Digital Financial Reporting

Pascal Bornet posted an insightful graphic that explains why most business professionals don't understand the changes that will be caused by artificial intelligence:

I taught an accounting information systems class at the University of Washington and there was not one student in the class that knew how to program, even Excel VBA.  It amazes me how many accounting students and business professionals that think they understand Excel but cannot even write simple VBA code.  Also, while Excel is an excellent tool, Microsoft Access is an even better tool for many tasks than Excel.  What really blows my mind is that you can have an entire team of accountants and not one person on that team can write VBA code!  If you know VBA and SQL you have an an excellent skill set.  Throw onto that XPath and XML and you can do even more.  Master XBRL to that and you can do even more.

Personally, I think my personal skill set is about three quarters of the way up that right side line toward the top.  I wish I could get my head around graphs better.  I don't think I can get my head around stuff good enough to be able to program complex stuff myself.  But, I understand enough to be able to talk to software engineers effectively.

I would really encourage business professionals to read and understand the information in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering in a Nutshell.  AI is real. Get ready.  Heck, even better...help create the future of accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis.  Why? As is said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it."