Monday, 3 August 10:00am – 12:00pm
You can also watch a video recording of the meeting on Zoom - click here.
Meeting Summary
Quick recap
The meeting focused on revisiting a paper Sophie wrote 8 years ago about Big Data in financial management, where she explored how AI and big data applications have evolved over the past 10 years in areas like trading signals, fraud detection, customer service, and risk assessment.
The term big data has been in use since the 1990s, it usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data philosophy encompasses unstructured, semi-structured and structured data; however, the main focus is on unstructured data.
Big data "size" is a constantly moving target; as of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many zettabytes (ie 10 to the power of 21) of data.It was noted that the pre-reading/listening mostly focussed on how financial advice/investment decisions can be streamlined using AI (ie via large language models (LLMs) reiterating human advice as opposed to agentic AI – such as demonstrated by Hannah Fry’s “Cassandra” in our July meeting)
The group watched a YouTube video demonstrating how Agentic AI could be used to automate a financial decision-making process concerning a business expansion. The expert in the video does not have any verifiable qualifications which made it a little controversial. It led to a detailed discussion about the implications of AI systems making complex business decisions without human oversight. Participants raised concerns about the lack of authenticity and independence in AI systems, the potential for concentration of power among few AI platforms, and questions about responsibility and regulation in AI-driven financial processes.
The group decided not to record YouTube videos because of possible copyright infringement.
Due to technical difficulties, and lively debate, the two questions participants were asked to prepare were only partially addressed.
- Should financial advisors use AI?
- How has your bank statement changed over the years?
References (For August Meeting)
- Cockcroft, S. and Russell, M. (2018), Big Data Opportunities for Accounting and Finance Practice and Research. Australian Accounting Review, 28: 323-333.
- How big data fed AI (nerdy history)
- Banking focus (Harriet Rees, Group Chief Information Officer at Starling, and Lawrence White, UK Banking Correspondent at Reuters talk about AI in Banking on Times Radio). The linked video is set to start 33 minutes in.
- AI in Accounting Explained | Automation, Accuracy & Scale
Next Meeting
Monday September 7th 10am-12noon
- Peter Law: News Item - OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attack.
- Peter Cooper: MidjourneySpa - a medical app (carried over from the last meeting) AND/OR
- Peter Cooper: Embodied AI (autonomous robots) are getting better!