Episode 6: How CPAs can use AI to measure business performance

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help businesses measure performance and make capital allocation decisions. Listen to a marketing professional and an accounting professor explain how they have benefited from these technological advancements.

On this episode we're asking, how can artificial intelligence (AI) help CPAs make smart decisions about capital allocation? One area that is notoriously difficult to analyze is marketing. Making smart decisions about marketing expenditures can be challenging because the correlation between marketing investment today and the long-term impact on financial results in the future is not obvious.

AI can help fill in this gap between todays’ decisions and results months or years in the future.

Our first guest Dave Bunce is the CEO of Morphio, a company that uses AI to analyze the effectiveness of marketing expenditures. He says AI is valuable to CPAs because, “It puts CPAs in the driver's seat of having access to information and insights they otherwise wouldn't have had, and that can apply across functions and across stakeholders.”

Our second guest, Mario Malouin, looks at what CPAs need to do to ensure they remain in the driver’s seat and not become a passenger. Mario Malouin is a professor at the University du Québec de l’Outaouais and a member of the IESBA Technology Experts Group. He breaks down the many steps CPAs need to take to feel confident in the data that they're getting from AI.

He says CPAs need to do more than examine what is the source of the data, how the algorithm has been trained, how it has been tested, and how it has been deployed in real life.

“You need to zoom out and understand what is the task you want to give to what I call those intelligent agents. And this is key.”

View transcript

In this episode

Dave Bunce describes a case study where his team analyzed the impact of marketing decisions on revenue. (02:50)
Mario Malouin breaks down the steps CPAs need to take to ensure they remain in the driver’s seat with AI. (06:50)
Mario describes the discussion CPAs need to have with their supplier of AI to feel confident it is the right tool for the right job. (08:50)
How CPAs can choose between the various suppliers of off-the-shelf AI solutions. (12:27)
How CPAs need to develop guiding principles like integrity or inclusion before embarking on any AI-enabled journey. (18:55)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect those of CPA Canada.