Alteryx Inspire 2024 | Travis Haworth & Aaron Bell | Capitalize Consulting

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Travis Haworth

Manager, Office of Finance Transformation

Capitalize Consulting

Aaron Bell

Senior Consultant, Office of Finance

Capitalize Consulting

Enhancing efficiency: Capitalize Consulting highlights the role of AI in tax automation

Tax automation is transforming the finance sector, enabling professionals to streamline processes and enhance decision-making with tools such as Alteryx.Businesses and partners are using artificial intelligence to automate processes and make better decisions, and the challenges for the Office of Finance include economic uncertainty and geopolitical questions, Aaron Bell (pictured, left), senior analystics consultant at Capitalize Consulting, explained.Aaron Bell and Travis Haworth of Capitalize Consulting talk to theCUBE about tax automation.“It’s people problems and process problems that we’re trying to fix here. Let’s talk about process problems first

play_circle_outline Alteryx as a solution for automating data extraction and transformation

play_circle_outline More time for reviewing insights with Alteryx automation

play_circle_outline Importance of setting big goals and working towards them

play_circle_outline Enhancing Financial Proficiency: The Integration of AI and Alteryx for Upskilling and Data Analysis

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Travis Haworth & Aaron Bell | Capitalize Consulting

Travis Haworth

Manager, Office of Finance Transformation Capitalize Consulting

Aaron Bell

Senior Consultant, Office of Finance Capitalize Consulting

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome back to theCube's Live coverage of Alteryx Inspire. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. We're having so many great conversations about how customers and businesses and partners are using AI to automate their processes and to make better strategic decisions and improve efficiency. It's really cool.

>> Yeah, no, I mean this is really making analytics and AI real. And I think that's where the rubber meets the road and companies are trying to figure out where these use cases are going to take them in the future.

Rebecca Knight

>> Let's get even more real with our next guest. I'd like to introduce Travis Howard. He is the manager of Office of Finance Transformation at Capitalize. Welcome, Travis.

Travis Hartman

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Aaron Bell, he is the senior consultant of Office of Finance at Capitalize.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you so much for coming on the show. So I want to start with you, Aaron. Just give our viewers an overview of what are the big challenges with Office of Finance. I mean, we know that there's a lot of economic uncertainty and high inflation and just a lot of questions around geopolitics. Talk a little bit about what the challenges are as you see them.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah, so what we're seeing with accounting professionals, tax professionals, finance professionals, in their day-to-day, they're dealing with gathering significant volumes of data from a variety of systems that is requiring them to perform very important tasks for their finance organizations, for their accounting teams that takes a significant amount of time. So if you're an accountant, you're spending your day-to-day gathering data from all these different data sources, throwing it into Microsoft Excel and performing calculations that are critical to the financial reporting or regulatory reporting or getting ready for audits for your organization. So with all these data sources that one is dealing with, it's causing a lot of problems, taking a lot of time. And we really want accountants, office of finance professionals to be able to interpret that data much more efficiently. So that data, it's causing a lot of challenges and teams are not able to gather the insights that they want to gather in an appropriate manner.

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah. And I think if I can add on to that, Aaron and I are both CPAs. So we started in public accounting, I was in advisory services. Aaron did a stint in audit and tax.we've got a team of about 12 of us with very similar backgrounds. And when I think of what was my life like before I got into the automation analytics, AI space, I really think of, I empathize with some of these teams. And Aaron hit the nail on the head. When I think of challenges, I really think of them in three big buckets. There's the people aspect, the process aspect and the technology aspect. When we think about people, what does that look like? I read stats all the time. 6 to 10% of all accounting and finance positions are open right now. It's really hard to find and retain talented, smart, driven accounting and finance professionals. Now, why does that happen? I think it's a lot of the processes. It's a lot of monotonous work you can imagine to be in accounting and finance, you have to have higher education. Often master's degrees. If you're a CPA, sit for these really strenuous testing. And what that leads when all you're doing is crunching spreadsheets together, you're not really using your value. You're not getting to use that big beautiful brain that you studied and worked so hard for. And so that piles into the technology aspect. And we all know it, right? What does accounting and finance people deal with? They deal with Excel. It's all day every day. They've got... I read another stat. The average organization has over 100 data sources that they use from a day-to-day operations perspective. The brunt of that comes onto the accounting and finance teams. When you combine those three challenges together, you get a lot of burnout, you get a lot of frustration. Leadership doesn't understand, "Hey, I just want to understand. How are we doing? What's our financial performance? Why does it take so long when I want to understand who's a great customer and who's a poor customer?" You're dealing with those three challenges that all overlap with each other and it just causes a big gap in what people want to do and what they are doing. And that's really where we try to come in and bridge that gap and really support people that are just like us.

>> And it seems like, again, this has been where Alteryx has really cut its teeth over the years and things of that nature that really in finance, in that accounting space, because like you said, the amount of spreadsheets, and I know a few financial services companies where they still run significant portions of their business on and it'd be amazing to know who they are. I can't talk about it. But when you start to look at it on spreadsheets and macros and things of that nature where, oh by the way, if that person leaves, all that knowledge goes out to the... Where do you see Alteryx really helping out? I mean, again, you guys are marketplace partner of the year again, and you guys are really into this stuff. Where does Alteryx come in to help you with that?

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah. So it's people problems and process problems that we're trying to fix here, right? So let's talk about process problems first. We talked about all the data sources, humans spending their valuable time just going to gather data and not yet just providing the insights that that data can provide. So Alteryx can plug into all the data sources that exist in your organization and automate the data extraction so that you're not having to click into all these different systems and pull that data down manually. The next step is data transformation. So as Travis was saying, when we came from public accounting, we were spending so much time working in these large Excel workbooks, setting up Excel formulas, pivot tables, doing all this different number crunching, and it takes so much time. And we also have that knowledge only stored in our head right now. So what you can do with Alteryx is you can automate the data transformation and take that process that's in your head and transport that into a repeatable and reusable Alteryx process that you can get done in a fraction of the time. So we're talking about data extraction and then automated, repeatable, reusable data transformation. Now, when you speed those two things up, it allows you to review the insights of your data with much more time. So accountants, tax professionals, they're dealing with so many deadlines. How many tax deadlines are there? There's financial reporting deadlines, there's regulatory reporting deadlines. And most of the time what we see with our clients is that you're getting your work done in Excel right before the deadline hits. So with Alteryx, you automate your data extraction, you automate that data transformation, and it gives you much more time to interpret what insights lie in your data. And now from a people perspective, accountants don't want to work long hours, right? They want to get their work done, they want to provide real value to the business that they're working for. And using Alteryx is just a fun software to use. It is fun to automate processes in Alteryx. So it's a refreshing approach to your work. It is fun to build things in Alteryx. It is fun to build repeatable reusable processes and provide value to your organization in ways you haven't done before.

Travis Hartman

>> And I think the thing that I'd like to add there is when you think about an organization that's starting out with their Alteryx journey, "Hey, what are the challenges that we have?" Maybe it's, "I want to accelerate month-end close." Maybe it's, "I want to reduce risk by automating and making repeatable processes with good audit documentation, a good trail." And that's great. And I can think of a particular organization, if I may walk you through the journey of a recent project that we just finished up. You can think that's where we started. We said, "Okay, we've got payroll. We've got accounts payable. We've got receivable. We've got global accounting. We've got tax. We've got FP&A. What tool can support all those different organizations?" And so their big goal, and this is what I would tell anybody, that I urge anybody listening in, what is that big goal? Dream big, and then work through the steps to get there. And their big goal was, "We want to cut our month end close from eight days to four days." And it took us four or five, six months. It took about 50 people working in Alteryx. Brand new accounting, right? Finance. Never used a technology like this before. Got them trained up, got them up skilled. We worked through their closed task list and we started chunking through. Is it over? No, of course not, right? Now we're into that next phase of scaling. So we've got through process automation. "What do you want to do next?' They want to manage cash applications, right? You were talking about some economic uncertainty, some of the global changes. Cash is king in these days. So how can I better predict and collect what I'm going to collect on my receivables? Well, the same tool that these people just learned to automate their processes, well now they can take advantage of all these advanced analytics tools, some of these AI modules, some of these forecasting. Are these data scientists? No, right? These are the same accounting and finance professionals. All they needed was that boost. They needed the tool to line up with their ideas and their dreams and then they go through and execute. And I think that's the biggest thing that Alteryx does well, that's what Capitalize aims to support, is empowerment of users of Alteryx. It's our big passion. And there's nothing more fulfilling in this role, in this world that we live in than somebody coming to us and say, "Travis, look what we got accomplished. We're accountants. And we just built a casual forecasting module that had real top line impact. I can show you exactly where it is on our 10K." When we do that, oh, that makes everything worth it.

Rebecca Knight

>> Accountants as superheroes. I love it. So there are certainly a lot of viewers who are watching this saying, "Hey, I got people problems, I got process problems, I got technology problems," and your advice, Travis, to think of that big audacious goal and then dream big and we can do it, but how would you recommend companies that are really just getting started with their... Or maybe even companies that have tried a couple of incremental things, what's some guidance that you have for them in terms of how to get started?

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah, go ahead.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah, I think it's important to just start having honest conversations as an organization to self-reflect where you are. What technologies do you have? Are you using them? What are your short-term goals, long-term goals from a business perspective? Does your talent have the skills needed to achieve those goals? And really just starting to have those conversations is the first key step, right? Then once you start having those conversations and establish the baseline of where you are as an organization, you can then start making informed decisions. As a group, as a team, where do we want to go? How are we going to do this? So really first thing, start having conversations and then you're going to build on that like a snowball.

>> What about for those that are more mature and really looking and are ready to scale from that perspective, where do they fit into this whole model?

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah, great question. And we work with... I think we've done 1,500 Alteryx deployments in the last five or six years since we started getting involved with Alteryx. And it's the common question that I think that everybody asks is, "Hey, we've got great success," right? You heard Aaron say, "We've built a plan. We started to execute. How do I scale? How do I really add gasoline to this fire with this awesome technology that's solving these people process and technology challenges?" And it's really about building that community. I think that there's nothing more important, there's nothing more valuable for a organization that really wants to implement big changes than to make sure that everybody has a seat at the table. I know you guys do plenty of interviews. I'm sure you have plenty of customer relationships, and that you can see where it's going to fail. When one team is dictating and making every single decision, they're not taking, they're not affecting good change management. They're not building a culture of transformation and analytics. What do the best organizations do? They share their wins. If I could give one easy answer, I want to scale Alteryx, you need to set up those meetings, those town halls, those small group sessions, those company-wide sessions. When the CFO is saying, "Aaron Bell just did the craziest thing I have ever seen at our organization. This is what he did. Aaron gets to talk a little bit about it." That's what motivates people, right? We all want to impact change in our organization. That's what really sparks that fuel, is sharing out successes. And it's not just sharing out successes. This community should be focused on bringing up risks, bringing up challenges. Where are we getting stuck? There's a lot of overlap in finance. If one person is running into a problem, it's not isolated, right? And if you're not communicating effectively, you don't have a program to share wins and struggles, you're going to do a lot, you're going to hit a wall a lot of times that may have already been solved. And that's where the light bulb really comes on, is when you have the right technology, but you have that community behind it that's passionate, that's sharing wins, everybody's marching in the same direction. That's how you really scale an analytics program.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah. To me, it's just all about creating a fun collaborative culture, right? Accountants, finance professionals, they work in long hours in Excel. So once people start hearing about all the fun, awesome automations you can do that are fun to do work-wise and they're providing real business value, everyone wants to be involved. So those weekly meetings where everyone's sharing what they're talking about, finance professionals want this. They want to do this, they want to provide value to their organizations. And at Capitalize, that's what we do. We partner with organizations. We'll up to set them up for success, helping them create those collaborative analytic-driven finance organizations.

Rebecca Knight

>> So what are the trends that you are hearing about here at Inspire or the new innovations that are making you excited to go back to work and bring it? Because you really are painting this picture of what it takes to create this kind of cultural change. It's not only a technology change, it is a cultural change too.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah. For me, it's about the up-skilling of office finance professionals. And I think it's so cool that Travis and I were accounting majors and now we're here at Inspire talking about Alteryx and all the awesome things you can do with it. And to me, Alteryx enables new skill sets for accounting and finance professionals. So now we're learning about all the new offerings that Alteryx has with Ai. Generative AI is all the buzz. And now as Office of Finance professionals, we get to go back, use Alteryx and incorporate these new features into our day-to-day. So I just think that's so awesome that we took an Excel course in college and now we're building very important financial regulatory reporting, tax reporting solutions with Alteryx using AI. And it's just crazy what Alteryx can enable from a business perspective, from a people perspective. And here we are talking about AI and Inspire, Travis.

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah. And my not-so-shameless plug that I'll shout at the rooftops is if you're an accountant, if you're in finance, the one tool that you would be foolish not to use, not to take a look at, there's a million use cases as auto insights, there's nothing more timely in the finance departments than time series data that we need to really understand the segments and categories of impact. Why are things going up? Why are things going down? It's a tale as old as time. "Hey, our revenue went up 12%." Okay, right? Cool. But if you drill a layer deeper, what you find is certain segments, certain lines of business, certain geolocations, maybe certain teams and departments are really driving 44% of that growth. And I can think of this exact use case that we were working on in the Inverse. The question that they asked was, "Hey, I want to understand which of my customers are actually generating revenue and profit." I could give the whole dissertation on auto insights, which I'll skip, but what we found out was what they thought was their best customer, which generated their number three in revenue, top line, once we started building out these Alteryx workflows to allocate and apportion different costs, we found out that that was worst customer. They were losing the most money on this, but they didn't have the right tool to actually dig a layer deeper. And then they didn't have a way to trigger a notification to find that. And I think that's what's so nice about the platform is, yeah, gen AI, that's the buzz. Yeah, AI's all in and hot, but it's really what are the practical applications. And I think that's what Alteryx has really solved the case on, is how do we use this and put this in people's hands in a way that they can actually take advantage of.

Rebecca Knight

>> Great advice. Aaron, Travis, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. A really great conversation.

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah, we really appreciate the time.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Thank you for having us.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Alteryx Inspire. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in technology enterprise, coverage, and analysis.

Travis Haworth & Aaron Bell | Capitalize Consulting

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome back to theCube's Live coverage of Alteryx Inspire. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. We're having so many great conversations about how customers and businesses and partners are using AI to automate their processes and to make better strategic decisions and improve efficiency. It's really cool.

>> Yeah, no, I mean this is really making analytics and AI real. And I think that's where the rubber meets the road and companies are trying to figure out where these use cases are going to take them in the future.

Rebecca Knight

>> Let's get even more real with our next guest. I'd like to introduce Travis Howard. He is the manager of Office of Finance Transformation at Capitalize. Welcome, Travis.

Travis Hartman

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Aaron Bell, he is the senior consultant of Office of Finance at Capitalize.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you so much for coming on the show. So I want to start with you, Aaron. Just give our viewers an overview of what are the big challenges with Office of Finance. I mean, we know that there's a lot of economic uncertainty and high inflation and just a lot of questions around geopolitics. Talk a little bit about what the challenges are as you see them.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah, so what we're seeing with accounting professionals, tax professionals, finance professionals, in their day-to-day, they're dealing with gathering significant volumes of data from a variety of systems that is requiring them to perform very important tasks for their finance organizations, for their accounting teams that takes a significant amount of time. So if you're an accountant, you're spending your day-to-day gathering data from all these different data sources, throwing it into Microsoft Excel and performing calculations that are critical to the financial reporting or regulatory reporting or getting ready for audits for your organization. So with all these data sources that one is dealing with, it's causing a lot of problems, taking a lot of time. And we really want accountants, office of finance professionals to be able to interpret that data much more efficiently. So that data, it's causing a lot of challenges and teams are not able to gather the insights that they want to gather in an appropriate manner.

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah. And I think if I can add on to that, Aaron and I are both CPAs. So we started in public accounting, I was in advisory services. Aaron did a stint in audit and tax.we've got a team of about 12 of us with very similar backgrounds. And when I think of what was my life like before I got into the automation analytics, AI space, I really think of, I empathize with some of these teams. And Aaron hit the nail on the head. When I think of challenges, I really think of them in three big buckets. There's the people aspect, the process aspect and the technology aspect. When we think about people, what does that look like? I read stats all the time. 6 to 10% of all accounting and finance positions are open right now. It's really hard to find and retain talented, smart, driven accounting and finance professionals. Now, why does that happen? I think it's a lot of the processes. It's a lot of monotonous work you can imagine to be in accounting and finance, you have to have higher education. Often master's degrees. If you're a CPA, sit for these really strenuous testing. And what that leads when all you're doing is crunching spreadsheets together, you're not really using your value. You're not getting to use that big beautiful brain that you studied and worked so hard for. And so that piles into the technology aspect. And we all know it, right? What does accounting and finance people deal with? They deal with Excel. It's all day every day. They've got... I read another stat. The average organization has over 100 data sources that they use from a day-to-day operations perspective. The brunt of that comes onto the accounting and finance teams. When you combine those three challenges together, you get a lot of burnout, you get a lot of frustration. Leadership doesn't understand, "Hey, I just want to understand. How are we doing? What's our financial performance? Why does it take so long when I want to understand who's a great customer and who's a poor customer?" You're dealing with those three challenges that all overlap with each other and it just causes a big gap in what people want to do and what they are doing. And that's really where we try to come in and bridge that gap and really support people that are just like us.

>> And it seems like, again, this has been where Alteryx has really cut its teeth over the years and things of that nature that really in finance, in that accounting space, because like you said, the amount of spreadsheets, and I know a few financial services companies where they still run significant portions of their business on and it'd be amazing to know who they are. I can't talk about it. But when you start to look at it on spreadsheets and macros and things of that nature where, oh by the way, if that person leaves, all that knowledge goes out to the... Where do you see Alteryx really helping out? I mean, again, you guys are marketplace partner of the year again, and you guys are really into this stuff. Where does Alteryx come in to help you with that?

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah. So it's people problems and process problems that we're trying to fix here, right? So let's talk about process problems first. We talked about all the data sources, humans spending their valuable time just going to gather data and not yet just providing the insights that that data can provide. So Alteryx can plug into all the data sources that exist in your organization and automate the data extraction so that you're not having to click into all these different systems and pull that data down manually. The next step is data transformation. So as Travis was saying, when we came from public accounting, we were spending so much time working in these large Excel workbooks, setting up Excel formulas, pivot tables, doing all this different number crunching, and it takes so much time. And we also have that knowledge only stored in our head right now. So what you can do with Alteryx is you can automate the data transformation and take that process that's in your head and transport that into a repeatable and reusable Alteryx process that you can get done in a fraction of the time. So we're talking about data extraction and then automated, repeatable, reusable data transformation. Now, when you speed those two things up, it allows you to review the insights of your data with much more time. So accountants, tax professionals, they're dealing with so many deadlines. How many tax deadlines are there? There's financial reporting deadlines, there's regulatory reporting deadlines. And most of the time what we see with our clients is that you're getting your work done in Excel right before the deadline hits. So with Alteryx, you automate your data extraction, you automate that data transformation, and it gives you much more time to interpret what insights lie in your data. And now from a people perspective, accountants don't want to work long hours, right? They want to get their work done, they want to provide real value to the business that they're working for. And using Alteryx is just a fun software to use. It is fun to automate processes in Alteryx. So it's a refreshing approach to your work. It is fun to build things in Alteryx. It is fun to build repeatable reusable processes and provide value to your organization in ways you haven't done before.

Travis Hartman

>> And I think the thing that I'd like to add there is when you think about an organization that's starting out with their Alteryx journey, "Hey, what are the challenges that we have?" Maybe it's, "I want to accelerate month-end close." Maybe it's, "I want to reduce risk by automating and making repeatable processes with good audit documentation, a good trail." And that's great. And I can think of a particular organization, if I may walk you through the journey of a recent project that we just finished up. You can think that's where we started. We said, "Okay, we've got payroll. We've got accounts payable. We've got receivable. We've got global accounting. We've got tax. We've got FP&A. What tool can support all those different organizations?" And so their big goal, and this is what I would tell anybody, that I urge anybody listening in, what is that big goal? Dream big, and then work through the steps to get there. And their big goal was, "We want to cut our month end close from eight days to four days." And it took us four or five, six months. It took about 50 people working in Alteryx. Brand new accounting, right? Finance. Never used a technology like this before. Got them trained up, got them up skilled. We worked through their closed task list and we started chunking through. Is it over? No, of course not, right? Now we're into that next phase of scaling. So we've got through process automation. "What do you want to do next?' They want to manage cash applications, right? You were talking about some economic uncertainty, some of the global changes. Cash is king in these days. So how can I better predict and collect what I'm going to collect on my receivables? Well, the same tool that these people just learned to automate their processes, well now they can take advantage of all these advanced analytics tools, some of these AI modules, some of these forecasting. Are these data scientists? No, right? These are the same accounting and finance professionals. All they needed was that boost. They needed the tool to line up with their ideas and their dreams and then they go through and execute. And I think that's the biggest thing that Alteryx does well, that's what Capitalize aims to support, is empowerment of users of Alteryx. It's our big passion. And there's nothing more fulfilling in this role, in this world that we live in than somebody coming to us and say, "Travis, look what we got accomplished. We're accountants. And we just built a casual forecasting module that had real top line impact. I can show you exactly where it is on our 10K." When we do that, oh, that makes everything worth it.

Rebecca Knight

>> Accountants as superheroes. I love it. So there are certainly a lot of viewers who are watching this saying, "Hey, I got people problems, I got process problems, I got technology problems," and your advice, Travis, to think of that big audacious goal and then dream big and we can do it, but how would you recommend companies that are really just getting started with their... Or maybe even companies that have tried a couple of incremental things, what's some guidance that you have for them in terms of how to get started?

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah, go ahead.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah, I think it's important to just start having honest conversations as an organization to self-reflect where you are. What technologies do you have? Are you using them? What are your short-term goals, long-term goals from a business perspective? Does your talent have the skills needed to achieve those goals? And really just starting to have those conversations is the first key step, right? Then once you start having those conversations and establish the baseline of where you are as an organization, you can then start making informed decisions. As a group, as a team, where do we want to go? How are we going to do this? So really first thing, start having conversations and then you're going to build on that like a snowball.

>> What about for those that are more mature and really looking and are ready to scale from that perspective, where do they fit into this whole model?

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah, great question. And we work with... I think we've done 1,500 Alteryx deployments in the last five or six years since we started getting involved with Alteryx. And it's the common question that I think that everybody asks is, "Hey, we've got great success," right? You heard Aaron say, "We've built a plan. We started to execute. How do I scale? How do I really add gasoline to this fire with this awesome technology that's solving these people process and technology challenges?" And it's really about building that community. I think that there's nothing more important, there's nothing more valuable for a organization that really wants to implement big changes than to make sure that everybody has a seat at the table. I know you guys do plenty of interviews. I'm sure you have plenty of customer relationships, and that you can see where it's going to fail. When one team is dictating and making every single decision, they're not taking, they're not affecting good change management. They're not building a culture of transformation and analytics. What do the best organizations do? They share their wins. If I could give one easy answer, I want to scale Alteryx, you need to set up those meetings, those town halls, those small group sessions, those company-wide sessions. When the CFO is saying, "Aaron Bell just did the craziest thing I have ever seen at our organization. This is what he did. Aaron gets to talk a little bit about it." That's what motivates people, right? We all want to impact change in our organization. That's what really sparks that fuel, is sharing out successes. And it's not just sharing out successes. This community should be focused on bringing up risks, bringing up challenges. Where are we getting stuck? There's a lot of overlap in finance. If one person is running into a problem, it's not isolated, right? And if you're not communicating effectively, you don't have a program to share wins and struggles, you're going to do a lot, you're going to hit a wall a lot of times that may have already been solved. And that's where the light bulb really comes on, is when you have the right technology, but you have that community behind it that's passionate, that's sharing wins, everybody's marching in the same direction. That's how you really scale an analytics program.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah. To me, it's just all about creating a fun collaborative culture, right? Accountants, finance professionals, they work in long hours in Excel. So once people start hearing about all the fun, awesome automations you can do that are fun to do work-wise and they're providing real business value, everyone wants to be involved. So those weekly meetings where everyone's sharing what they're talking about, finance professionals want this. They want to do this, they want to provide value to their organizations. And at Capitalize, that's what we do. We partner with organizations. We'll up to set them up for success, helping them create those collaborative analytic-driven finance organizations.

Rebecca Knight

>> So what are the trends that you are hearing about here at Inspire or the new innovations that are making you excited to go back to work and bring it? Because you really are painting this picture of what it takes to create this kind of cultural change. It's not only a technology change, it is a cultural change too.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Yeah. For me, it's about the up-skilling of office finance professionals. And I think it's so cool that Travis and I were accounting majors and now we're here at Inspire talking about Alteryx and all the awesome things you can do with it. And to me, Alteryx enables new skill sets for accounting and finance professionals. So now we're learning about all the new offerings that Alteryx has with Ai. Generative AI is all the buzz. And now as Office of Finance professionals, we get to go back, use Alteryx and incorporate these new features into our day-to-day. So I just think that's so awesome that we took an Excel course in college and now we're building very important financial regulatory reporting, tax reporting solutions with Alteryx using AI. And it's just crazy what Alteryx can enable from a business perspective, from a people perspective. And here we are talking about AI and Inspire, Travis.

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah. And my not-so-shameless plug that I'll shout at the rooftops is if you're an accountant, if you're in finance, the one tool that you would be foolish not to use, not to take a look at, there's a million use cases as auto insights, there's nothing more timely in the finance departments than time series data that we need to really understand the segments and categories of impact. Why are things going up? Why are things going down? It's a tale as old as time. "Hey, our revenue went up 12%." Okay, right? Cool. But if you drill a layer deeper, what you find is certain segments, certain lines of business, certain geolocations, maybe certain teams and departments are really driving 44% of that growth. And I can think of this exact use case that we were working on in the Inverse. The question that they asked was, "Hey, I want to understand which of my customers are actually generating revenue and profit." I could give the whole dissertation on auto insights, which I'll skip, but what we found out was what they thought was their best customer, which generated their number three in revenue, top line, once we started building out these Alteryx workflows to allocate and apportion different costs, we found out that that was worst customer. They were losing the most money on this, but they didn't have the right tool to actually dig a layer deeper. And then they didn't have a way to trigger a notification to find that. And I think that's what's so nice about the platform is, yeah, gen AI, that's the buzz. Yeah, AI's all in and hot, but it's really what are the practical applications. And I think that's what Alteryx has really solved the case on, is how do we use this and put this in people's hands in a way that they can actually take advantage of.

Rebecca Knight

>> Great advice. Aaron, Travis, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. A really great conversation.

Travis Hartman

>> Yeah, we really appreciate the time.

Aaron R. Brown

>> Thank you for having us.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Alteryx Inspire. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in technology enterprise, coverage, and analysis.