On 18th September, NextWave and Alteryx welcomed senior leaders from across financial services to The Ivy City Garden for a breakfast forum exploring how GenAI and agentic capabilities in Alteryx are reshaping the future of data and finance.
The session brought together a mix of perspectives, from risk, technology, and operations leaders actively experimenting with AI, to discuss what it takes to move beyond proof-of-concepts and deliver real business impact.
Thank you to everyone who attended. The discussion was insightful and wide-ranging, with a number of clear takeaways emerging:
- AI can help with data preparation and management, reducing reliance on spreadsheets.
- Governance is essential for ethical and responsible AI use.
- Data quality remains a barrier — we need to trust our data for AI to be effective.
- AI adoption requires a structured maturity model to scale beyond experiments.
- Automation has huge potential to simplify complex workflows and reduce operational risk.
- Data lineage is critical for transparency and explainability in AI decisions.
- Collaboration between IT and business is vital to unlock value.
- The future of AI lies in seamlessly integrating into existing workflows to enhance decision-making and efficiency.
Read the article below for a more in-depth look at the key themes and insights which emerged.
Key themes and insights
1. Moving Beyond Spreadsheets
Many firms remain heavily reliant on spreadsheets for critical processes. As one CFO put it, “within five minutes of our AI conversation, we realised all of our data was still in spreadsheets.” The group agreed that breaking this dependency is a prerequisite to scaling AI responsibly.
Alteryx showcased how its platform can embed structured workflows and deterministic rules, reducing risk while enabling AI-driven automation that is auditable, governed, and secure.
2. Balancing AI innovation with governance
A recurring theme was the tension between experimentation and control. While 95% of AI POCs deliver little to no business value, they remain an essential part of the adoption curve
The challenge is ensuring governance, compliance, and transparency from day one.
Discussions highlighted:
- The EU AI Act’s prescriptive approach versus the UK’s principle-based model.
- The need for firms to establish AI control towers that include not only IT and data specialists but also business stakeholders to ensure explainability and alignment with regulatory duties.
- The risks of hallucination, bias, and drift in GenAI systems, and the importance of embedding human-in-the-loop oversight.
3.The AI at a Clearing House concept
NextWave and Alteryx introduced the idea of an AI Data Clearing House—a framework that blends large language models with domain-specific business rules, vector databases, and agent coordination. This approach ensures that sensitive financial data stays within organisational boundaries while enabling GenAI to act effectively and safely
4. Demonstrating the future: Automating reconciliation
The highlight of the session was a live demonstration of how Alteryx can coordinate AI agents to tackle one of finance’s most pervasive pain points: reconciliations.
The demo showed how:
- Alteryx workflows handle structured comparisons between front-office and back-office records.
- Vector databases provide secure, context-rich data to LLMs without exposing information externally.
- AI agents, coordinated through Alteryx, triage and resolve exceptions in real time.
The potential benefits are significant: millions in operational savings, reduced risk of errors and fraud, and faster, more reliable decision-making
5. The adoption journey: 12–18 Months to real impact
Participants reflected that most organisations are in the experimentation phase, running multiple POCs to understand guardrails and opportunities. The consensus: firms that fail to engage in this cycle risk falling behind, as the adoption learning curve typically spans 12–18 months before delivering material value.
Observations and lessons learnt
LLMs and agents excel at orchestration, reasoning, and language. Alteryx workflows bring the deterministic logic, governance, and auditability they lack. Together, they offer a pragmatic path to scale AI responsibly.
- Trusted outcomes: Business rules in workflows are transparent, testable, and reusable.
- Scale with control: Agents ramp quickly; Alteryx enforces guardrails and human oversight.
- Productivity boost: Agents guide users, while workflows capture and share business knowledge.
- Smarter economics: A hybrid approach avoids the hidden costs of pure AI (retries, failures, token burn).
Final thoughts
The forum reinforced that while the hype around GenAI is real, the path to value lies in governed, domain-specific applications that blend automation with human oversight.
With Alteryx’s new GenAI and agentic capabilities, financial institutions can finally see the art of the possible:
- Moving beyond spreadsheets
- Embedding governance into every workflow
- Automating high-value use cases like reconciliation
- And enabling finance, risk, and operations teams to deliver insight at speed and scale.
NextWave and Alteryx are committed to helping clients navigate this journey—from experimentation to enterprise-wide adoption.
To learn more about our upcoming forums, training, and demonstrations, get in touch with NextWave.
