Deloitte Australia recently took an embarrassing blow to its reputation when a report it compiled for the Australian government turned out to contain numerous AI-generated hallucinations. The firm will have to refund part of the $290,000 the Aussie government paid for the report.

Though the Deloitte Australia incident’s unusual in that it involves a Big Four firm, it may point to a broader issue with poorly edited or cut-and-pasted AI-generated content in the workplace. The phenomenon’s even got a catchy name: workslop.

Workslop’s toll: A Stanford University and BetterUp Labs survey published in the Harvard Business Review found that 40% of 1,150 US employees across a range of industries said they’d received workslop from colleagues in the past month. Staff estimated that around 15% of the work product they get is workslop, and that they spent an average of nearly two hours dealing with each incident. Workslop “shifts the burden of the work downstream” to the people who receive it and who then must fact-check, correct, rewrite, or interpret it, the authors wrote. Staff lose trust in coworkers who send them work products with obvious errors or that lack context, the Stanford study found.

Workslop can have “pretty detrimental” effects on culture, Asha Palmer, SVP of compliance solutions at Skillsoft, told CFO Brew. Workslop can ultimately lead to “reputational damage” for both the organizations and individuals involved, Palmer said.

Preventing workslop: Leaders can help minimize the chances of workslop by creating norms and procedures around AI use in the workplace. AI policies alone aren’t enough, Palmer said. They’re “necessary but not sufficient…How you hold people accountable to those policies really has nothing to do with the document itself” but with the culture around it, she added.

Are you producing workshop?—CV

Want to feel old? ChatGPT was released this month…three years ago. Yes, only three. And, yes, we know: It feels like a lifetime.

In those three short years, finance teams have rushed to invest in AI and pilot tools that, they hope, streamline workflows. And while ROI on many AI investments still proves…let’s be nice and call it elusive…we’re finally getting a much better sense of exactly how and where AI can assist with key finance functions, including the audit process.

On October 27, PwC offered reporters a look at what the firm is calling “the next generation audit,” which currently consists of a slew of AI assurance tools either currently in use or in the pilot phase.

Expanding the toolkit. “It’s a transformation of our entire audit practice,” Kyle Maryanski, US assurance partner and leader of the Next Generation Audit for PwC, told reporters during an Oct. 27 roundtable. “Yes, it’s rooted in technology. There’s a big base technology to that. But it also is talking about our people, process, and methodology and how we’re going to do things.”

The “north star,” in Maryanski’s telling, is an “AI-integrated, end-to-end audit platform, which is where we’re going to get at the end of the day.” He said the global scale of the effort will eventually give the firm “consistency in how we collaborate and how we share information across countries, across accounting standards.” The upside of the gradual rollout is that as the firm debuts tools “in pieces and phases, we’re getting benefits immediately along the way.”

What will PwC’s AI audit look like?—NP

With talk of agentic AI and digital twins gripping the industry, it can sometimes feel like a company not already automating workflows and implementing “AI teammates” is living in the past.

But it’s still early days, and companies are figuring out the best use of these latest innovations. For some, it’s simple: What if executives were available to answer questions and talk with employees without needing to actually participate in a conversation? Or even better, what if everyone in the company had a digital twin that was just like them, only trapped inside the cloud?

To get a sense of how far this AI teammate tech has actually progressed, I set up a demo to see how it worked. I was also able to talk to an AI persona I never expected: myself.

Personal AI, not Kamino. Personal AI, a company that builds out AI teammates, envisions a time when every person has their own personal AI. Specifically, it’s aiming to create digital twins that can act as a knowledge base, answering specialized questions for other users.

Continue reading IT Brew’s story on AI twins here.—CN

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• VP, Sr Financial Planning and Analysis Specialist at SMBC (in person)
• Financial Systems Analyst at Polaris Industries (in person)
• Sr. Vice President - Controller at Stanford Health Care (in person)
• Chief Financial Officer at Northern Radiator (in person)
• Senior Analyst - CFO Group Business Line Risk at Ally (in person)