“I can do this more efficiently, for example, by combining an unsupervised technique where I can review a database of a million emails and, from the 10,000 I've reviewed, I can project to the rest of the database which emails or which of those 990,000 would have a high probability of being relevant, I can substantially direct my effort and be much more efficient and accurate in my review.” (EX11-O) |
Experts and early adopters from all the accounting areas studied highlighted “efficiency” as the main effect. The words productivity, time, process, agility, bigger, and better stood out. |
“Better efficiency in directing resources to increase sales in a specific region and optimize operational resources.” (EX5-G) |
“It’s optimizing the process, so in a way, we can do it with more productivity, ask less of the team, and improve the speed of taking that credit. It improves the process and takes that credit faster.” (EA2-T) |
“It’s accuracy, accuracy in classification, so you can predict for the organization that's calculating, you can predict a scenario more accurately, have actions, so to speak, to minimize unpredictability.” (EX12-F) |
Experts and early adopters from all the accounting areas studied highlighted the effect of “quality.” The words greater accuracy, coverage, precision, and security stood out. |
“The most sensitive thing, the first thing is the accuracy of the data, right, reliability, agility in getting the data, right; I focus on reliability because I generally don’t know what the percentage is, but the vast majority of errors that occur that result in fines from the tax authorities are due to data errors.” (EX8-T) |
“There’s an improvement in the quality of information, knowing how much we're going to grow, how much we're going to lose, and then being able to invest better.” (EA8-F) |
“Effects, here, is a support for corporate decision making, because with the result of this analysis, the company will know that it has to take some action plan to improve.” (EX3-A) |
Experts and early adopters from all the accounting areas studied highlighted “improved decision-making” as one of the effects, derived from better conditions for planning and managing the business based on reliable and easily accessible information. |
“I think there are n possibilities when it comes to forecasting, but the main ones are these: it improves decision making in the company.” (EX5-G) |
“There’s another front that helps me make decisions, calling the sales department, for example, and saying: look, we're going to change the pricing policy for this item, this item, this item, and the return for the company is going to be this, we're going to optimize the tax chain by this much, etc.” (EA1-T) |
“The best decision making, really, if we think about optimizing financial gain, I’m going to buy, I'm going to sell, I'm going to negotiate based on the model’s response, right, if it’s falling I'm going to buy, well, for that kind of decision making, for gain.” (EX12-F) |
With the exception of the forensic area, experts and early adopters highlighted “increased profitability” as one of the effects, with the financial and management areas being the most prominent. |
“The economic gain in the capital market is because with these techniques the auditor can audit better, can do his job better, and that protects the market in general, resulting in better quality accounting information.” (EX1-A) |
“We can increase the company’s profitability and really increase the people doing what they should be doing.” (EA9-G) |
“Greater control over transactions, over operations, over sensitive interactions, according to the company’s vision of risk.” (EX11-O) |
Compliance is one of the effects present in the research. It is strongly related to the forensic, auditing, and tax areas. The main words associated with it are fraud, control, supplier, and detection. |
“We can often stop a tender that’s overpriced or something like that before it happens, because we already get the data on a daily basis, we can detect it by generating alerts.” (EA3-A) |
“The company doesn’t like positive surprises or negative surprises, it likes predictability, which in a country like Brazil is complicated; it likes to be in compliance [...] So this analytics front seeks to bring a little more tax coherence to our table.” (EA1-T) |
“Basically, you’re going to have a more rounded company, I'd say, you're going to detect fraud, you're going to improve controls, you're going to inhibit fraud.” (EX10-O) |
“Effectiveness” is one of the effects highlighted by experts. |
“I think that the effect is to strengthen the internal control structure [...] you improve your control so that it doesn't happen again next time.” (EX1-A) |
“We could bring new business to the company, new possibilities, open up customers, launch new products.” (EX2-A) |
Experts believe that some initiatives have the effect of “anticipating market trends.” |
“Bringing in new customer perspectives that can shape new products and bringing in new ideas that can add to the company’s portfolio.” (EX5-G) |
“An understanding of the market perhaps in that sense, a greater understanding [...] of the market that we operate in, you know, niche markets that we operate in to promote new business and opportunities.” (EX9-F) |