The Future is Now?
The Nikkei Newspaper company is using Artificial Intelligence to generate financial summaries published to their website. The AI Reporter, as it is called, generates articles by extracting numerical data from the XBRL filing as well as summarising sentences around sales and profits from the text. Additional summary text is then generated from an analysis of the accompanying PDF document. This whole process can be accomplished in under 10 seconds. To cope with peak filing periods, in which up to 2000 companies report on the same day the system uses the AWS cloud based platform to distribute the work across multiple servers.
So will journalists soon go the way of the dinosour? To this point a representative from this particular project noted “It is necessary to leave routine work to AI in order to maintain competitiveness, and change the working hours of reporters in order to concentrate on higher added value work.” So be reassured, at least in this case, the robots are not taking over the world; they are just taking over the routine work that we don’t like to do in the first place.
The developers are quick to point out that the information that is provided to the system must be structured to achieve a high level of success.
At XBRL International we fully support projects using XBRL data to make information available for consumption by the market in an expedient manner, especially in an era in which smaller public companies struggle to get attention.
