Getting Excel Ready for Enterprise AI

Watch the Webinar On-Demand

Excel infrastructure quietly powers critical processes across financial services, from regulatory reporting to capital calculations to financial controls. But for most organisations, it's also one of the least visible and least governed parts of the enterprise.

In this webinar, Coherent and KPMG explore what changes when you treat Excel as infrastructure worth understanding and controlling, and why that's the real starting point for AI.

 

About the Webinar

The starting point isn't AI.
It's visibility.

Most banks and capital markets institutions have thousands (sometimes millions) of Excel workbooks embedded across their finance processes. These workbooks support critical work, but they've been built up over decades, often by people who've since left the organisation. The result is a huge surface area that's manual, fragile, and hard for anyone to fully see, let alone improve.

In this session with KPMG, we walk through what we're seeing across the organisations we work with: how they're getting a handle on their Excel estate, why governance needs to come before automation, and what becomes possible when that foundation is in place.

What We'll Cover

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The Discovery Problem

Most organisations don't have a clear picture of what's sitting across their Excel estate. The path from millions of workbooks to the thousands that actually matter used to take months. AI is making it possible in hours.

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Governance Before Automation

If you're speeding up processes you don't fully understand or control, you're more likely to amplify risk than reduce it. Visibility and governance are prerequisites, not afterthoughts, especially with CPS 230 and DORA driving urgency.

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Excel as Asset, Not Liability

Five years ago, most organisations wanted to eradicate Excel. That's changing. With the right controls and AI capabilities, Excel infrastructure is starting to look less like a necessary evil and more like a competitive asset.

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Where Agentic AI Fits In

Pre-filling compliance assessments using regulatory context. Replacing manual copy-paste across workbooks. These use cases are already working today. The question is how to do them at enterprise scale with a human still in the loop.

Meet the Speakers

Chris Ayres

Chris Ayres

Partner, Finance Advisory,
KPMG Australia

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Nick Robison

Nick Robison

Managing Director,
Australia & New Zealand

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Alex Van Zuylen

Alex Van Zuylen

Director,
Customer Success

Frequently Asked Questions

What is this webinar about?

This webinar explores why Excel infrastructure is one of the most practical, and most overlooked, starting points for AI in financial services. Coherent and KPMG discuss how organisations can move from fragmented, ungoverned spreadsheet estates to infrastructure that's visible, controlled, and ready for AI at scale.

Why do AI initiatives stall in financial services?

AI performs best in environments that are visible, consistent, and well-governed. In many financial institutions, Excel infrastructure doesn't meet any of those criteria. Workbooks have been built up over decades, often by people no longer with the organisation, with limited documentation or oversight. Without visibility into what exists and where the risks are, AI investments tend to produce isolated experiments rather than scalable results.

What does Excel governance have to do with AI readiness?

Governance is the bridge between knowing what you have and being able to act on it. If you automate or apply AI to processes you don't fully understand or control, you risk amplifying errors at speed rather than improving productivity. Establishing an inventory, classifying workbooks by risk and criticality, and putting controls in place is what makes it safe to introduce AI, and what makes that AI useful at enterprise scale.

What is an Excel estate?

An "Excel estate" refers to the full collection of Excel workbooks and spreadsheets that exist across an organisation or function. In financial services, this can range from thousands to millions of files, many built over decades to support processes like regulatory reporting, reconciliations, and financial controls. Most organisations don't have a complete picture of what's in their Excel estate, which makes it difficult to manage risk, remove duplication, or identify where AI and automation could add value.

Who should watch this webinar?

Finance and risk leaders at banks, insurers, asset managers, and capital markets institutions who are evaluating where to apply AI across their operations. It's especially relevant if your organisation has a large Excel estate supporting critical processes like regulatory reporting, capital calculations, or financial controls.