Week 8 - BALT 4363 - LinkedIn Refresh and Chatbase Exploration

This week, I decided to update my LinkedIn profile to reflect the AI skills I’ve cultivated in this course. These skills include Python, Replit, Lovable, Chatbase, and Generative AI. While updating my profile and reflecting on the knowledge gained from this course, I found myself once again considering the implications of AI in accounting, my chosen career field. Unfortunately, many discussions purport that AI will lead to the demise of humans’ role in accounting. At best, this claim is only half true. While it is inevitable that AI will replace accountants previously tasked with completing journal entries and other repetitive work, I predict the implementation of AI will not eradicate the human element of accounting. Instead, there will be a shift in accounting roles. Repetitive tasks will be replaced by those increasingly driven by creative thinking and analytics.


Furthermore, AI is prone to mistakes and hallucinations. Based on these circumstances, human-based accounting roles will likely incorporate a greater degree of investigative and substantive work.  As such, human roles in accounting will become more associated with business management and auditing rather than becoming fully extinct.

In addition to refreshing LinkedIn, I also experimented with Chatbase, which customizes AI customer support for various business platforms, especially e-commerce. As with many of the previous AI tools tested throughout this course, I initially believed creating an AI customer support tool would be strenuous. After creating a chatbot to simulate a resource for an imaginary Shopify account, I was surprised to find the setup process relatively easy. I also found that Chatbase is incredibly flexible, as it allows users to choose the type of file(s) on which to train the chatbot. The outlined requirements for such a tool could be as broad or as specific as dictated by the specific needs of any business, making it versatile for the full spectrum of business sizes and complexities.

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