PowerPoint Prison Break

While most of my career I've been in tech (both in BigTech and startups), I did two stints in professional services:

• Two years as a CPA in Big 4 accounting after undergrad

• One year as a strategy consultant at one of the largest firms after my MBA (now happily back in startup land)

When asked about these experiences, I usually share the polished version: Being a CPA helped me understand the interworkings of a business from a financial sense, and consulting taught me how to ramp up quickly on unfamiliar industries and defend my point of view.

While these are true, they're what I tell people on the surface. The majority of the day-to-day work wasn't glamorous at all:

• Most of my days as an accountant were consumed by manual data entry

• Consulting primarily involved mundane tasks in PowerPoint, sending endless recap emails, taking manual notes on calls, and occasionally wrestling with Excel

The dogma that we push for students to take on these prestigious roles blew my mind. Take strategy consulting, for example—we pay brilliant minds from top schools and tell them it's a prestigious role, only to have them do manual donkey work in PowerPoint and Excel all day.

The meme pages like consulting comedy aren't just funny but deadly accurate:

This system has been running on autopilot for many years; too many smart, high-compensated people are doing mundane tasks.

Like many others, when ChatGPT emerged in November 2022, my view of the future AI landscape suddenly became clear. Where my mind went to first: I knew this would revolutionize how knowledge workers do their jobs. However, the industry is notoriously old school, and I anticipated it would take a couple of years to gain real traction.

That's why I'm thrilled to see a few companies finally taking off in this space:

• Hebbia for financial services

• Harvey for law

• Basis for accounting

It's the perfect use case for AI - eliminating the mundane work that bright minds shouldn't be doing and automating it effectively. The impact is already visible across industries:

Financial Services:

• Navigate messy, unstructured VDRs (virtual data rooms) with precise queries

• Quickly assess a company's financial position

• Analyze multiple 10-Ks in minutes to understand trends

Law:

• Free associates from mind-numbing document review and searching for case law

• Allow focus on more intellectually stimulating work

Accounting:

• Reduce manual data entry and audit oversight

• Enable humans to focus on final verification and professional judgment

As models improve and companies harness frameworks and technology like LangChain for the agent use case, these capabilities will become more powerful. I can't wait until every white-collar knowledge worker has an AI assistant that can confidently handle all the tasks they'd rather not do, executing them even better than humans could.

• An AI assistant that can act like a co-pilot (to help empower them and be 5x more productive) and a smart, eager associate that can do tasks on their behalf and send them back for review

In a world where we used to say "better, faster, cheaper—pick two," we're witnessing this constraint dissolve. These cutting-edge AI tools deliver all three simultaneously, as evidenced by their successful funding rounds backed by strong revenue traction.

While I've frequently expressed my frustration about sending our brightest minds into consulting and finance only to have them perform monotonous tasks, I'm optimistic about AI's potential to transform these roles for those who still go into them. Even for those still drawn to these traditional paths by conventional wisdom, AI is finally making these jobs more intellectually rewarding.

The knowledge worker's liberation has begun, and I’m so jazzed for it.