Can AI Fill the FP&A Skills Gap?

According to research by Lang Cat in partnership with Morningstar Wealth, fewer young professionals are choosing careers that develop deep Financial Planning skills. It suggests declining interest among younger workers in traditional finance pathways; particularly financial planning and accounting — raising broader questions about where the next generation of analytical finance talent will come from.

FP&A sits at the heart of business decision-making. It requires interpreting data, building forecasts, translating numbers into narratives, and helping leadership navigate uncertainty. Yet it is also a discipline built on time-intensive processes: gathering data from multiple systems, cleaning inconsistencies, running models, and producing reports under tight deadlines.

At the same time, AI-driven platforms such as Pigment and emerging AI agents are rapidly advancing in exactly these areas. These tools can consolidate structured data, detect anomalies, model scenarios, and produce management-ready analytical reports in a fraction of the time traditional workflows require. What once needed multiple analysts can increasingly be achieved through automated pipelines supervised by smaller groups.

In some ways, this could be seen an opportunity. AI could reduce manual workloads, shorten reporting cycles, and give finance teams faster, more consistent insights. It may also lower barriers for organisations that struggle to hire or retain experienced FP&A talent.

Although, FP&A is not only about producing outputs; it is about interpreting context, challenging assumptions, and influencing decision-makers. Can AI-generated analysis carry the same weight in boardroom conversations? Will organisations trust automated forecasts as much as those built by seasoned professionals? And if AI handles the foundational analytical work, how will future finance professionals develop the judgement traditionally earned through doing it?

More broady, could modern AI-enabled finance environments attract more digitally minded graduates into FP&A? Or might automation reduce perceived career opportunities and further thin the pipeline?

As businesses confront evolving workforce expectations and accelerating automation, FP&A stands at an intersection of human judgement and machine intelligence. Whether AI becomes a solution to emerging skills shortages — or introduces new challenges of its own — remains an open question.