Using AI to analyze a financial report

- You know how AI tools are brilliant at summarizing information? Well, sometimes we want to take that a step further. Rather than condensing the information, we want the AI tool to process the information and to turn it into something more valuable. And that's exactly what this next prompt does with financial reports. It extracts the important information, it does some calculations, and it uses those to give you an analysis. Now, before we dive in, let me be clear about something. If you're planning to use this information for actual business decisions or investments, please double check those calculations. These AI tools are basically souped up text prediction machines. They're not scientific calculators, though I will say they're getting better all the time, and their mathematical accuracy has improved hugely just over the last year. So let me walk you through how this prompt works and how I used my embedded intelligence approach. So I started by researching the most important ratios and calculations that you can extract from a financial report. These fall into different categories, things like profitability, efficiency, liquidity, leverage, and so on. Now, to get the AI tool to get those calculations right, I've designed it to focus on one category of calculation at a time. So this is another multi-stage prompt. Instead of asking for all the calculations in one badge, we get the output delivered chunk by chunk. Getting your financial report is pretty simple. You just enter the prompt and attach your financial report as a file. The ability to attach files varies across AI tools and even across different models of the same tool. This changes as the tools update. So I can't give you any recommendations, because whatever I say will probably go out of date before the oat milk in my fridge. It is easy to find financial reports for major companies online, but there is a good chance that the file you download is too much for your AI tool to handle. So for this demo, I randomly chose Walmart and searched for its official financial filings. That led me to an unformatted financial report on a government site, which I then turned into a PDF. I deleted everything except part two of the document because that's the bit that had the financial information, and I uploaded what was left to my AI tool, a much smaller, more easily to handle file. If the company you're investigating is outside the US, the process will be different, but most governments publish annual accounts of listed companies. Now I've got two pounds 36 here just in case Walmart looks like a promising investment. So join me in the next lesson to find out if I'm about to become a retail tycoon.