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In CFO Brew’s latest virtual event, Howard Katzenberg, founder and CEO of artificial intelligence-powered accounts payable platform Glean.ai, who also has more than 10 years’ experience as a CFO, spoke with CFO Brew editor Drew Adamek about how generative AI will transform financial processes and society as a whole.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
When you think back to when ChatGPT was introduced, what was your reaction? How did you think that was going to change what you do?
We always knew that AI was going to disrupt a lot of traditional finance processes, like accounts payable, so they could be more strategic. So it was really no surprise to see the announcements. We were certainly ahead of the curve in preparing for the adoption of large language models (LLM). In May 2022, we started pivoting our business from NLP-based (natural language processing) modeling to more of the LLM and generative AI approach.
What were your first steps to making that strategic pivot?
We broke down our pipeline into different stages and moved over from the NLP approach to the LLM approach for two stages first, to see how it went. We took a very measured approach, but we almost immediately saw the accuracy benefit, the performance benefit in terms of speed, and certainly the cost benefit. And once we started seeing very positive results, we moved quickly to move the rest of the pipeline over to that generative AI approach.
How did this transition to LLM change the skill sets that your team needed and the skills that you needed in dealing with this new kind of tool?
At this point, I expect everyone on the team, not just the data team, but even the marketing team to be using it on a daily basis. Certainly, on our data team, the skill set that was very in high demand for us maybe two and a half years ago is not really required at this point. Knowing how to do prompt engineering for one of the leading LLM models is much more important now. But if you’re on the marketing team or if you’re an account executive, being able to use an outline to develop an email sequence or write a great follow-up email, these are all tools I expect my team to have know-how on.
Over the years we have talked about a lot of technological innovations. Is this one different?
Intuition tells me it is. I would compare it almost to the advent of the computer. This isn’t a computer, but this is going to change the way humans interact with computers. You may never need to code again, or build a financial model again, because you can just give it instructions, and it might build [the model] itself. I place my money on this being very impactful in terms of the way we work five to 10 years down the road.