IBF Editorial Team
For years, the typical planning-transformation sequence seemed straightforward.
First, understand the business problem and design the process. Then establish the roles, responsibilities, and capabilities required to operate it. Finally, select technology to support the organization and make the process more effective.
That sequence is beginning to change.
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, automation, and new planning platforms has created pressure to adopt technology faster than ever before. In many organizations, the conversation now begins with the technology rather than the problem it is intended to solve.
Instead of technology supporting a carefully designed operating model, the operating model is being forced to catch up with the technology.
This creates a significant challenge for demand planning, forecasting, S&OP, and IBP leaders. Organizations cannot ignore emerging capabilities, but they also cannot install a new system and expect their processes, people, and decision structures to transform automatically.
Without first understanding the decisions they are trying to improve, organizations risk implementing powerful technology that solves the wrong problem—or reinforces an ineffective process.
The question is no longer only whether companies are ready for the next generation of planning technology.
It is whether their planning organizations can evolve quickly enough—and define the right problems clearly enough—to use it well.
When Technology Arrives Before the Organization Is Ready
Best-practice planning transformations typically begin with process design.
Organizations establish their forecasting and S&OP processes, clarify decision rights, define meeting structures, develop appropriate roles, and then select systems that support those practices.
Today, the sequence can feel almost reversed:
Technology arrives. People are asked to acquire new skills. Processes are then redesigned around what the technology can do.
That reversal presents both opportunity and risk.
New tools can analyze larger quantities of information, identify relationships across systems, highlight exceptions, and direct planners toward the variables that deserve attention. They can reduce repetitive work and accelerate analysis that previously required substantial manual effort.
The risk is that organizations may allow the technology to define how planning should operate before deciding what the planning process is expected to accomplish.
A technically impressive implementation can still fail to improve decisions. It may add complexity, create additional work, or introduce capabilities that the organization is not prepared to use.
Technology can accelerate a well-designed planning process. It cannot determine the purpose of that process on behalf of the business.
Strong Foundations Keep the Tool From Defining the Process
The speed of technological advancement creates pressure to act.
Leaders see competitors experimenting with AI. Vendors demonstrate increasingly sophisticated capabilities. Executives hear claims about autonomous planning and begin asking when similar technology will be implemented internally.
The resulting initiative may begin with questions such as:
- Where can we use AI?
- Do we need a more advanced planning platform?
- Should we hire data scientists?
- What parts of the planning process can we automate?
- Can this technology replace work people perform today?
These may become appropriate considerations, but they are not business objectives.
Planning leaders should first determine what needs to improve.
Is the organization trying to respond faster to changes in demand? Reduce inventory exposure? Improve service? Identify supply risks sooner? Shorten planning cycles? Improve collaboration? Give planners more time to investigate exceptions?
Once the objective is clear, technology can be evaluated against the decision, constraint, or capability the business needs to improve.
Advanced tools still depend on strong planning foundations:
- Clear business objectives
- Reliable master data
- Consistent definitions
- Appropriate segmentation
- Well-designed processes
- Clear ownership and decision rights
- Harmonized assumptions
- Cross-functional participation and accountability
Technology can identify missing information, detect inconsistencies, connect data across systems, and expose relationships that were previously difficult to see.
But it cannot create organizational agreement where none exists.
A system cannot independently decide which definition of demand the organization should use. It cannot resolve conflicting incentives between sales, operations, and finance. It cannot establish ownership of planning assumptions if leadership has never assigned that responsibility.
The faster the technology moves, the more important these foundations become. They provide the stability that allows an organization to experiment without losing control of the planning process.
This does not mean companies must achieve perfect data or complete process maturity before moving forward. Waiting for perfection can become another form of inaction.
It does mean that leaders need an honest assessment of where the foundations are strong, where they are weak, and which weaknesses could prevent a technology investment from producing value.
Technology Should Narrow Complexity and Expose Risk
Planning professionals make decisions in an environment of competing variables.
Creating an unconstrained demand forecast may require considering promotions, pricing, new products, seasonality, economic conditions, competitive activity, weather, customer behavior, market trends, and other internal and external factors.
An unexpected change in demand can also affect supply, production, materials, transportation, inventory, working capital, suppliers, and customer commitments.
Technology does not always need to produce the final answer to be valuable.
Its contribution may be narrowing 30 or 40 possible variables to the three most likely to matter.
That changes the planner’s work.
Instead of manually investigating every possible explanation, the planner can focus on the highest-priority exceptions, evaluate the business context, and determine the appropriate response.
This is a more credible vision of technology-enabled planning than the promise that systems will remove people from complex decisions.
Technology can also help reveal connections between functions that traditional systems were not designed to show clearly.
Many planning systems reflect the organizational silos in which they were created. Demand planning, sales, marketing, supply, production, purchasing, inventory, and finance may each have visibility into their own activities while the relationships between them remain difficult to understand.
Emerging technology can make those intersections more visible:
- How will a change in demand affect service, capacity, and inventory?
- What are the downstream consequences of a supplier or purchasing decision?
- Which products or customers are most exposed to a constraint?
- Which commercial signals should influence the demand plan?
- Where is the organization accepting risk without clearly recognizing it?
- What are the likely financial effects of alternative decisions?
Traditional systems often show the expected number without adequately quantifying or visualizing the surrounding risk.
That is an important opportunity for AI and advanced analytics in S&OP and IBP: not to eliminate human judgment, but to make the variables, relationships, and consequences easier for people to understand.
The objective is not merely to share more information—or to automate collaboration out of the process.
It is to connect people with the right insights at the right time so they can make better decisions faster.
Transformation Requires Ownership and Protected Capacity
One of the most underestimated challenges in transformation is that the daily operation does not stop while the organization prepares for the future.
Orders still need to be fulfilled. Inventory must still be managed. Forecasts must still be produced. Meetings must still take place. Customers, suppliers, and executives still require answers.
Leaders may ask employees to support a system implementation or process redesign in addition to their existing responsibilities. Transformation becomes another item on an already full list.
That approach rarely creates sustained progress.
Operational work will consume nearly all available capacity unless leadership deliberately protects resources for improvement.
One practitioner described removing a small number of people from daily responsibilities and assigning them specifically to continuous improvement. The group brought together people from supply chain, finance, and technology rather than treating transformation as the responsibility of one function.
Removing capable people from daily work creates short-term pressure. But failing to create dedicated capacity carries a different risk: the organization remains trapped in existing processes while the external environment continues to change.
Technology adoption also cannot be left solely to IT.
IT plays an essential role in architecture, security, integration, implementation, data access, and technical support. But planning leaders must own the business problem, process changes, adoption requirements, and expected outcomes.
The planning function should be able to answer:
- What problem are we solving?
- Which decisions should improve?
- How will the process change?
- Which roles and responsibilities will be affected?
- What knowledge must be developed?
- How will people use the new capability?
- How will value be measured?
- Who remains accountable for the result?
Senior leadership sponsorship is essential because meaningful change requires resources, priorities, new capabilities, and protection from operational demands.
But sponsorship is not simply approving a budget and handing the project to technical specialists.
The business function must remain actively involved in the design, testing, adoption, and measurement of the new operating model.
Technology adoption is not complete when the system goes live. It is complete when people use it to make better decisions.
Build a Connected Planning Team, Not a Super-Planner
Discussions about the future of planning often produce an expanding list of capabilities that every planner is expected to possess.
The future planner should understand forecasting, finance, commercial strategy, data science, machine learning, systems, change management, risk, communication, and executive influence.
Individually, each capability is valuable. Collectively, the expectations may become unrealistic.
As planning technology becomes more sophisticated, organizations may need to stop searching for one person who can do everything and instead build teams with complementary strengths.
A future planning organization might include:
- Business-facing demand planners with strong customer and market knowledge
- Forecasting specialists who understand segmentation and model performance
- Data scientists who develop and evaluate advanced models
- Data engineers or technical specialists who maintain integrations and pipelines
- Data interpreters who connect analytical output with business stakeholders
- S&OP or IBP leaders who govern the process
- Change leaders who support adoption
- Finance partners who connect operational decisions to financial outcomes
The structure will vary according to company size, industry, maturity, and complexity. Some capabilities may be centralized within a center of excellence or control tower. Others should remain close to business units, markets, plants, customers, or commercial teams.
The essential point is that planning is becoming a team capability.
Organizations should design how these specialties will work together rather than continually adding requirements to one planner’s job description.
Business Acumen Connects Planning to the Enterprise
Technical skills remain essential, but they are not sufficient to give planners influence over business decisions.
A planner can produce a sophisticated analysis and still fail to gain executive attention if the implications are not connected to the outcomes leadership cares about.
To influence senior leaders, planning must speak the language of the enterprise—and particularly the language of finance.
That means translating planning information into implications for:
- Revenue
- Margin
- Working capital
- Inventory exposure
- Capacity
- Service
- Cash flow
- Risk
- Strategic priorities
Business acumen also enables planners to operate effectively within the friction that S&OP and IBP are designed to expose.
Sales may see an opportunity. Marketing may see additional demand potential. Operations may see a constraint. Finance may see financial exposure. Leadership must decide which assumptions to accept and which trade-offs to make.
The demand planner’s role is to develop an unbiased, unconstrained view of expected demand rather than reflect the preference of any one function. By understanding the wider business and the decisions the forecast supports, the planner can help each function make better choices.
A planner who understands only the forecast may struggle to earn influence beyond the planning organization.
As more analytical work becomes automated, this connecting role becomes more important. The organization will still need people who can determine what the analysis means, how it affects the business, and what leadership should do next.
Developing Talent Requires More Than New Technology
Modern tools can help attract talented planners, particularly professionals who expect to work with current technology and meaningful data.
An organization relying heavily on manual processes may struggle to convince ambitious employees that planning offers an innovative career path.
But technology alone will not retain them.
People also need opportunities to learn, take responsibility, work across functions, interact with experienced leaders, and participate in meaningful transformation initiatives.
One panelist described involving employees in research and university partnerships, giving them responsibility for part of the work so they could contribute directly to the transformation.
That approach provides more than training. It creates ownership.
The next generation of planners should not simply be taught how to operate a new system. They should be given opportunities to help shape how the organization will use it.
That experience can build the technical understanding, business acumen, confidence, and cross-functional influence required for future leadership roles.
Do More With the Same—Not Automatically With Less
Technology investments are frequently accompanied by the expectation that an organization will reduce staffing.
In some situations, automation will reduce manual effort. Roles will change, and certain activities may no longer require the same resources.
But “do more with less” should not be the automatic promise attached to every planning transformation.
A more credible objective may be to accomplish significantly more with the same resources.
That could mean:
- Evaluating more scenarios
- Detecting risk earlier
- Responding to changes faster
- Spending more time on exceptions
- Improving cross-functional alignment
- Supporting additional products or markets
- Strengthening financial integration
- Creating more resilient plans
- Developing people
- Accelerating continuous improvement
If every efficiency gain immediately results in removing capacity, the organization may never create the space needed for better analysis, collaboration, innovation, and decision-making.
Planning technology should not only make the existing workload cheaper.
It should expand what the planning organization is capable of contributing to the business.
What Planning Leaders Should Do Now
Planning leaders do not need to predict exactly what their technology or organization will look like five years from now.
They do need to prepare the organization to adapt.
1. Define the business decision first
Do not begin with a technology category. Begin with the decision, constraint, risk, or planning capability that needs to improve.
2. Map the process and assess readiness honestly
Document how planning currently operates, including process steps, ownership, data, systems, handoffs, assumptions, decision rights, and cross-functional participation. Identify the gaps most likely to restrict value.
3. Protect transformation capacity
Create dedicated time, resources, and accountability for continuous improvement. Do not assume meaningful transformation can be delivered on top of a full operational workload.
4. Design the connected team and clarify ownership
Determine which capabilities should sit with planners, finance, IT, data specialists, process leaders, and centers of excellence. Establish how they will work together and who owns the business outcome.
5. Measure organizational and business value
Track improvements in decision speed, risk visibility, planning capacity, adoption, collaboration, and business performance—not only system usage, technical output, or labor reduction.
Looking Ahead
Planning organizations are entering a period in which technology may continue to advance faster than established roles, processes, and structures can comfortably absorb.
The answer is not to resist the technology.
It is also not to chase every new capability.
The organizations that create value will be those that connect emerging technology to clear business objectives, strong foundations, complementary teams, and accountable decision-making.
Technology can identify where planners should look. It can reveal relationships, reduce repetitive work, and make complexity easier to understand.
People must still determine what matters, bring the right functions together, and decide what the organization should do.
The future of planning will not belong solely to the company with the most advanced tool.
It will belong to the company that builds the organization capable of using that tool well.
Watch the full discussion: S&OP Unplugged — Episode 27 explores where planning is heading, why the fundamentals still matter, how technology is reshaping S&OP and IBP, and the capabilities future planning teams will need.
To learn more about upcoming IBF conferences, training programs, and leadership forums, visit the IBF Forecasting and Planning Conference schedule.
Editor’s Note
This article reflects themes discussed during an IBF S&OP Unplugged session recorded during the Europe: Business Planning, Forecasting & S&OP/IBP Conference, held November 19–21, 2025, in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
S&OP Unplugged is an informal, off-stage discussion among planning practitioners designed to encourage candid conversations about the evolving challenges and opportunities in business planning, forecasting, S&OP, IBP, technology, and AI.
The discussion featured perspectives from Lonza, Arkema, Crocs, Baker Hughes, and Lancaster University.