What If You Could Build an Anaplan App Just by Asking?
- Elena
- 7 juil. 2025
- 5 min de lecture
How Anaplan is Redefining the Future of Enterprise Planning
In the era of intelligent platforms, AI is no longer just a buzzword—it’s quickly becoming the foundational layer across enterprise performance management (EPM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. These platforms are evolving from static planning tools into dynamic, predictive engines that adapt, automate, and optimize business processes in real-time. For companies navigating complex operations, this evolution promises more agility, better data quality, and smarter decision-making.
At Anaplan Connect London—Anaplan’s flagship event for customers, partners, and experts—this transformation was front and center. The event is where Anaplan shares its latest product innovations, strategic vision, and real-world customer success stories, making it a must-attend for anyone invested in the platform's future. This year, Anaplan unveiled a bold roadmap powered by over $500 million in new product investments, aimed at tackling more complex use cases by enhancing core capabilities like Polaris, Workflow, Geo-mapping, and Connected Applications. But beyond the buzz, one core message resonated: Anaplan is rapidly evolving into a platform where AI, automation, and user-centric design converge—and it’s happening faster than you think.
Four Strategic Pillars: The Core of Anaplan's Product Roadmap
Anaplan’s innovation strategy is built around four key areas like ADO, Polaris, Connected Applications and AI.
ADO – The Data Foundation of the Future
Anaplan Data Orchestration (ADO) is set to become the de facto data architecture for all new applications. More than just a new data hub, ADO will support data ingestion, transformation, and governance—and do so with a push model that simplifies populating connected models. This makes it easier to scale and manage data across business units.
Our take: ADO is a game changer. It brings scalable data governance, high performance, and native integration capabilities (like SFTP, Redshift, S3, and Azure SQL)—all built for the modern data stack. For companies still using legacy Anahubs, investing in ADO migration is a no-brainer. It enables a single source of truth across use cases, supports better BI, and introduces environments like production and development spaces for controlled access and collaboration.
Polaris – The Natural Dimensionality Engine
Polaris, now generally available since 2023, is Anaplan’s next-gen calculation engine—built to scale. Unlike the original engine, it removes dimensional constraints and offers 10x better granularity with 10x less space usage, all while improving performance.
Big names like Nvidia, Adobe, Stripe, and Sony were early adopters, and the platform now has 18 active clients using Polaris-based models.
Upcoming enhancements include:
Finance-ready functions like IRR and NPV
Statistical calculations (standard deviation, variance)
Faster aggregation and filtering
Real-time model monitoring
Our take: Polaris is the future standard. It’s more than just a performance upgrade—it’s an enabler for complex, granular analysis across functions. Companies adopting Polaris early will not only scale faster but also cut storage costs and unlock advanced use cases. This should be the default engine for any net-new builds going forward.
AI Across the Platform – Precision, Not Hype
Anaplan is integrating AI at every level of the platform, with a focus on delivering value in targeted use cases:
Data quality: AI for anomaly detection
Model building: Assistants for optimization, forecasting, and architecture
Open ML architecture: Native or external ML for time-series forecasting and optimization
Reporting: GenAI CoPlanner to answer business questions directly from the model
What’s unique? Anaplan is not overpromising. Instead of generic AI hype, they focus on business outcomes—fewer hallucinations, more relevance. CoPlanner will soon support not just Demand Planning and Integrated Financial Planning, but Territory & Quota (Q3 2025) and Operational Workforce Planning. Plus, specialized agents are coming to automate workflows via natural language. That’s big.
Our take: CoPlanner might become the AI assistant every model builder dreams of—from optimizing formulas to generating model summaries, or even building full applications from natural language inputs. If the execution matches the vision, this will redefine productivity for solution architects.
Connected Applications – Speed Meets Flexibility
Anaplan is rolling out a suite of connected apps, all configurable and upgradable out of the box. These apps are designed to be turned on when needed, with predefined dimensionality, hierarchies, and company-specific terminology—accelerating time to value.
Our take: Out-of-the-box apps sound great for faster time to production. However, every company has unique needs, and “one-size-fits-all” can be a double-edged sword. Customization, governance, and scalability will ultimately determine adoption. Still, this framework could make implementation cycles weeks instead of months, especially when paired with AI capabilities like CoPlanner.
User Experience and Modeling
One of the most exciting updates for Rivex Plan’s UX designers—as well as for Anaplan business end users—is the evolution of Anaplan’s UX and modeling flexibility, especially when powered by Polaris. These enhancements will enable the creation of more seamless, interactive, and flexible applications and dashboards, improving both the user experience and decision-making flow across the platform.
Historically, reporting in Anaplan was limited to three nested dimensions, which constrained the complexity of the analyses you could display on a single page. With upcoming enhancements—enabled by Polaris’s natural dimensionality—this limitation is being removed. Users will now be able to build reports with more than three nested dimensions, unlocking far richer, multi-layered insights within a single view.
Additionally, the page selector functionality is becoming significantly more dynamic. Rather than being static filters, selectors will now allow for multi-select context aggregation, meaning you can select multiple items (e.g., several regions, products, or cost centers), and Anaplan will intelligently summarize and calculate data based on those selections in real time.
This means reporting becomes not only more flexible but also more intuitive—giving business users the ability to explore data from multiple angles without needing a model builder to create separate views or dashboards.
At a glance, the key UX improvements revolve around:
Nested dimensions
Dynamic aggregation with multi-select context
Interactive modeling with performance feedback
These enhancements—powered by Polaris’s performance and natural dimensionality—will provide modelers with real-time insights into model behavior, enabling proactive performance tuning rather than reactive fixes. By transforming how users interact with models, they will make data exploration, analysis, and decision-making more seamless, responsive, and efficient than ever before.
Final Thoughts
Anaplan’s roadmap is bold but grounded. With strong investments, real customer adoption, and a focus on practical AI, it’s clear the platform is moving toward automation-first planning that’s scalable, flexible, and intelligent.
But transformation doesn’t happen on its own.
At Rivex Plan, we specialize exclusively in Anaplan consulting and application development. Our mission is to help organizations accelerate their adoption of AI, Polaris, ADO, and Connected Applications—not just to keep up, but to lead.
We’re ready to guide you through this next phase of connected planning:
Build smarter and faster with AI-powered modeling tools like CoPlanner;
Migrate confidently to Polaris and ADO for better performance and governance;
Launch solutions that enable faster, data-informed decisions across business units.
If you're ready to unlock the full potential of Anaplan’s platform, Rivex Plan is here to help you turn strategy into scalable, high-performance solutions.
Let’s shape the future of planning—together.
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