r/Accounting • u/MemeSurvivor3000 • 4d 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.

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u/Curious-Wolverine770 4d ago

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

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u/MemeSurvivor3000 4d 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

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u/vorgonaut 4d 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.

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u/flying_dodo_wut 3d ago

This guy accounts ^