Building Expert Systems Without a Single Software Developer

The article, How Expert Systems & Legal Document Automation Can Help Law Firms & Freelancers Stay Competitive, makes what could be considered a provocative statement but a statement that I believe is very true.  Also, take that article and change the term “Law Firm” to “Accounting Firm” and “lawyer” to “accountant”; the ideas apply equally as well to both areas of knowledge.


That statement should be unpacked a bit.  How could you POSSIBLY automate things without developers???  That is impossible.  Well, so actually, it is not.  This is what the article is really saying.  You build what I might call a "platform" and then use that platform to build the powerful expert system.  The article says there are two things necessary to build an expert system; but I say there are three:
  • First you need to build a knowledge base of declarative, machine-readable rules.  And I say that the knowledge base should be created using some global standard such as XBRL so that those rules can be used by others, not just by the creator.  Basically, this enables the machine-readable rules to be shared for free or for a fee.
  • Second, you need to build an inference engine (a.k.a. reasoner, rules engine, semantic reasoner, logic engine, insights engine) that processes those rules and basically runs the expert system.
  • Third, you also need a business professional user interface that enables business professionals to interact with the expert system.
This graphic below summarizes the components of such an expert system or people are now calling these knowledge based systems:

Something in that article is particularly interesting.  The article, which is targeted at law firms and lawyers uses an accounting example of such an expert system: TurboTax.

So a software engineer and I are creating an expert system for creating financial reports.  The software engineer, Fuad Begic, has been programming since he was 12 years old and his father was also a programmer. You can think of this as the THIRD BULLET in the list above. The software application is currently called Luca and is part of the Auditchain Suite.

We are leveraging an inference engine, the SECOND BULLET, that another software engineer and I created called Pacioli.  That software engineer, Miguel Calejo, has 30 years of logic programming expertise and happened to have learned from Bob Kowalski, the original designer of PROLOG. The Pacioli logic engine was one of four finalists for the Alain Colmerauer Prolog Heritage Prize.

My work with Miguel and Fuad is built on other work with Hamed Mousavi, another software engineer who worked with me to create Pesseract which helped us figure out and prove the logical model of a financial report and led to the creation of the Seattle Method.  Pesseract is a desktop tool for viewing XBRL-based digital financial reports.

Yet another software engineer, Yury Volkovich, built a cloud-based application, another version called General Luca currently, that specialized in creating reports using the Seattle Method.


The author of that first article I referenced started a company called Gavel that provides legal document automation.  What is interesting is that they have a position that they call an "automator".  Those automators are the ones that build the automation and their background is legal, not software engineering.

Financial accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis is also going to need automators.

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