Financial software company Datarails aims to disrupt itself with AI before someone else does with launch of new FinanceOS product

Datarails, a company that makes financial planning and analysis software, is making a bold bet that the traditional FP&A tools it helped pioneer are now obsolete thanks to AI, and that it needs to disrupt itself before someone else does.

In response, Datarails is launching FinanceOS, an AI-native platform it describes as a “financial operating system”—a platform that allows finance teams use whichever AI tools they want, like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, to perform financial analysis, while maintaining necessary data controls and audit trails.

“AI can build models and run analysis and create reports much faster and much better than any human,” Didi Gurfinkel, the company’s cofounder and CEO, told Fortune in an interview. “So all these tools that focused on creating tools for people, for humans—they’re not relevant anymore. The opposite. They limit the AI.”

It’s a provocative claim from a decade-old company that made its name solving what Gurfinkel calls “Excel hell”—the challenge of managing the sprawl of spreadsheets that finance departments rely on for budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. Datarails built a platform that consolidated data from accounting systems, HR platforms, CRMs,...