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Comment by AvAn12 | Hacker News Reader

> “Does it have to be perfect?”

Actually, yes. This kind of management reporting is either (1) going to end up in the books and records of the company - big trouble if things have to be restated in the future or (2) support important decisions by leadership — who will be very much less than happy if analysis turns out to have been wrong.

A lot of what ties up the time of business analysts is ticking and tying everything to ensure that mistakes are not made and that analytics and interpretations are consistent from one period to the next. The math and queries are simple - the details and correctness are hard.

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Is this not belligerently ignoring the fact that this work is already done imperfectly? I can’t tell you how many serious errors I’ve caught in just a short time of automating the generation of complex spreadsheets from financial data. All of them had already been checked by multiple analysts, and all of them contained serious errors (in different places!)

There’s actually different classes of errors though. There’s errors in the process itself versus errors that happen when performing the process.

For example, if I ask you to tabulate orders via a query but you forgot to include an entire table, this is a major error of process but the query itself actually is consistently error-free.

Reducing error and mistakes is very much modeling where error can happen. I never trust an LLM to interpret data from a spreadsheet because I cannot verify every individual result, but I am willing to ask an LLM to write a macro that tabulates the data because I can verify the algorithm and the macro result will always be consistent.

Using Claude to interpret the data directly for me is scary because those kinds of errors are neither verifiable nor consistent. At least with the “missing table” example, that error may make the analysis completely bunk but once it is corrected, it is always correct.

Very much agreed

No belligerence intended! Yes, processes are faulty today even with maker-checker and other QA procedures. To me it seems the main value of LLMs in a spreadsheet-heavy process is acceleration - which is great! What is harder is quality assurance - like the example someone gave regarding deciding when and how to include or exclude certain tables, date ranges, calc, etc. Properly recording expert judgment and then consistently applying that judgement over time is key. I’m not sure that is the kind of thing LLMs are great at, even ignoring their stochastic nature. Let’s figure out how to get best use out of the new kit - and like everything else, focus on achieving continuously improving outcomes.

Speak for yourself and your own use cases. There are a huge diversity of workflows with which to apply automation in any medium to large business. They all have differing needs. Many excel workflows I'm personally familiar with already incoporate a "human review" step. Telling a business leader that they can now jump straight to that step, even if it requires 2x human review, with AI doing all of the most tediuous and low-stakes prework, is a clear win.

>Speak for yourself and your own use cases

Take your own advice.

I'm taking a much weaker position than the respondent: LLMs are useful for many classes of problem that do not require zero shot perfect accuracy. They are useful in contexts where the cost of building scaffolding around them to get their accuracy to an acceptable level is less than the cost of hiring humans to do the same work to the same degree of accuracy.

This is basic business and engineering 101.

>LLMs are useful for many classes of problem that do not require zero shot perfect accuracy. They are useful in contexts where the cost of building scaffolding around them to get their accuracy to an acceptable level is less than the cost of hiring humans to do the same work to the same degree of accuracy.

Well said. Concise and essentially inarguable, at least to the extent it means LLMs are here to stay in the business world whether anyone likes it or not (barring the unforeseen, e.g. regulation or another pressure).

There is another aspect to this kind of activity.

Sometimes there can be an advantage in leading or lagging some aspects of internal accounting data for a time period. Basically sitting on credits or debits to some accounts for a period of weeks. The tacit knowledge to know when to sit on a transaction and when to action it is generally not written down in formal terms.

I'm not sure how these shenanigans will translate into an ai driven system.

That’s the kind of thing that can get a company into a lot of trouble with its auditors and shareholders. Not that I am offering accounting advice of course. And yeah, one can not “blame” and ai system or try to ai-wash any dodgy practices.

> Sometimes there can be an advantage in leading or lagging some aspects of internal accounting data for a time period.

This worked famously well for Enron.

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