August 6, 2025 l Business Mirror
With the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in almost every aspect of our lives, the question is: “Are we going to join the bandwagon of formal learning of AI?” It seems inevitable.
If so, how do we prepare ourselves that we may not be left behind? Where do we start our learning process? Which AI platform are we going to give priority for learning?
Unless we are into programming, we don’t need to learn Python, which is a most popular language for AI and machine learning. I, myself, would not attempt to learn programming. I tried to years ago but found it is so difficult to start without a programming background.
Still, I understand that Python is easy to learn even without a background in computer programming. There are introductory courses offered by Coursera, edX, Data Camp, or Google AI.
There is no maximum age to learn AI. You can learn AI even at your 40s or past that age as long as you are interested to learn and have the time to spend in studying. Learning AI is not only for tech experts or programmers.
Since I am in the accounting and auditing industry, I would like to focus more on these areas. There is “Agentic AI” in accounting, which is designed to act with a purpose with new information, learn, react and automate processes in real time. What is interesting is it can do more than just find problems in financial data. The AI can not only look into these problems, assess their impact and outcomes, but recommends what action to take. It can also undertake autonomous actions. (Source: trillion.com dated April 27, 2025. “The Evolution of AI in Accounting.”) This is not only helpful to financial controllers but to external auditors as well.
An example would be the closing of books. The autonomous accounting software can identify missing entries, connect to the concerned stakeholders and resolve discrepancies by itself, saving time in closing the books.
What I hope is to have audit trails for us to determine what was missing and resolved and are done in a correct manner. Nonetheless, Agentic AI can make the records ready for audit since an AI agent maintains a real-time audit trails. As early before an audit, the company is alerted by this AI, in what areas where compliances are not met and helps those in the company prepare for audits and provide explanations or make corrections before audit comes.
But how is Agentic AI different from the generative AI?
Generative AI creates content such as text, report, summaries, and generates outputs. However, Generative AI cannot perform a specific function unlike Agentic AI. The latter analyzes information and can automate processes in real time just like an accounting or finance specialist.
Speaking about generative AI, there is Grok 3 and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. These tools, however, are different fundamentally because they are built on different assumptions for various purposes. Grok 3 is more updated than ChatGPT and outperforms the latter in response time.
The weakness of Grok is it can become unpredictable. Grok can be unreliable if you are looking into continuity for your workflow. ChatGPT is more dependable since it can build on previous inputs without going off course.
Likewise, Grok 3 is designed to be more witty (with a sense of humor) unfiltered and with real time content, which is deeply integrated from X (formerly Twitter). It stood out as faster in speed and analytical insights, too. On the other hand, ChatGPT4 is more polished and professional and has various features. It is better in terms of coding, image generation and research accuracy. (Source: learn.g2.com/grok-vs-chatgpt dated June 7, 2025)
There may be other chatbots like DeepSeek, Gemini etc. but Grok and ChatGPT are the more popular nowadays. But we should ask ourselves which one can serve us best and at a price we can afford?
There is a wide array of AI’s tools out there, and sometimes with the many choices, we do not know which one to choose. For an ordinary person like me who is not really an information technology graduate or deep into IT expertise but would like to maximize AI’s benefits in my daily work and even in my writings and personal needs.
The key is to focus on which one will help your business and personal life and learn more from it. Remember it is never too late or you are never too old or too young to continually learn especially when the future growth of our business is greatly determined by technology nowadays.
***The views expressed herein are her own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of her office as well as FINEX. For comments, email wimiranda@inventormiranda.com. Photo is from Pinterest.