Paul BarnhurstFP&A Expert Empowering Finance Professionals to Excel Everday

AI can build models you can’t verify.

8 May 2026 · 0 min

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0:26

In this brief talk, the speaker highlights the emergence of AI tools capable of generating massive numbers of spreadsheet formulas—up to 100,000 cells—while questioning how users can be confident those formulas are correct. Although the technology is impressive and may eventually earn user trust, the current reality presents a significant challenge: hidden anomalies and errors are hard to detect, especially when the user did not build the model themselves. The speaker emphasizes that auditing or picking through such AI‑constructed spreadsheets is difficult, raising concerns about reliability and verification.

An AI tool that generates 100,000 cell formulas in a spreadsheet, how do you know it's done it right? The developments recently in terms of AI tools generating spreadsheets, they're getting so good at it, which is amazing. It may be that we'll get to a point where people trust the tools so well that they just don't make the mistakes that humans make. But in the meantime, I think that's a real challenge. There could be some anomalies in there that you just don't spot. If you didn't construct the model, actually picking through it is going to be really difficult.