AI and Cybersecurity

Helen Knight examines some of the risks of technology recently covered in the media and some of the opportunities AI can provide.

For more information on this topic and more, please visit www.mercia-group.com for further details.

Transcript

Hi everyone, it's Helen Knight, tech senior manager at Murcia Group, and I am back with another edition of the Mercia podcast. Today I am talking about all things AI and technology. I say all things, it's much, much too big of a subject to go into into too much detail, but if you follow Mercy's predictions for 2025 that we released before Christmas, a lot of the themes which came out were around the use of AI and technology. 

And it certainly seems that every time I pick up some, some tax and accounting news lately, I really see these as, as some buzzwords. So certainly the pace of digital change is incredibly unprecedented. And it's something that obviously brings a lot of both risks and opportunities. So I'm going to talk very briefly about some of those in this podcast based on what I've been reading lately. 

So, in terms of cyber security, first of all, I was reading an article towards the end of last year, and this was all about a BBC reporter who used her clone voice and artificial intelligence to get into her own telephone banking as a bit of an experiment. And this was quite an interesting article I read, it was certainly something I've never And that's it. 

thought about before but particularly for those of us where our voices are out there in the public domain represents potentially quite a significant safety concern and indeed in that article it mentions a video done between with James and Nesbitt which was part of a of awareness raising from Starling Bank, but it's certainly worth a watch what they what they managed to do was they, they effectively used his voice to have a full on conversation with him, just to show him how. 

How easy it is to potentially use AI for these purposes. Now, these two experiments, clearly they were done with some of the best products which are out there, but it's definitely something to be aware of. Criminals are getting increasingly more sophisticated. Those You know, primarily you think of this, those, what, what was in those articles as a risk to individuals, but it's a real risk to businesses as well. 

I'm sure a lot of people saw in the news about the case of Arup, the engineering firm last year, where they lost twenty million pounds approximately, it was via Hong Kong, where an employee was duped into sending money to criminals through an AI generated video call from senior officers of the company. 

So there's increasingly sophisticated technology out there, but what a lot of these strategies really rely on is pressure tactics, so make the game. Trying to get staff to do things immediately without giving them the time to do those proper checks. And so what may be really key here is going to be some staff training, particularly on confirming identities, trying not to bow under that pressure, even where the request has come from sort of more senior members of staff. 

Obviously other security controls like multi factor authentication can help here as well. So that was, that was kind of a bit of the doom and gloom to start off the podcast, but technological improvements can be significantly positive and may well really improve efficiencies and have other benefits. If we take AI as an example, some experts are claiming that generative AI is as seismic a change as the development of the internet itself. 

And you can really see that. I think I've started using it in the last few months, personally. And to be honest, I've only really scratched the surface of what is out there. But I'm already finding it really useful, particular things. I might not take the entire text from it for a blog or a podcast. But what it is allowing me to do is to have a good starting point. 

So where I've got a lengthy document, it helps generate some of the key points from that document that I can then talk on a bit more in my own style. From an advisor's perspective then, I've seen that many sort of text technology firms are offering accountancy and tax geared AI to help with generating responses to client queries, help with drafting emails and the like. 

The government actually is even trying its own AI chatbot and that is using 700, 000 pages of guidance to provide Personalised answers to questions around setting up a business. So it's definitely the direction of travel. There's some really helpful tools out there, but it's really important to understand the risk. 

Obviously, you may have heard this idea of hallucination. This is where generative AI can give answers which are not factually accurate, but the answer they think is. think you want, or what they predict is the answer based on the inputs. Generally, there will be a lot of nuances in client situations, so it's important to to apply the legislation to the real nuances of the situation. 

And that's something that AI thus far doesn't really beat the experience of advisors on. Obviously, finally, they're also only as good as the information that has been put into them. So if you take a real open source generative AI, it may well be pulling from inaccurate or downright false sources of data as well. 

So covering some of those issues we've produced a topical issue on next step technology opportunities, risk and compliance. And what the benefit of this is it's in client language. It can be used to help your client, make your clients aware of some of these changes and perhaps some of the risks of them trying to use an open source. 

Generative AI to answer their own tax queries. I'd also really recommend having personally watched it myself, our series from Daniel Clarke, who describes himself as an AI assisted accountant. It's a really useful series. First one's called What is AI? And what does it mean for accountants? So if that's something that you personally want to learn more about, then that is already available in the library. 

And the live streamed courses will next be running in the spring as well. So, thank you very much. Obviously in the time we can't do a deep dive into all the aspects of what AI means for us as an accountants and tax advisors but hopefully giving you a couple of interesting points in there to think about and do check out our website for further information, training and resources. 

Thank you very much. Bye.