Digital Financial Reporting

This blog post pulls together a set of information which helps someone understand the moving pieces of digital financial reporting:

• Expert systems: Expert systems are computer programs that are built to mimic human behavior and knowledge.  A computer application that performs a task that would otherwise be performed by a human expert.
• Digital Financial Report Creation Vision: A digital financial report creation tool is an expert systetm.  This provides an example of the types of benefits offered by such an application.
• Framework and Theory: A framework and theory is necessary.
• Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence is used to make an expert system work.  The term "artificial intelligence" tends to be overloaded and means different things to different people.  This is a good definition of artificial intelligence as I mean the term: 
  • Artificial intelligence is an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence; the power of a machine to copy intelligent human But  behavior.
• Two approaches to constructing artificial intelligence: There are two approaches to building artificial intelligence:
  • #1-Know how to 'write down the recipe' meaning that those with the knowledge of some business domain articulate the information in machine-readable terms. In order to effectively express information in machine-readable terms, knowledge engineering skills are necessary.  This document, Knowlege Engineering Basics for Accounting Professionals, summarizes important information related to knowledge engineering.
  • #2-Let the machine grow the knowledge itself.  Another term for this is deep learning.
• Artificial intelligence to be 'the norm' in law firms in 2020: This article predicts that law firms will be using artificial intelligence by 2020 (only 5 years away).  It does not provide a lot of specific details.
• Artificial intelligence meets the C-suite: (McKinsey) "Many of the jobs that had once seemed the sole province of humans—including those of pathologists, petroleum geologists, and law clerks—are now being performed by computers."
• Digital Financial Report Information Quality Improving: I have been tracking the quality of XBRL-based digital financial reports for three years, information quality has improved significantly.  XBRL-US has created the Data Quality Committee to improve quality.
• Digital Financial Reporting Part of Larger Trend - Digital Business Reporting:  A digital financial report is a type of digital business report.  Another name for a digital business report is 'semantic spreadsheet'.

It would be great to synthesize all of this information into one clear, concise document.