"Built for the industry": HLB International's global CTO on DataSnipper Excel Agents

John Toon is the Global CTO at HLB International. In this role, he helps advisory and accounting firms navigate the technology landscape, staying on top of what vendors are doing while keeping a broader view of the industry. 

At DataSnipper Connect London, John shared his take on DataSnipper Excel Agents and the role of AI in audit. 

Q: What was your first impression of Excel Agents? 

A: It was mind-blowing. Excel is a place where accountants and auditors live every day, so having a solution that helps you do more of your busy work faster and become more efficient and effective there is really important. Excel Agents is specifically designed for the industry, rather than something generic. It gives you greater context, greater power over what you're doing, and something very specific in terms of output.

Q: What use cases do you see for Excel Agents? 

A: There are tons of use cases. With my audit background, I can see opportunities around the day-to-day testing that is always quite mundane. But also future opportunities, like post-balance sheet event reviews and complex forecasts with granular analysis. We also saw an example of analyzing SOC reports, and quite often, those are challenging for an LLM to extract information from consistently. Accomplishing this is massively powerful because it creates an interesting feedback loop where you can layer one process on top of another for things that are highly important to audit but should also be highly automatable.

Q: What are your thoughts on Agent Builder? 

A: I love Agent Builder. It looks absolutely incredible. It’s the future of where a lot of technologies are going, not just having agents built into a specific product, but building a coordination layer that allows you to do multiple tasks, repeatably, at scale, with a human managing and overseeing the outputs. It means you can speed up and scale in a way that was never possible before.

Q: What benefits are HLB firms seeing from DataSnipper? 

A: The biggest opportunity for our network is that DataSnipper helps firms maintain a competitive advantage. There is huge pressure on price around the world, and clients want everything faster, more accurate, and more reliable. DataSnipper allows our firms to do all of those things. It also allows staff to focus more on the subjective areas of the audit, taking away the busy work so they can spend more time thinking about the outcomes they're trying to achieve. That is principally the most important thing about audits. It allows our firms to go up a notch in terms of professionalism and capability, and gives them time to be skeptical about what they're looking at, so we get high-quality delivery of service.

Q: What makes DataSnipper different from other AI and automation solutions? 

A: DataSnipper is built for the industry, and that really helps. They understand the principal problems we have: we want to maintain trust, and we operate in a highly regulated environment with confidential client data. DataSnipper knows and understands this and appreciates that we need the right controls in place. That's not always the case with more generic models, which is a risk. And the fact that DataSnipper is so willing to listen to feedback and tailor the product means you have a true partnership developing something that works for the business.

Q: What role do you see AI playing in audit going forward? 

A: AI is clearly having a massive disruptive effect in audit and accounting. The deterministic workflows, where we're expecting a known outcome, are going to start to disappear, and firms are going to invest more in these kinds of technologies. The challenge for firms is how to help their people shift from process-driven roles to something more analytical, more managerial. And how do we train the next generation coming into the profession? We talked about training accountants like we train pilots in a simulator, experiencing in six months what might previously have taken three to five years so they can develop the judgment and expertise the profession now demands as quickly as possible.

Q: What excites you most about AI in this industry? 

A: In the last few years, we've seen a lot of LLM disruption, a huge change in capability and outcomes in models and from platforms like DataSnipper. I’m excited to witness what continuing disruption looks like. This is an opportunity for firms that are willing to be courageous, curious about the technology, and willing to take a risk. Those are the ones that will keep ahead of the rest. If you lead rather than follow, you're always going to be in a better place strategically.

For John Toon, the firms that will come out ahead are not the ones waiting to see where AI lands. They are the ones already moving, and we are excited to be part of their journey.