2 minute read

From Accountants to Agents From Accountants to Agents

Navigate the AI landscape with my latest newsletter. Get practical insights for executive decisions that deliver business value. To read my future editions subscribe here and ‘follow’ me on LinkedIn

Most companies serious about AI are focused on equipping teams and running today’s business more effectively. But what about new business offerings? Deloitte’s Zora accounting agents built with NVIDIA are a glimpse into the future. Zora transforms Deloitte’s accounting expertise into an AI platform provider. NVIDIA is simultaneously expanding beyond hardware with an open-source AI ecosystem. Though not revolutionary businesses like Uber and Airbnb from the mobile and internet era, Deloitte and NVIDIA are venturing beyond their cores.

The AI Expertise Ecosystem

Harvard Business Review notes we’re entering an era where AI rapidly expands expertise while the costs of accessing expertise for others plummet. These dual forces create both opportunities and threats. Success hinges on capturing efficiencies, elevating team capabilities, and refocusing expertise investments. link

A new Procter & Gamble study reinforced BCG findings (both with Harvard Business School) of significant benefits from LLMs. With minimal training using ChatGPT-4o, teams achieved significant gains in quality, speed, and satisfaction. link

Procter & Gamble Productivity Procter & Gamble / HBS AI Impact

Accenture research confirms that AI-leading companies are focusing their strategic AI investments on extending competitive advantages. Life-sciences companies prioritize accelerating drug approvals, while financial firms target fraud prevention. Sensibly, most organizations are enhancing existing business models before creating new ones. True differentiation will emerge from more innovative initiatives. link

The technology talent shortage remains critical. Bain reports AI talent demand outstrips supply 2:1, with wages doubling since 2019. I offer five keys to building and retaining AI teams based on my experience. link

Bain - Talent Gap Mind the talent gap | Bain

Agent Alliances

Expanding on my comments above, Deloitte’s Zora is an interesting AI functional customer offering that confers domain confidence (90% of Fortune 500 companies work with Deloitte), accommodates privacy and security through on-premises and virtual private cloud implementations, and provides transparency and flexibility through open-source. Conveying that accounting knowledge accurately will be critical though. link

Anthropic’s agent tie-up with Databricks is different and helps companies implement the big strategic bets mentioned above. The partnership directly addresses two AI implementation challenges: leveraging company data and highly accurate agents. Databricks hosts data for 10,000 customers and has invested in AI. Anthropic is focused on helping companies build revenue-generating solutions. This partnership is important for both companies as they take on Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. link

Intelligence and Imagery

Feeling dizzy from all the AI technology developments? Simon Willison takes a step back and offers up some key observations, including 18 labs now deliver GPT-4-level models, application-specific evaluations are crucial for performance monitoring, data extraction capabilities are improving, and LLMs excel at coding. link

Two months ago I didn’t produce a banner image for my newsletter out of frustration working with diffusion tools like DALL-E. Getting what I wanted was difficult and random. Google and OpenAI, in particular, just launched autoregressive image generators that provide unprecedented control with creativity including correctly rendering text. It’s easy to imagine how this will be deployed, for example in personalized marketing, where control, creativity, and speed are needed. link

I can spell! ChatGPT-4o I can spell!

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