Analyst To AI

We are experiencing an interesting time in technology. We know we have to learn and embrace AI in our work but as finance professionals we want, no we require, accuracy. We want efficiency, but not at the cost of integrity.

At least on the industry side, but certainly in all areas of accounting, we have always considered the trade off between speed and accuracy.

I want to share a lighthearted experience I had this past weekend that was not work related or urgent, however is a good example of this.

I’m always looking for different ways to take advantage of AI so I decided to try using it to create horse sheets for my Kentucky Derby watch party. I went to ChatGPT and prompted it to prepare the latest update of the horses and odds on PDF printable format with a section at the bottom for writing win, place and show. Not a difficult thing but certainly could save me time. ChatGPT created a usable sheet for sure and after a few editing prompts it created a document that would fit my needs.

However, always mindful of accuracy, I cross checked it against the official listing and it did not include all the correct horses and it wasn’t in the order which I asked it to sort. I then decided I would try the exact same thing in Copilot and when I checked it for accuracy, I got a useful and accurate sheet that had what I needed which I was able to print out.

Now I’m not writing this to say one chatbot is better than another. I’m also aware that there are other systems that might be even better than both of these. What I am saying though is that AI is amazingly powerful and has incredible potential, however we are still in the early stages. We know we have to adopt it into our role as finance professionals but it isn’t able to do work our accurately. We need to be at the forefront of understanding and transition its potential to our benefit. That way we will control its use and not be a victim.

So that means to learn and adapt as much as possible so we are ready for the future.