As I’ve noted in previous posts, I’ve been educating myself on AI through various online resources. The one I’m currently using had an interesting section on documentation of using AI for work as well as giving ideas for policies for consistency throughout the organization.
This is important for several reasons. The first is for financial audits. If you are using AI to assist you with preparing reports, reconciliations, and so forth, your outside audit firm might want to take a deeper dive into the document. They are supposed to review and test the information and part of this is to dive into source documents. If it is not calculated by staff, then it is your responsibility to know the meaning of the numbers and how it was derived, not some random chatbot. Additionally, if you’re like me and you want to revisit data prepared months earlier, you might not remember so it’s a good idea to have the information available for future reference.
A second reason you need to document work using AI is for consistency of information. Any of you who have used AI and then go back and ask again, either using a different engine or a slightly different prompt, know that you’ll get a different result. So if you use AI, you’ll want to be able to recreate the reply exactly, so the more information you have to recreate it, the better.
A third reason is to avoid good old fashioned plagiarism. AI takes information that’s available and has the ability to take it and prepare it in the format of your prompt. Often times, it will also include the citation of how it got the information. It is critical to document that in your work. You should NOT take AI generated data and claim it as your own.
There are many reasons that documenting your work using AI is a good idea, these are just three examples. A good practice for any organization is to set a policy that dictates what is required from it’s staff when using AI. It will save you alot of hassles later on.
Below is a table that I downloaded for my own reference and hopefully it’ll be helpful for you. This was downloaded from an online learning class through Corporate Finance Institute (CFI) called AI for Finance Workflows & Governance.
Remember to always’ review the output from AI for accuracy.
