Team Derico, consisting of second-year accounting students, won the Stellenbosch round of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) auditing competition with 40 minutes to spare, securing them a place in the national final on 9 October, in Johannesburg.
The team, and two others from Stellenbosch University (SU), will represent the university at the national final of the competition, the Monsoon Cup (MC), which is hosted by RAiN chartered accountants.
The aim of the MC is to expose accounting students to “the skill of writing prompts”, said Charlene Black, who is responsible for student recruitment at RAiN. Along with SU, the competing universities are North-West University (NWU), the University of the Free State (UFS), and the University of Cape Town (UCT), she said.
Team Derico won the Stellenbosch round on 21 August.
“We finished very quickly,” said Vaughn Else, member of team Derico and second-year accounting student at SU. “We only had two hours to complete this project of a forensic audit […] and we finished in an hour and twenty [minutes].”
The aim of the competition was to detect fraud in a company’s accounts using an AI called “Monsoon”, said Black. Participants would create AI personalities that would perform the auditing work, but participants would also feed these personalities the necessary prompts to perform their tasks, she added.
Work that would take an auditor about two weeks could be completed with this AI in under two hours, said Black.
“You still need a human to design the prompts and check the AI’s work,” she added. However, “this is something not taught at universities”, said Lize-Marie Pretorius, a junior actuarial analyst at RAiN, who studied at UFS.
Pretorius added that universities tend to teach all the traditional knowledge and skills needed for auditing, but she had to learn the skill of using AI only when she started working in the industry.
“This actually makes me excited to work as an accountant,” said Leslie Tanyaradzwa Kapfumvuti, a member of Derico and second-year accounting student at SU.