How I'm Using Artificial Intelligence

My use will evolve but for now it's increasing my capacity

Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash

In my finance career, I’ve always explored ways to do my job more efficiently and increase my capacity. Over the past thirty years, I’ve been amazed at the progression of technology. I started at an old industrial company with a glass-enclosed mainframe room where the IT guy printed my general ledger for me each month on a dot-matrix printer so that I could close the books.

Nowadays, such a scene is laughable. I can do more on my phone than those computers could do back in the day. I can do my job anywhere in the world as long as I have an internet connection. My company is entirely remote, so my coworkers and I do our jobs over Slack and Zoom, and we still do it far more efficiently than I did in that first role out of college.

I could drone on and on about the changes of the last thirty years, but that’s not the point of this post. If you’re just starting your finance career, you should be prepared for many changes before you retire. I advise you to keep up with the progression of technology and look for ways to use it in your job so that you can do more because you’ll always be expected to do more.

With that in mind, this week’s post focuses on how I’m using Artificial Intelligence (AI) now. If you’re like me, you can’t read two headlines in the news without encountering the hype cycle that is AI. It’s either going to put us all out of work or destroy humanity, depending on which melodramatic story you believe.

I’m less inclined to believe the apocalyptic storylines because every step up in technology brings out the worrywarts and naysayers. Just know that it’s never as bad or as great as others would have you believe. I lived through a similar hype in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, and we all came out the other side in great shape.

The current AI hoopla is similar to the dot-com boom. Today's promises will likely fall flat, but they may pan out a few years later once the hype has dissipated. I believe the incredible progress in machine learning is the next exponential change in technology. Still, as for how it affects your finance career, I think it will take far longer than is currently projected.

In the meantime, I’m focused on two areas where AI can help me do my job and potentially give me a leg up in my finance career. The first is automating manual tasks, and the second is amplifying my capacity. Neither of these areas is particularly career-changing at the moment, but I think that as the technology matures and the hype cycle fades, the true value of AI will become more apparent, much like the true value of the internet became evident after the dot-com bust.