In 2025, something shifted in how businesses think about their most critical decisions. After years of AI hype and chatbot promises, leaders began asking harder questions: Why can't we just "use AI" for our financial planning & analysis? Why do we need specialized tools when AI is supposedly so powerful?
The answer, as it turns out, is everything.
You can't "just ChatGPT" your financial data, and in 2025, the market finally caught up to what we've known all along: true financial intelligence requires a fundamentally different foundation.
So we built it.
AI became the defining technology story of 2025, but as finance teams rushed to adopt it, they discovered a fundamental limitation: generic large language models can't deliver true financial intelligence.
They don't understand that "COGS" means entirely different things to a manufacturer versus a SaaS company. They can't maintain multi-dimensional consistency across rolling forecasts. And most critically, they hallucinate without the right structure and context—a dealbreaker when decisions involve millions of dollars and stakeholder trust.
The promise of AI-powered finance remained just that: a promise, not a reality.
Through conversations with hundreds of CFOs and finance leaders, we identified what was missing: a semantic truth layer that sits between systems and AI. Not another dashboard. Not another chatbot slapped onto legacy infrastructure. But a fundamentally new approach to how financial data gets structured, understood, and activated.
At Cube, we spent 2025 pioneering this foundation—shedding our old SaaS skin to emerge as something fundamentally different: a Financial Intelligence Platform built specifically for the AI era.
While competitors rushed to add chatbots to existing tools, we rebuilt from the ground up with five core pillars:
An intelligent data layer that unifies fragmented systems into a single, governed foundation—eliminating the manual reconciliation that slows down every decision.
Semantic financial context that understands your specific business logic, not generic definitions. Our platform learns how your organization defines metrics, calculates variance, and structures forecasts.
Enterprise-grade governance with cell-level security, complete audit trails, and traceable lineage from source system to strategic decision. No black boxes. No unexplainable outputs.
Finance-native architecture that preserves the formulas, assumptions, and bi-directional workflows finance teams actually use—working within Excel and Google Sheets rather than forcing wholesale replacement.
Specialized FP&Agents that execute governed financial actions across workflows and strategic planning—not generic AI assistants, but purpose-built agents that understand financial operations.
But technology alone isn't enough. We also invested heavily in the human intelligence behind the platform: FP&A experts from the world's top companies who embed best practices into everything we build. We scaled our services organization to operate like a high-velocity standalone business, ensuring rapid time-to-value even at enterprise scale. And we launched strategic partnerships that extend Cube's reach further than ever before.
2025 wasn't just about building—it was about proving the model works at scale:
These aren't vanity metrics. They represent finance teams at sophisticated organizations making a calculated bet: that the future of financial planning requires intelligence infrastructure, not just better interfaces.
2025 was about building the intelligence layer. 2026 is about delivering that intelligence across every workflow—turning every finance team into a strategic powerhouse.
We're not just participating in the Intelligence Era. We're defining it.
As we accelerate into 2026—the year of the Horse in the lunar calendar—we're arriving with the momentum to match. More product launches. More embedded intelligence. More ways to work. The gate just opened, and Cube is setting the pace.
The question isn't whether AI will transform finance. It's whether finance teams will adopt AI built on solid foundations—or chase the illusion of quick fixes that can't deliver real intelligence.
We're betting on the former. And based on what we saw in 2025, so is the market.