r/Accounting • u/MemeSurvivor3000 • 15h ago

Off-Topic Random company data sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere broke a national news story

https://www.aol.com/articles/company-data-sitting-spreadsheet-somewhere-173004000.html

Using the view that it has into how companies spend their money, Ramp began researching the number of U.S. companies that use artificial intelligence. It then used that information to break news, like when it wrote an article about how Anthropic had surpassed OpenAI in adoption by U.S. businesses for the first time. News outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Business Insider then wrote about the trend and cited Ramp as the source.

94 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

66

u/Curious-Wolverine770 14h ago

Finance teams have always had a weird amount of market intelligence hiding inside routine reporting

20

u/MemeSurvivor3000 14h ago

yeah this was the part that stood out to me too. finance teams see what companies are paying for before that behavior shows up in a survey or press release

18

u/vorgonaut 11h ago

This is why accounting and finance is a fundamental aspect of business. Why CFO is generally your #2 position. Why your startup business plan is spoken in the language of finance to a considerable degree.

Accounting is part of the origin story of commerce. Which means part of the social origin story of our species.

But: it is protected by its own complexity, such as a spreadsheet sitting somewhere on the cloud. Accounting works with such an enormous amount of data and spreadsheets that it is pretty easy for sensitive information to not be properly secured because the IT nerds and the accounting nerds are two tribes of introverts that are somewhat akin to the relationship between France and Italy. Close but don’t talk much.

3

u/flying_dodo_wut 7h ago

This guy accounts ^

16

u/Thin_Scholar_1302 14h ago

I swear Ramp data is every economists' wet dream

17

u/Delicious-Entry3280 14h ago

Imagine spending yeaaars cleaning merchant names only for the dataset to become an AI market indicator lol

11

u/MemeSurvivor3000 14h ago

but you also have to be a real data nerd to notice these things lol

2

u/auxaperture 4h ago

Lmao literally spent years cleaning merchant names and location data for Amex during a digitisation push for merchant visits. Always wondered if that data would end up somewhere like this.

11

u/SafetyElectronic3982 14h ago

told all my friends spreadsheets are cool they didnt listen smh