Paul Barnhurst explains why faster tools like Shortcut and spreadsheets need careful oversight. Speed without auditing outputs creates risk, even when automation handles the heavy lifting. Dermot's models need checking.
When back in the day you would hear about promoter having a 100-meter dash with a world champion 100-meter sprinter against like a cougar, obviously the cougar is going to win. It's not about speed. So Shortcut was faster than you. I mean, if I asked you to add up 100 numbers on a piece of paper and Giles got to use, you know, a spreadsheet, guess who's going to win that as well? I'm not sure what the point was. And, you know, you're one of the fastest in the world. So imagine somebody else. And I wonder whether, you know, we all have kind of a responsibility to help people think about the purpose. We should use these tools. I mean, anyone responsible knows, like, why wouldn't you use these tools? Like, why wouldn't you use a spreadsheet. If you're still trying to build spreadsheets by hand, you don't have much of a career. You stopped working in finance in the '80s, probably. So of course we should use these tools, but we're in this funny time. And then you talked about Dermot. What's the right— well, if any associate, like when you said Dermot, people will get comfortable and not want to do their audit checks. I don't know about that. If you had any associate on your team or analyst build a model, you'd check it. And if they did 10 models, you would check them all because occasionally there might be a mistake.
AI Is Accelerating Faster Than Humans Can Keep Up: What Should Finance Pros Do
