Today in letting the machines talk to the machines: Copilot just helped me build a process that will convert a report from our new payroll system into a GL import file. It took me 90 minutes to build the tool and accompanying procedures. The process itself will require two minutes of work on the part of the end user–a huge time savings compared to doing this conversion manually.
Now if I would have already been fluent in Power Query, I could have built it in even less time. The advantage Copilot gave me was to tell me, step by step, how to build it. It allowed me to build what I needed without hours of Power Query training–and it was able to solve problems on the fly in plain language. So I built what needed to be built and learned what I needed to know about Power Query.
This is nothing to sniff at. For an accounting department that is already fairly behind the times technologically, this will help us improve processes much more quickly. I’ve already built a few other tools like this with the help of AI that have saved our department a chunk of time.
Listen, here’s the situation: my one marketable skill is accounting. If I’m going to make a decent living for my family, that’s the field I will work in until I retire in fifteen years or so. AI is no longer avoidable in companies of any size. Could I go out in a blaze of refusenik glory? Sure. Then what? I still have a mortgage and the need for health care. Alternatively, I could use Copilot to help my fellow accountants get out of some drudgerous work and maybe do something more worth their time. I don’t hold that out as a virtue; it is merely making the best of the situation.
I do not and will not use AI for any writing that means something to me. If I post something eye-rollingly tedious about animism, blame me not the robot. This is not machine work.
I just checked with the robot: drudgerous is not a proper English word. That’s how you know this is all me.
I have no advice for you. I am sitting here at the intersection of the demands of real life and my deeply Luddite worldview. I have drawn lines where it makes sense to me. There is, however, no purity to be found.