Sofie at Work: How to Turn Unstructured Problems into Decisions, Models, and Momentum

Sofie at Work is our series where real users share ways in which they are implementing Sofie at their site. This article features Brent, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at GBA, where board communications, portfolio capacity planning, and operational tooling all converge on one desk. We discuss how Sofie has become the trusted partner behind his highest-stakes work, turning hours of manual effort and uncertain outcomes into something faster, more consistent, and entirely his own.

For any FP&A director managing a portfolio, the work is never just the numbers. Translating complex financial data into board-level narratives, building planning tools from vague briefs, and debugging complex spreadsheets and data models are all part of the role. Each has traditionally required specialized expertise, significant time investment, or both. Getting to the right answer, framed the right way, at the speed the work actually demands, has never been straightforward.

Sofie changes that equation. Bring your hardest problems — strategic, technical, or operational — into a secure, trusted environment and leave with something you can act on. Not a starting point that needs refinement, but a working output that reflects the quality and judgment of someone who has done this before. For Brent, the result is a meaningful shift in both what he produces and how quickly he can produce it, without the hours of research, trial and error, or manual iteration that used to stand between him and the answer.

Three Use Cases, One Trusted Environment

At GBA, Brent has built the kind of relationship with Sofie that compounds over time. The work he is doing today is measurably better, delivered faster, and no longer dependent on resources or bandwidth he may not have. Across his highest-stakes responsibilities, Sofie has become the place where hard problems get worked through and outputs get pressure-tested. For a portfolio-level FP&A function, that is not just an efficiency gain. It is a structural upgrade to how the work gets done.

“I use Sofie to pressure-test messaging and prepare for strategic board and committee discussions. It gives me a place to work through the message before it reaches the room.”

The proven possibilities of Sofie from use cases at GBA:

• In building board decks, messaging needs to resonate. Sofie can act as a trusted, secure sounding board for presenting sensitive financial data. Brent runs every monthly board deck through Sofie after the initial build, prompting it to respond as a board member — asking what's clear, what feels unsupported, and what question the framing might invite — and Sofie catches connotation issues and validates the strategic positioning of each slide before it reaches the room, not just whether the language is right, but whether leadership will read it the way it is intended, turning every slide into deliberate, reviewed communication. 

• Instead of having to manually fill the gaps if the board flips the script and a question surfaces that the deck did not anticipate, Brent turns to Sofie to work through framing a response, positioning a follow-up, or reframing a narrative before the next meeting. 

• Sofie enabled Brent to transform a lengthy brief into a Power Query-based capacity planning model that is now used monthly. With Sofie, he was able to work through the logic, edge cases, and design decisions in chat before a single formula was written.

"I used Sofie to think through the logic and design decisions, then used it to help build a full capacity planning model from the ground up. Now the team uses it each month."

• For complex spreadsheets and data, Sofie can field Excel errors, data mismatches, and Power Query issues in plain-English guidance and actionable fixes. Rather than finding a tutorial, searching for an answer, or waiting for an internal resource, Sofie helps resolve these issues and support his work momentum and day-to-day operations.

Telling Sofie What You Want, Not How to Build It

The pattern across all of Brent's use cases is the same: describe the outcome you need, not the process to get there. For board deck pressure-testing, that means prompting Sofie to role-play as a board member reviewing a specific slide and asking how it reads. For planning model builds, it means describing the business question (who is available, who is booked) and letting Sofie work through the architecture. For troubleshooting, it means pasting the error and asking for the fix. In each case, Sofie responds with a working answer you can act on immediately: revised language, a working model, or a step-by-step solution. You review, adjust, and execute without needing to interpret technical output or manage an external dependency.

By replacing the dependency-heavy workflows that slowed him down, Sofie helps Brent turn direction into a usable next step, while he remains accountable for the judgment, review, and final decision. That is the shift from financial analyst to strategic operator: less time trapped in mechanics, more time improving the quality and pace of the work.

Want to move from a rough brief, a broken formula, or a board deck that is not landing to a finished, production-ready deliverable without the overhead? Talk to our team about what Sofie can build for you.