Paul Barnhurst warns that dumping data into AI tools expecting instant answers wastes effort. Real insights take time: defining the actual problem and cleaning data matter far more than the tool itself. Finding insights is only about 5% of the work.
People want to have quick results. Because nowadays everyone talked about AI. You start to see some posts on your Instagram about a tool that can receive a data and turn into a lot of insights for you. It's not the way it works. I think people need to understand the real problem they want to solve. I see many people just jump in the tool, just put some data in there and just try to receive the best results as possible. So they don't think about is it a real problem to solve, is it worth it to work with data? Because it's very poetical to say that someone that work with data is someone that needs to come up with insights. But I think it's like 5% of my time that I come up with my projects, to my manager say, hey, see, I found this very interesting pattern in your data. Let's work on this. It's not the way that work. It demands a lot of time, especially cleaning the data, understanding the real problem. People skip this process and moving faster to the tools they want results and everything.
Trust and Leadership Lessons for FP&A From 100+ Top Leaders with CFO Jon Laudie
