Interview: The AI innovator

As artificial intelligence (AI) makes the leap from science fiction to everyday applications, debate about the technology’s pros and cons has intensified. A recent survey in the US by Forbes found 75% of people to be concerned about AI causing job losses, yet 45% of those polled said they were already planning to use the technology to reply to texts and emails, in both social and business contexts.

The opportunity for an on-demand personal assistant at home and in the office is fuelling a fresh wave of tech innovation and, according to technology market intelligence platform Tracxn, there are already 223 AI start-ups in Ireland alone.

Among them is Cork-based Clearword, a company harnessing the power of AI to tackle a pain point familiar to anyone who has ever hosted an online meeting: the need to accurately capture the points discussed, decisions made and follow-up actions required.

‘Clearword was born out of a frustration with online meetings and a need to make them more productive,’ co-founder and CFO Clodagh Monks FCCA explains. ‘Prior to Covid, our co-founder, David Coallier, had the experience of managing a number of teams remotely for his businesses and had long recognised the issues. When the pandemic struck and the market for meeting platforms exploded, the opportunity to do something about it surfaced.’

A new dimension

Set up in 2021, Clearword’s goal to ‘make meetings better’ resonated with investors and it secured pre-seed investment of US$3.15m in 2022. Initially, AI had not been in the frame, but the rise of large language models such as ChatGPT, which understand and generate text in a human-like fashion, offered the potential to bring a new dimension to the offering.

Now available through the company’s website, Clearword is a meeting platform that generates transcripts, summaries, decisions and action items directly from a meeting, with no note-taking or additional inputs required. Bloom is a recent addition which takes the AI functionality further by carrying out the agreed actions, and is expected to boost productivity by two or three times compared with a 10%-20% productivity increase as Clearword originally provided.

‘Many of the action items that result from a meeting are based directly on the conversations that took place – for example, the need to send a follow-up email to a colleague or to write the specification for a new role in the company,’ Monks says. ‘Bloom is effectively the PA that will carry out these tasks for you.’

The company is currently identifying the industry sectors that it believes will be most receptive to its offer while also expanding its user base and building public awareness.

‘In terms of headcount, we are a small, effective team, which means there are a lot of hats to be worn by everyone, including me. Our users are growing month-on-month and we have a lot of people on a free-trial model as we develop awareness of the product. So it’s still very early stages but we are very happy with where we are going,’ Monks reports.

Future trends

So how does she see AI ultimately impacting on the role of accountants?  ‘Forms have been dotted through financial tools for a number of years now; it’s just been disguised as business intelligence. It’s been there in the background and its growth in usage has been incremental.’

As someone who now uses the technology in her daily work, she says: ‘There are certainly limitations with ChatGPT and, ultimately, it has to be seen as a tool. It can have hallucinations and every now and then will return gobbledigook to you. But I can see in my own role that it definitely speeds up work, particularly when you are beginning a process, and I absolutely love using it.’

She also stresses the principle of professional responsibility that machines can’t supplant. ‘As an ACCA member you have to act with integrity at all times,’ she says. ‘We have to be accountable for our use of information and AI is another source of that. We will always have to validate and stand over the information we use.’