Prime Ai Solutions
Read time: 5 minutes
Welcome back, leader.
AI helped junior staff do better work. But when the AI was taken away, they were no better than before.
If you run a finance or legal team, that matters.
This week: what the study found, how hackers are using AI tools against firms, and a prompt that helps juniors learn
LATEST NEWS
AI is helping juniors work faster, but not learn faster
What happened: Researchers from MIT and Google gave 133 lawyers an AI drafting tool for three months. Everyone's work got better with it.
Juniors improved the most.
Then the AI was taken away and everyone did a review task on their own. Seniors who had used AI did better than before. Juniors did not.
On average, they had learned nothing extra.
Why it matters to you: Juniors learn by doing the basic work.
Bank recs, first drafts of commentary, checking numbers.
AI now does a lot of that work. So your juniors get the output, but not the practice.
You can already see the risk.
Last week a paralegal used ChatGPT to write court papers that included fake cases. The judge blamed the senior solicitor who signed them off, not the tool.
In finance, that's the manager who signs off a board pack with a junior's AI-made numbers in it.
What to do: Your senior people will leave one day, and someone needs to be ready to replace them. Don't let AI take all the basic work.
Let juniors do some of it themselves, then go through it with them.
Hackers are using firms' own AI tools against them
What happened: Security firm Semperis surveyed 1,200 IT staff at firms hit by ransomware (where hackers lock your systems and demand money). 84% said the attack involved AI.
44% said hackers used the firm's own AI tools to help them.
It's a survey by a company that sells security products, so take the exact numbers with care.
Why it matters to you: More finance teams are connecting AI to their accounting system, inbox and files. If an AI tool can change or delete things there, a hacker who gets into it can too.
What to do: When you connect an AI tool to a finance system, give it read-only access at first. Turn off its ability to edit, delete or send.
You wouldn't give a new starter full access on day one.
Treat AI tools the same way.
So how do you use AI and still help juniors learn? Change who does what.
STEAL THIS
Let AI check the work, not do it
Most teams ask AI to write the first draft.
The junior then just tidies it up and learns very little.
Try it the other way round.
The junior writes the draft. AI checks it, like a senior manager would.
The junior still does the thinking, but gets feedback in minutes, not days.
You are a senior finance manager reviewing a junior analyst's month-end variance commentary before it goes to the CFO.
Below are the budget vs actuals figures and the analyst's draft.
Do not rewrite the commentary. Instead:
1. Check every number in the draft against the figures. List any that don't match.
2. Flag any explanation the data doesn't support (for example "timing" with no evidence).
3. List the three questions the CFO is most likely to ask that the draft doesn't answer.
4. Name the biggest variance the draft underplays or misses.
5. Give one specific thing the analyst should do differently next month.
Here is the tone I want: "Good catch on payroll. Now tell me why it happened, not just that it did."
Keep it under 300 words, in bullet points.
[paste figures]
[paste draft]Why it works: "Do not rewrite" means the junior still does the work.
Point 1 catches wrong numbers before the CFO sees them.
Point 3 teaches the junior to think about what the reader will ask.
For legal teams: swap in "senior associate", "contract markup" and "client". Now it checks a trainee's contract review.
SOMETHING I’M BUILDING
People often ask what tools I use, so here they are.
I use Claude and ChatGPT daily.
For coding, I now mostly use Codex, 6.1 Sol is great and I have banked resets which I’m trying to get through! I also use Claude as Opus 5.5 is really good!
Grok Bot is my personal AI assistant. It's fast, it's good, and it's easy to use. I set up a new one for each task, then close it when the job is done. It picks up tasks from my Notion and hands off to me.
Why do I build things at all?
Not to become a developer. Building makes me make decisions.
What matters? What does good look like? What should I throw away?
That's how I practise judgment. It also lets me try lots of ideas quickly and keep the best ones.
It's the same lesson as the study.
You only get better at judgment by making decisions yourself. AI can speed up the work, but it can't make the decisions for you.
SIGNAL / NOISE
Signal: According to study done by MBABench 2.0, the best AI tool got only 16 out of 101 Excel modelling tasks fully right.
Always check the formulas!Signal: Anthropic, which makes Claude, is expected to publish its stock market listing documents soon. If you read them, look at how revenue is counted. Headline "run-rate" figures are not the same as reported revenue. It's a good test of reading AI company accounts.
Signal: The EU has delayed its strictest AI rules to December 2027. But from December 2026, AI-made content must still be labelled as AI-made.
Noise: Big valuations for AI finance and legal startups.
Harvey at $15.5bn, Rillet at $1bn.
They tell you what investors think, not whether the tool will speed up your month-end (or your close or case-load!)
The lesson this week:
AI makes the work better, faster than it makes people better. The firms that do well will plan for both!
If you're working out how to use AI in your team without your juniors missing out on learning, that's exactly what I help firms with.
Hit reply and tell me where you're at. I read every reply.
-Umar Prime AI | primeai.solutions
P.S. Want to try the review prompt on your own month-end pack?
Reply "review" and I'll help you set it up for your numbers.
