Financial Modeler's Corner
00:27:09 · Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:27:09] S1: Yeah. [00:27:09] S0: Right? To kinda really get their thinking and see where they're at in Excel. And this guy said a 10 out of 10. Okay. And he raised himself, well, I can do anything I need to, blah blah blah blah blah. And I go, hey. By chance, have you ever heard of x lookup? And it was fairly new. It'd been out a year. No. Have you heard about this? No. And kinda went on and go, do wanna change your answer? And he looked at me begrudgingly and said, fine. A nine out of 10. Just like, wow. Are we arrogant? And he was really smart, and I actually put him forward to the next round and see what the other manager would say. And they interviewed him and go, he could do the job, but I wouldn't wanna work for... Work with him because he was just so arrogant, and we didn't hire him. [00:27:48] S1: And I think that's also... If you think back to the the point about trainers, that's one of the skills of a good trainer as well as times you're gonna have to deal with real world people, personalities, and and, you know, people that are gonna disagree with you or try and put you off or whatever it might be. On the training front again, and we should probably start talking about AI, do do you think we're gonna... Do you think we'll have a job, Paul, in two years as as trainers, or is AI taking it all over? [00:28:14] S0: AI is gonna change it, but trust still matters, and there will be areas you want a human. So I don't think so. But if it does, I guess I'm hoping for a not a universal basic income, but some call it a universal high income, and I'll just go retire.
00:28:14 · Paul Barnhurst, Giles Male
[00:28:14] S0: AI is gonna change it, but trust still matters, and there will be areas you want a human. So I don't think so. But if it does, I guess I'm hoping for a not a universal basic income, but some call it a universal high income, and I'll just go retire. [00:28:31] S1: You know, the thing that always jumps out to me when you when you look at... Let's take our field in financial modeling. You look at all the experts that share so much thought leadership at the moment. My my worry is whether it's a year, two years, five years down the line, if all of those people just stop because, you know, AI is just doing all of this work for everybody anyway, Where does the thought leadership come from, or or does AI just fill that gap, which fills me with fear? Don't know if you have have any strong opinions on that.
00:29:04 · Paul Barnhurst
[00:29:04] S0: I haven't given that a ton of thought. I think the thought leadership will continue. What I fear is it's gonna get watered down over time. So a good example is Carl Seidman recently shared... He he had shared a financial model, and then he was attending some... Something Someone was sharing. The financial model they were sharing looked almost exactly like model he had built. There's, like, 90% the same. And what he realized, he had recently done a training where he built a lot of it with, I think, Claude or, you know, one of the AI tools. And we're furious. Everything's gonna look the same. We as humans, one of the things that makes us great is the diversity via thought, the diversity that's out there. I would say even in the modeling field, even though, yes, there are standards, we all have a signature. As, Jeff Robinson said, he's done... Trained thousands of people, right, there in The UK, he made a comment once. He goes, I could usually tell who trained them when I'd see a model because... Or, you know, what style they had been trained in because everybody has a unique signature. Do we really want that to go away? That's what I worry about, whether it's thought leadership, whether it's modeling, whatever it might be. AI doesn't have the creativity that a human has. And so there's just something to be said value. Right? We've all seen it. Where you're reading a post, and the information may be valuable, but you could tell it's 100% written by AI, and it just turns you off because you're like, I want some original thought. I wanna connect with the person here. That's what that's what I fear more than anything even though I think we'll continue to have content develop, we'll continue to have thought leaders regardless of how good AI is. Is the next generation gonna lose a lot of that creativity and part of what just makes us who we are?
00:30:50 · Giles Male
[00:30:50] S1: Yeah. I agree. And, actually, the creativity words are really important one. We... We've mentioned that in some of our training recently as well. Even when you think of the use of AI, ideally, you need to be quite creative in your thought processes and interactions with AI to try and get the most value out of it. So that's something that I try and keep in my mind, like not to just fall into a lazy mindset with modeling and AI of just that, okay, we'll build me a free statement model. Actually, you've got to engage with these tools quite creatively to get the best outputs. I don't know if if that's something that resonates with you.
00:31:27 · Paul Barnhurst
[00:31:27] S0: No. I do agree. I mean, I... You have to spend time with them. There's an art and a science. And for certain parts of the model, you want it to be science. Right? A debt revolver. There are other areas within a... The balance sheet balancing. That's not an art. There is science to that that you need to follow or it won't balance. But how you show the summary, how you do other things, there is that ability to bring art into it. You know, exactly how you do the scenarios, yes, there's some structure to that, but there's also some freedom. What assumptions you use? How many? These are all things that... Whether you wanna call it creativity, knowledge, they're human judgment. So even if you're... You wanna say, oh, I don't like to be creative. Fine. Take out creativity. You still have to involve human judgment in the process, and that leads to a different outcome than turning over your judgment to AI, which is happening. Now is AI building models for us? The answer is unequivocally yes. Is it building good models in the hands of a right person again? The answer is unequivocally yes at this point. Can it do a lot of the work and save us hours? Right? Those are all yeses. Those are no longer a debate like when we started the Mod Squad a year and a half ago and we were wondering where it would be. Those have been settled. The question is how you're gonna adopt it, when you come on board, and how you responsibly use it at this point to meet.
00:32:56 · Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:32:56] S1: And you mentioned The Mod Squad. I mean, god, if you and I reflect on the year that we've had... What was it? Pretty much a year ago, I think, we started The Mod [00:33:04] S0: I think the first one was September, late August or early September of last year. We started talking about it, I think, the end of July. It took us about a month to find our logo and our name and all that. [00:33:14] S1: Yeah, which we used AI for, I think, in part, at least, didn't we, to try and brainstorm the name? But you think when we stand, for anyone that doesn't know, listening or watching, this is Paul, myself, and Ian Schnoor, who's the founder of the FMI. And a year ago, we were just testing third party AI tools in Excel because we didn't have Claude and Copilot in Excel. There weren't agents. The only link to, like, in app experiences with with these third party tools. [00:33:44] S0: Right? Copilot came out about a week after we started. We did our first episode. I think our second was testing Copilot online. Online. I remember. The agent. Not not Copilot in Excel, but the actual agent that would build for you, just so everybody understands. Copilot had been out for a while, but it could only give you... Answer your questions. It didn't have an agent that actually could build for you. So the first one was online. And do remember how awful it was the first time we tested that thing?