
- A modern planning interface built for productivity
- Forecasting that aligns both strategy and execution
Continuous planning is no longer aspirational. With Board 15, it becomes agentic.
Experience Board 15 at Board Beyond
Join us at the Board Beyond event series to get hands-on with the latest innovations in Board 15: Explore Board Agents in action, test our new Operational Forecasting capabilities, experience the redesigned Flex Grid, and try out our new Board for Microsoft 365 integration firsthand.
Re: Show the Last Month's value even when there's a 12-month screen selection
The Grouping Symbol will always be at the same position.
Re: What happens when I don’t have access to a specific cube, but I launch a procedure that uses that cu
Hi Andrea, if a user runs a procedure which references a cube to which they don't have the required access I believe they'll get an error stating something to that effect. I know that if they open a screen with a layout which uses a cube they don't have permission to see, that block will simply not be included when the layout is run, I believe a procedure would handle it similarly, from their point of view that cube simply doesn't exist.
Re: Show the Last Month's value even when there's a 12-month screen selection
same issue here, i've requested this enhancement 5 years ago
Show the Last Month's value even when there's a 12-month screen selection
Hello,
Is there any way other than Refer to to get the last month's value when there's a 12-month screen selection active?
Example: Jan 2026 to Dec 2026 is active on the screen selection and we want the value for Dec 2026 only for some visuals.
We need the 12-month selection for the trend line graphs but we also need the last month's value for other visuals.
I tried using Analytical function Last Value but it's getting only the non-zero last value. I would like to refrain from using Refer to because it impacts performance when you are adding them to a lot of datablocks using a procedure.
Efraim
Re: 3 Q's with Amy Holmes, Board Academy Director
You guys are doing a fantastic job !
Feature request - 1st Half and 2nd Half as options in Time Functions
I imagine it's not just me that would find this extremely helpful, but if the Time functions had the option of 1st half and 2nd half, and the ability to choose that for fiscal year, that would be amazing.
Is there a more formal way of requesting for features for Board?
Re: Difference between numbers
Hi Maik, okay if that's not the standard day entity at the top then it'll be a bit more difficult since you won't be able to use the inbuilt time/date functionality. I think to do it in the format you have it there you'd need to populate a second cube with the figures for the previous date basically, so that you could compare the two blocks.
If you were doing it in a horizontal layout you'd need to create an entity containing all of those values from the left axis, you would then have that entity as part of your cube structure. You'd populate the current period value(s) into the relevant row(s) and you could then use Nexel to reference the block to the left as you wanted to do to calculate the difference.
Basically your life would probably be much easier if that was the normal Day entity you had at the top rather than a custom entity, but I understand that may not be possible 🙂
128-Bit Sparsity in Board: When it Matters
Featuring: Community Captain Leone Scaburri, Solution Architect—internal Center of Excellence for Professional Services, Board
If you have ever reviewed a Board cube and felt uneasy after seeing 128-bit sparsity, you are not alone. For many architects and modelers, 64-bit sparsity is perceived as the “safe zone,” while 128-bit triggers immediate concerns about performance, memory usage, and design quality. The instinctive reaction is usually the same: “How do we get this back to 64-bit?” However, that reaction, while understandable, is not always justified.
To truly understand whether 128-bit sparsity is a problem, we need to step back and reconsider what sparsity is meant to achieve in the first place—and what actually drives performance in Board.
Sparsity is a Consequence, Not a Goal
Sparsity is not a feature to be “optimized” in isolation. It is the natural outcome of dimensional design choices.
Every cube reflects a balance between:
- The number of dimensions involved.
- Their cardinality.
- The number of combinations that make sense from a business perspective.
When this balance is handled correctly—by identifying which entities should be dense and which should be sparse—the cube starts to resemble reality more closely. In some cases, that realistic representation naturally exceeds what can be addressed with a 64-bit pointer. When that happens, Board simply scales to 128-bit sparsity.
This is not a failure of the engine, nor an indication of instability. It is a supported and expected behavior.
What Really Changes Between 64-Bit and 128-Bit
A common fear is that 128-bit sparsity will dramatically slow down procedures, calculations, or screen interactions. In practice, this fear is often misplaced. The core engine logic does not change when moving from 64-bit to 128-bit sparsity. What changes is primarily the width of the internal pointer, which has an impact on memory footprint and, consequently, on pure runtime execution.
However, what truly affects performance is not the pointer size, but:
- How many combinations are actually stored.
- How many of those combinations are meaningful.
- How much unnecessary data the cube is carrying.
A cube with fewer, well-defined combinations, even if managed with 128-bit sparsity, will often perform better than a bloated cube artificially constrained to 64-bit.
The Hidden Risk of “Forcing” 64-Bit Sparsity
Trying to stay within 64-bit sparsity at all costs can be counterproductive. Common strategies—such as keeping high-cardinality entities dense “just in case”, avoiding sparse structures where they are logically required, and preserving combinations that never occur in real data—may may help remain under the 64-bit threshold, but they do so by inflating the cube with meaningless combinations. This leads to higher memory consumption, heavier size on disk, and ultimately worse performance.
In other words, forcing a cube to remain 64-bit can be far more damaging than allowing it to move naturally to 128-bit.
How to Design Cubes for Correct Sparsity
A healthier design mindset is to treat 64-bit sparsity as a preference, not a constraint.
The recommended approach is simple in principle:
- Start from the business reality and identify meaningful combinations.
- Apply sparsity consistently to entities that do not interact fully with others.
- Reduce unnecessary dimensions and unused entities.
- Observe the resulting cube size and data density.
If this process results in 64-bit sparsity, that is ideal. If it results in 128-bit sparsity, that is still acceptable, if the cube is smaller, cleaner, and more representative of actual data.
When 128-Bit Sparsity Is a Warning Sign
There are cases where 128-bit sparsity should raise questions, but the questions should be about modelling choices, not about the engine.
It is worth reviewing the design if:
- Many dimensions are rarely used or completely unused.
- Sparse entities were added without validating real data interactions.
- The cube stores a large number of empty or meaningless combinations.
In these situations, the issue lies in dimensional design, not in the sparsity level itself.
Final Thoughts
The concern around 128-bit sparsity often comes from treating it as a warning sign rather than what it actually is: a natural consequence of dimensional design. When sparsity is applied correctly, cubes stop storing artificial combinations and start representing real business structures. In many cases, this makes the model significantly more efficient, even if it moves beyond the traditional 64-bit range.
From a modeling perspective, this is the right trade-off. The real danger is not reaching 128-bit sparsity. The real danger is distorting a model just to avoid it, keeping unnecessary combinations or avoiding proper sparse structures. 128-bit sparsity is not something to be afraid of. It is not an error, a limitation, or a performance sentence. The real goal is not to “stay at 64-bit,” but to store only what truly matters.
So, the next time you see 128-bit sparsity, resist the instinct to panic. Instead, ask a simpler question: Does the cube reflect the business correctly? If the answer is yes, then the model is doing exactly what it should.
