As new AI chat tools continue to generate waves of hype, worry, and wonder, how’s this for a prompt to try out on ChatGPT: How will finance professionals really be using AI tools like ChatGPT in the next few years?

Sorting out the potential from the pitfalls is going to take time, especially as the tech improves and evolves. We recently spoke with Glenn Hopper, director at Eventus Advisory Group and author of Deep Finance: Corporate Finance in the Information Age, about how finance departments might use AI tech, and what finance professionals will need to consider to prepare themselves for the possible risks and ROIs of AI in the workplace.

What is the current state of AI and chat-enabled AI in finance as you see it?

Today, for 99% of the people who would be using it, it’s a novelty. It has some use that we’ve seen, and people every day are coming up with new uses…But as far as putting production company data into ChatGPT…the proprietary information that you put into GPT is actually, in this public release right now, used to further train the model.

So by your prompts you can be accidentally leaking proprietary company information. I would strongly advise against anyone putting actual company information that they don’t want shared in there. It’s just the nature of what it is right now, a further refinement in training for the machine learning algorithm that runs it.

Continue reading.—DA

Almera Mahmood is the CFO of Prolific, a holding company based in Indianapolis. She’s held a variety of finance and accounting positions in her career and she’s been with Prolific since 2019.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How is your career different from what you expected when you started off?

I always thought of the CFO role as a hybrid finance and accounting role. And it still is. However, when I was entering the finance world out of college, I thought it was going to be heavier accounting. As I have grown in my field, I have actually seen that the accounting function—in terms of the review, the audit, the tax—are often deferred and outsourced to a Big Four [firm]. What’s really, truly needed is the financial expertise, the advisory capability in house, and then, to take the organization forward. It really is a strategic CFO role.

What do you see as your most important skill set for the next five to 15 years as we move into a digitally transformed world?

I would say, while building skills in Excel, getting comfortable with dashboards, getting comfortable with getting away from paper, and getting comfortable with apps, and being able to read charts and graphs and making sense of data that way. That is where things are headed. People want to take a look at one page and gather all their data and infographics. I see annual reports transitioning into infographics from binders of information. There’s so much that's happening today. And it’s going to look so different in 10–15 years. That’s where the future is headed; we’ve got to be able to translate and communicate more and more, with less and less.

Continue reading.—DA

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 7,239. That’s the number of tax-enforcement personnel that the IRS says it wants to hire in its newly released spending plan. (Politico)

Quote: “Rather than an abrupt and jarring end to the jobs party of the past couple of years, the nation’s job market is instead gradually turning the lights back up and music down in a mostly smooth transition from weekend to weekday that looks, for now, to be largely sustainable and healthy.”—Nick Bunker, head of economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab, talking about the Labor Department’s March job report (Reuters)

Read: Uber’s CEO learned valuable lessons when he started driving for the company himself. (the Wall Street Journal)

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