Explainable AI Is The Next Big Thing In Accounting And Finance

Much of what we see in AI today is working to reproduce the way natural intelligence works, with the hopes that we'll get to human-level decisions that are faster and more circumspect. For example, in the world of accounting, an application of AI would be to identify spending variance (i.e., transactions that break from normal practices of the company or industry). Human beings can identify spending trends and variance in a group of a few hundred transactions, most of which get identified as false positives after further investigation. In the same or less time, AI can identify spending trends and variance across billions of transactions and perform further investigation to eliminate false flags within milliseconds. The concern in this scenario is that the "further investigation" is some nebulous black box that we are expected to trust.