AI in practice week of 8/17…..

Some more productive ideas for using AI this past week. It’s a little short because I took some PTO this week.

• Prepare an email to send to staff of the upcoming software transition. This was to be the first email to introduce that more information will follow when we go live. I got a quick version and a more detailed version. Claude asked which I wanted and I said both. It was prepared in an email format with a subject line. Pretty much ready to go with a few adjustments.
• I started to explore ways to use Claude to analyze the variances of the monthly statements. After I dumped the data into an Excel file, I prompted AI to prepare a MTD and YTD variance analysis. That was it. It asked me for the output (I said Excel) and how deep (I said full line-item detail). Both questions gave options to choose, btw. After about 15 min, the output was very complete. In my prompt, I didn’t note where any information was by column or row, but that wasn’t an issue. The app gave me a top line summary explaining the Excel output. The next section gave me the “Headlines” which was revenue and expense changes over budget for both the month and year to date. The last section called out specific items to for me to review further for accuracy. The Excel file was a 5 tab output that had a summary, MTD Detail, YTD Detail, FY Budget Pacing (which is YTD actuals as a % of FY Budget), and the Top Variances (which in my case was by product). The 15 minutes was by far faster than I could have prepared this myself. As I’ve noted before, Claude is very good at presenting in a usable format, without any prompting. This was limited by the data I provided as well as the prompt I entered so I think it’s a good start and a useful tool going forward.
• I used the Google AI function to learn to replace my toilet filler valve. Not related to finance except saved me a bunch of money on plumbing costs!

As always’, review the output for accuracy and be sure it meets your requirements before passing it on to your audience. It is a great tool, but WE have to control the output to delivery our goals.