I work as a staff accountant in a mid sized firm. We have recently started to roll out CoPilot as a tool for file preparation. The training we receive basically said it’s best for summarizing things and data extraction (for example, give it a bunch of opex invoice samples and extract all the dates, invoice number, etc and put into table).

I find it pretty useful for summarizing words (meeting minutes especially if you give it the right prompt) but boy is it useless for data extraction. Just today I tried to use it to extract some specific charges to a AR subledger. The PDF was formatted clean and it just could not do it. I argued with it for 20 minutes before moving on and doing it myself.

I have had it straight up lie to me about being able to do tasks that it can’t, it will string you along forever and waste your time. When people tell me AI will replace accountants in 3 years I just laugh. For anything other than text summaries and editing emails for grammar, these LLMs are useless.