Controllers (Expert Accountants) and Technologies: Artificial Intelligence and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

The demands of controlling when meeting cutting-edge technology are quite high given its underlying principles, its prospective character, flexibility, but also the desire for transparency, ethics, and responsibility. Through controllers (expert accountants), in their roles as collaborators, reminders, relationship managers of top management, smart technologies will be truly put to good use as business intelligence tools, as trusted allies (digital assistants, AI copilots, AI generative chatbots, interactive dashboards with AI inserts). Of course, there will be obstacles, a certain amount of distrust related to the “black boxes” regarding creation, operation, possible reactions. Hence the multiplication of searches to find something safer, with fewer unknowns regarding the purpose, risk levels, possible discriminations. This is how we arrived at XAI — explainable artificial intelligence, but also at HITL — complex models in which human judgment is integrated. The two systems also have their limits (especially regarding the balance between accuracy and explainability), but it is certain that the degree of trust, openness, and understanding of users (towards algorithms, models, artificial intelligence in general) through these tools will further increase. Basically, both tools suggest the same thing: if employees are directly involved and helped to understand something from the arguments, from the behavior of machines (whether it is about machine learning models, neural networks, or deep learning), then there will be an interactive collaboration between specialists and machines that is particularly beneficial to each productive or functional segment, but also to the entire organization.