What Finance Wants from EPM: Insights from 2026 Dresner Study

In 2026, organizations rely on Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) to move beyond basic financial budgeting, planning, and reporting. More often, they’re seeking AI-driven intelligence and automation to cut cycle times, improve accuracy, and give teams more time to focus. Planful delivers with AI embedded across the platform. And, according to this year’s Dresner Wisdom of Crowds® Enterprise Performance Management Market Study, Planful is recognized as an industry leader driving high value, low TCO, and a superior customer experience.

• Fundamentals still lead, with 57% of respondents rating financial budgeting and planning critical, the highest of any EPM capability.
• Finance wants embedded AI for specific work: Capabilities ranked “highly beneficial” by the most respondents include anomaly detection (56%), agentic AI for routine accounting tasks (55%), and predictive forecasting (54%).
• Planful is an Overall Leader in Dresner’s Customer Experience and Vendor Credibility models, with a perfect recommendation score from its customers.

Dresner Advisory Services delivers high-quality, impactful research to inform decisions by capturing evolving market needs. Its Wisdom of Crowds® reports (100% based on input from EPM users and buyers) uncover how organizations use technology, then compare vendor performance against those findings. The result is a recognized benchmark for real-world finance technology trends.

EPM remains critical to organizations globally, with 85% rating it at least “important,” and 30% deeming it “critical” to their operations — the highest share ever recorded by Dresner. It’s a very mature market, but vendors are rapidly incorporating AI, bringing speed and accuracy to analysis, planning, forecasting, and other areas of finance.

The top EPM priorities identified in the 2026 Wisdom of Crowds® study include:

1. Financial budgeting and planning

2. Financial consolidation and financial reporting

3. Management reporting and analytics

4. Operational budgeting and planning

5. Managing the period-end financial close

The leading capability priorities saw 80% or more of respondents calling them critical or very important to their business. In fact, these FP&A fundamentals drive many organizations to seek EPM solutions: Improving efficiency, speed, and accuracy across budgeting and planning is crucial to driving business performance.

From “2026 Edition Wisdom of Crowds® Enterprise Performance Management Market Study,” pg. 57. Copyright 2026 by Dresner Advisory Services, LLC.

In 2026, finance leaders continue to prioritize an EPM foundation grounded in finance fundamentals. That solid foundation is a prerequisite for finance teams before developing more insightful rolling forecasts and capturing complex, multi-entity business structures in a single EPM

However, enabling AI-driven agentic automation to accelerate financial cycles has taken on new urgency for finance leaders.

For those exploring options to upgrade an existing EPM or move from spreadsheets and manual processes to modern EPM, finance fundamentals are the expected baseline. Today, finance leaders want the agility and speed AI-powered solutions already provide to teams across the organization, making AI widely accepted in finance.

The need for AI is also shaping EPM purchase decisions. Rather than bolt on third-party AI tools or develop AI capabilities in-house, 87% of those surveyed expect their EPM vendor to build AI into a future release, and more than half are ready to be early adopters.

Planful delivers on those expectations with a customer-first approach, embedding AI capabilities seamlessly into our platform and covering top use cases in the Dresner study, including:

• Signals for AI financial data anomaly detection that flags anomalies, explains what changed, and shows what matters.
• Projections for predictive financial forecasting that builds a baseline from data and automatically selects the best-fit model.
• Planner for AI financial planning that projects accounts forward from actuals and flags those drifting off plan.
• Analyst Assistant as an agentic AI assistant purpose-built for finance that responds to ad hoc natural language queries with explainable visualizations and narratives.
• Help for a built-in AI assistant that answers questions and provides step-by-step, in-context Planful guidance and support.

Additional Planful AI capabilities launching soon include assistants for close and financial consolidations, custom application development, governance management, and business task automation.

From “2026 Edition Wisdom of Crowds® Enterprise Performance Management Market Study,” pg. 80. Copyright 2026 by Dresner Advisory Services, LLC.

Every finance professional knows the real-world pain and limitations of manual spreadsheets. It’s what drives many organizations toward modern EPM in the first place, with goals to speed monthly close and consolidation, automate weekly reporting, and ease quarterly and annual planning and budgeting. As noted above, improving these fundamental functions drive organizations to EPM.

While periodic plans, budgets, and reports will always be critical, EPM lets finance teams go far beyond traditional cycles. Leading finance teams are looking past yesterday’s insights and building a continuous approach to financial performance management. More and more, they’re looking to AI to ease this transition.

Reinforcing this shift is the 90% of respondents (shown above) who see benefits in using agentic AI to automate routine FP&A activities. Of those, 55% deemed it highly beneficial, making it the second-most mentioned AI/ML use case behind automated anomaly detection.

Modern EPM with embedded AI capabilities is what makes this automation possible.

Dresner ranks EPM software vendors across 33 criteria and a five-point scale. In this year’s report, Planful is a top-scoring vendor, sweeping all three Dresner evaluation models along with a perfect customer recommendation score:

• Planful places in the “Overall Experience Leader” quadrant of the “Customer Experience Model.” The ranking highlights customer confidence in Planful solutions and the value they deliver, driven by high product usability and best-in-class ease of administration.
• Planful places in the “Overall Credibility Leader” quadrant in Dresner’s “Vendor Credibility Model.” This measures vendors on customer confidence versus perceived value, showing customers trust Planful to deliver value.
• Planful is positively rated in the high-value, low-TCO quadrant in the “Value/TCO Model.” This ties directly to Planful’s ease of administration, delivering faster time-to-value for lean FP&A teams.

For finance leaders evaluating EPM, these findings provide objective, third-party validation that Planful consistently meets core planning priorities, lowers administrative burden, and maximizes return on investment. Sweeping the leadership tier across Customer Experience, Vendor Credibility, and Value/TCO models makes Planful essential to any organization’s EPM shortlist.

From “2026 Edition Wisdom of Crowds® Enterprise Performance Management Market Study,” pg. 110. Copyright 2026 by Dresner Advisory Services, LLC.

Don’t just take our word for it. Dig in for yourself.

Read the 2026 Dresner Wisdom of Crowds® Enterprise Performance Management Market Study to see how your peers are evaluating the EPM landscape as they prepare for 2027. It covers implementation and sourcing strategies, deployment options, industry-specific and regional differences, common barriers to success, and detailed rankings for more than a dozen vendors.

Download your complimentary copy of the full study to create your EPM shortlist.

What is the Dresner Wisdom of Crowds® Enterprise Performance Management Market Study?

The Dresner Wisdom of Crowds® EPM Study is an annual report that analyzes EPM usage, adoption trends, and vendor performance based on actual user feedback. It helps organizations better understand and select EPM solutions.

What are the top 2026 priorities for finance teams?

According to the 2026 Dresner study, financial budgeting and planning, financial consolidation and financial reporting, and management reporting and analytics are the most critical EPM use cases.

Is Planful rated as an EPM leader?

Dresner recognizes Planful as an overall leader in Customer Experience and Vendor Credibility, delivering a high-value, low-TCO EPM solution while maintaining a perfect recommendation score from surveyed customers. Planful is also noted for having best-in-class ease of administration.