Why Standards are Important (2024-01-22)

The AI Budget Assistant

I saw this article about AI helping IT leaders plan their budgets, and I had visions of certain departments getting cut, especially data-related ones. My concern is that a lot of what a DBA does can be acting as insurance or supporting others and not necessarily doing things which are easily visible or that might show up in reports, praise in Slack/Teams, or in other places an AI might be prompted to look. If an IT leader has to decide what's important for the AI to look at, is data included?

Of course, it's entirely possible the AI would look at all the performance problems and want to spend more budget on the data side. Fingers crossed for that interpretation.

The idea of an AI looking at a large amount of current data in various spreadsheets, reports, goals, requirements, usage, and more to synthesize a budget makes sense. This is the type of thing many AI-type technologies do well, finding patterns and summarizing the data in a way that assists a human in producing a final report of where to spend money.

Just like any report produced by a human, I would hope that someone reviews the results and verifies the analysis makes sense. However, in reality, I suspect a lot of human reports are passed along as-is, with only a cursory glance. The world of AI might make this worse as we can produce larger and more detailed reports.

The funny thing might be that whoever has to approve the budget might let their GenAI model summarize the budget for accuracy. In that case, do we need humans involved? I can see some managers trying to reduce the staff that might have internal knowledge and replacing them with GenAIs. Will we just have AIs producing things other AIs read and summarize?

Most of us know that garbage in/garbage out is a constant problem in the world of data and reports. Judging data quality and ensuring the accurate (and complete) data is fed into any system is something that humans need to be a part of. An AI model might assist, but humans have context and knowledge that can be hard to craft into a prompt. After all, this might be the training data for your model, and I'm not sure general models will learn well without handholding from humans, especially in specialized areas like budgets.

I've had to build budgets, and while I don't think it's hard, it's time-consuming. There is a lot of drudgery, and I think an AI can help here. However, I'd want to audit and check the data and ensure that my helper is summarizing the data in a way that makes sense to me. Even then, what I'd most like to do is let the AI give me a few suggestions of future costs and let me fine-tune those before I present them to anyone else. After all, if we make large errors, I suspect I'll feel the pain of failure more than my AI assistant.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums