We’ve created a lot of useless busy work. Making errors, fixing errors, spending so much time building reports rather than adding value. This could cure that for experienced accountants and free them up to add more value. We will need new ways in the near future to train junior staff so they have a solid understanding without needing to ever do this grunt work.
When Excel introduced advanced finance functions (however many decades ago) - it was great because suddenly people didn’t have to manually build out big ugly present value formulas or amortization schedules…it was a time saver but didn’t immediately put all financial analysts out of work. Like any tool or library, it made certain aspects of their job easier…so is this a real game changer? Or is it just another stepwise / natural evolution of a widely used tool?
Maybe my skepticism is because your premise feels like kind of a cartoony view of what people who work in and around spreadsheets *actually* spend time doing…
But far be it from me to bury my head in the sand… I’ll pull some of my most complex workbooks out of the archives and see how well an AI agent can replicate them (and report back!)
You are joking, right? 45% accuracy in a work that requires 100% ??? I have tried to use Gemini, Copilot, chatGPT in a very simple task of counting words in a single column of a spreadsheet. All gave different results and all were wrong when I did the job manually. Trusting AI which is stochastic to do calculations is a big big mistake! Specially accounting, companies will soon realize it and abandon genAI
We’ve created a lot of useless busy work. Making errors, fixing errors, spending so much time building reports rather than adding value. This could cure that for experienced accountants and free them up to add more value. We will need new ways in the near future to train junior staff so they have a solid understanding without needing to ever do this grunt work.
When Excel introduced advanced finance functions (however many decades ago) - it was great because suddenly people didn’t have to manually build out big ugly present value formulas or amortization schedules…it was a time saver but didn’t immediately put all financial analysts out of work. Like any tool or library, it made certain aspects of their job easier…so is this a real game changer? Or is it just another stepwise / natural evolution of a widely used tool?
Maybe my skepticism is because your premise feels like kind of a cartoony view of what people who work in and around spreadsheets *actually* spend time doing…
But far be it from me to bury my head in the sand… I’ll pull some of my most complex workbooks out of the archives and see how well an AI agent can replicate them (and report back!)
You are joking, right? 45% accuracy in a work that requires 100% ??? I have tried to use Gemini, Copilot, chatGPT in a very simple task of counting words in a single column of a spreadsheet. All gave different results and all were wrong when I did the job manually. Trusting AI which is stochastic to do calculations is a big big mistake! Specially accounting, companies will soon realize it and abandon genAI
This is good news! I have no Excel skills.