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Culture War appropriate? Okay, I'm hearing everything about how AI is coming for our jerbs/gonna make us so productive, eventually only six humans will be working in the entire economy and the rest of us will be livin' large on that sweet, sweet UBI from all the yuuuuge economic gains.
But what does that mean in actuality if I'm not a software engineer type?
For example, a Substack comedian (literally, that was his day job) has a post up about AI and how this is all hysteria, nobody is going to lose their jobs, it's merely the usual sort of dip in the economy and the sectors most affected are:
Okay. I fall into the "secretaries and administrative assistants" bucket and I know Sweet Fanny Adams about AI. My exposure to it in the workplace is with the free Copilot Microsoft has bundled in with Microsoft 365 and, apart from annoying me with "Do you want me to write that email?" (no thanks, I think I can figure how to say "I got that invoice, thanks" all by my little ownsome), I see no use for it.
But! AI is going to be the wave of the workplace future! So, for all you who know and use the thing and are up on the different models, here's an example of a task I routinely need to do in my job. Can AI (Copilot or whatever) do this, or most of it, for me?
A request from our auditors:
Where this information is located:
How do I use AI to take all this drudgery off my hands? Can I ask/tell it "here's the details of how to log in, now go ahead lil' Copilot and pull out all that info and make a nice, tidy spreadsheet out of it all"? Or do I have to hand-hold it every step of the way, in which case I am just as well off to do it all myself?
Computer use is still pretty ass and I absolutely would not trust AI to navigate websites for you that aren't on the clearnet. I.e. if it requires a login tied to you, no good. If it's freely available via Google, go for it.
For your tasks, you can absolutely leverage AI to do the data processing steps required after you download the files.
I'm still in the process of figuring out how to use it for effective spreadsheet work. It's hit or miss, but the hits are fantastic. I find I need much more precise prompts for spreadsheet work, whereas for code/general tasks you can usually get away with saying "do X" whereas with spreadsheets I find I need to be a bit more precise "use X to accomplish Y, you'll probably want to Z first" .
It does sound like what you're doing involves some reconciliation/bridging. AI LOVES doing this. I've been using it to sift through shitty client accounting (my clients seem to deliberately hire the worst accountants) and it's fantastic. Just be warned, if the answer is there, it will find it eventually, but if the answer isn't there, it will come up with the most insane plugs to get there. So you have to understand the scope/problem, but it's saving me a LOT of headaches along the way. I haven't had to manually do a bridge between documents in a few months, thank god.
But I still have to do the downloading myself, and by that stage it's quicker for me to go "I need to sort out the 9 employees for centre 2 and sum up their gross wages in that period" with Excel rather than hand-hold an AI through all the steps about "no, don't include that staff member but do include this staff member" and so forth.
It may very well be
If this is a regular task and the various tacit rules wrt employees are stable, it's potentially worth codifying this so you can streamline the one step.
But that is a nonzero amount of work (frequently a lot of work) to set up a new workflow and it's your life!
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