Black Diamond Podcast

S2E9 | OneStream Director Reveals Why ML Isn't Scary

Tiffany Ma, Director of Product Marketing for AI and Operational Analytics at OneStream, returns for her second podcast appearance to share what's really happening with AI in finance. From 100+ live customer implementations to natural resource forecasting, the AI hype is meeting actual results. Remember when Tom Shea showed IBM Watson back in 2017 and shocked everyone by saying "this is really hard, I'm not gonna sell it to you"? That honesty was refreshing, but also showed the problem - AI was expensive, complicated, and required data scientists writing Python for years. Fast forward to today and OneStream's cracked the code on what they call "applied AI" - purpose-built for finance, no coding required, delivering results in weeks instead of years. But here's what's really interesting - the use cases have exploded beyond what anyone expected. Started with demand forecasting, expanded to P&L, now customers are doing workforce planning, cash management, even trying to forecast the materials needed to produce steel. That's not your typical FP&A use case, but when you have a tool that's agile enough to iterate quickly, people start getting creative. Tiffany breaks down why OneStream renamed Sensible Machine Learning to Sensible AI. Machine learning is quantitative - numbers forecasting numbers. But they've added generative AI for automated commentary and variance analysis, plus agentic AI with their new agents. They couldn't box themselves into "machine learning only" when the solution does way more than that.

S2E8 | $5B Distributor's OneStream Rescue

John Kowalkowski, Senior Manager of Financial Systems at BradyPLUS, shares the wild story of taking over a failing OneStream implementation, managing consolidations across 35-40 different ERPs, and building a roadmap for a newly formed $5 billion distribution company. Plus, insights on AI from someone with actual machine learning background. John started when an implementation was at a "trainwreck status". Everyone was overwhelmed with too many responsibilities. John took it over, spent a year getting everything in place amid ongoing organizational change. The data wrangling nightmare included 35-40 individual ERPs and ended up being organized and usable. John's machine learning background makes his AI takes carry weight. He thinks OneStream is taking the right track with a plug-and-play approach. With about a third of Splash sessions being AI-related, you could be cynical and say it's just positioning, but "their hearts are in it" and they're making good decisions building it into the platform.

S2E7 | Cutting Planning Time By a Week

Ricky LaBerge shares how a global manufacturing company transformed both consolidation and planning processes with OneStream.  Their old planning system was basically just a repository. Offline models everywhere, constant data loading issues, and fire drills that ate up valuable time. Instead of discussing the business, they were stuck trying to get numbers into the system.  After their OneStream implementation, there were no more fire drills. They were consistently closing books and issuing results to management on day four instead of day five. On the planning side, they started working before books are even closed thanks to the accordion setup. Thorough reviews happen a week earlier than before, and they keep shaving days off every year. DexKo was an amalgamation of an American firm and a German firm with completely different planning processes. BDA's Accordion Rolling Forecast helped bring them together while keeping separate models for different brands. The challenge wasn't technical - it was getting everyone aligned on new processes. Ricky's advice to companies starting their OneStream journey: From his consulting side: Ask lots of questions, keep requirements simple, don't spend 80% development time on 10% value, and really focus on design because it's expensive to change later. From his industry side: Training is everything. OneStream can be intimidating. Prying Excel from finance people's hands is hard, but communicate the value and it works.

S2E6 | Running a Complex Aviation Services Business

Phil Kaplan, FinTech Manager at Unifi, joins Cameron and Celvin to discuss running OneStream for a complex aviation services business. From contract-level planning across US, Canada, and UK airports to exploring AI for flight forecasting - this is real-world FP&A in action. Unifi is doing everything at airports except flying planes - baggage handling, cleaning, maintenance for Delta, Southwest, and other airlines. They have a CFO-driven AI initiative with a tangible use case: improving flight count forecasts. Weather, events, and seasonal patterns make flight forecasting ideal for AI. External data sources could dramatically improve accuracy of their departure-based revenue planning. OneStream's AI library could leverage multiple data sources for better volume predictions. What's your use case?

S2E5 | OneStream Power User Talks AI

Heather from Attain Finance sits down with Cameron and Celvin to share her journey from the early days of Hyperion consulting to running OneStream at a financial services company today. This is a refreshingly honest conversation about career transitions, platform evolution, and trying to figure out what AI actually means for finance professionals. Like everyone else at Splash 2025, AI came up a lot. Heather's take is refreshingly measured - she describes herself as "excited but optimistic but skeptical." It's an initiative for Attain Finance this year to figure out where AI fits, so she's attending sessions and trying to separate signal from noise. The honest assessment from both sides: yes, AI will change things. The timeline is uncertain, and it'll probably be more evolutionary than revolutionary. But the professionals who are actively learning, experimenting, and figuring out how to augment their work with AI will be the ones who thrive in that future.