“𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘢𝘯 𝘶𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘫𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦.”

Last week I wrote about what happens when two systems disagree and somebody quietly decides which one wins.

𝗗𝗼𝗻 𝗩𝗼𝘀𝘀 left a comment that named something worse. He called it the 𝗔𝗶𝗧𝗮𝘅 — the cost of Finance scrutinizing AI-generated data it had no idea was circulating in the organization.

He’s right, and it’s a harder problem than the one I wrote about.
When your billing system and your GL disagree, both numbers have lineage. Each one came from somewhere. You can trace it, argue about it, and eventually decide which source is authoritative for that element. The disagreement is at least a fair fight.

𝗔𝗻 𝗔𝗜-𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗻𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗹.

Someone asked a model to summarize a spreadsheet, or estimate a market size, or pull the churn rate for the deck due at four. The number that came back may be right. It may be approximately right. It may be a confident invention. There is no way to tell by looking at it — because once it lands in a slide, it is formatted exactly like a number from your ERP.

That’s the part that should worry you. Not accuracy. 𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.

An unattributable number can’t be audited, challenged, or corrected at the source, because there is no source. You only discover it’s wrong after someone has already acted on it.

And it travels. By the time Finance sees the figure and asks where it came from, it’s been in three decks, a board pre-read, and somebody’s commitment to a customer.

So what do you actually do?

The honest answer is that this is a disclosure problem, not a technology one. The rule is simple and nobody is enforcing it: 𝗶𝗳 𝗮 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗱𝗼𝗰𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗮 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹, 𝘀𝗮𝘆 𝘀𝗼. One line. Source, date, who prompted it.

That isn’t bureaucracy. It’s the same standard we already apply to every other number in the building.

We spent decades teaching organizations that a figure without a source is an opinion.

AI didn’t change that. It just made opinions look like data.

Does anyone in your organization have to disclose when a number came from a model?

#TheAccidentalCFO #AIGovernance #FinanceLeadership #FPandA #INERSEC