Confronting AI hype with reality
Christian Harinarain
LONDON — Three years into the AI boom, the finance industry is still waiting for the liberation that was promised. Analysts are validating outputs they didn’t ask to babysit. The AI hype cycle didn’t remove document work from finance professionals’ lives. For many, it added more.
So we've launched "Finally, free to think", a campaign built on that gap between promise and reality, and a new product capability designed to close it.
Why most AI tools keep failing finance teams
The problem isn’t that AI tools are bad at their jobs. It’s that their jobs are wrong. When the output of any AI interaction still requires a human to validate, correct and take accountability for it, you haven’t removed work from someone’s plate — you’ve just changed its shape. In finance, where a single extraction error can affect a deal or a credit decision, that dynamic is worse than useless. It’s a liability dressed up as efficiency.
V7’s own social listening across finance communities put it plainly:
“80% correct 80% of the time is useless in a field where 100% accuracy is required.”
— Finance professional, r/FPandA
Harvard Business Review described this as the AI Intensification Effect: the tendency of AI tools to shift burden rather than remove it, leaving professionals to validate machine output on top of their original work. V7 was built specifically to avoid this.
Skills is what elimination actually looks like
Alongside the campaign, V7 is introducing Skills — a new capability within V7 Go that changes what the platform can do with a document task. A Skill is not a prompt. Where a prompt generates a response and stops, a Skill defines how a task gets executed: the steps, the logic, the tools, the output format. Agents sequence Skills together to handle complex multi-step workflows — research, extraction, analysis, document generation — without returning the work to the human at each stage.
Teams can define their own Skills based on how they actually operate, from lease abstraction to investment memo preparation. Once built, they run consistently across the organisation. The work happens and it doesn’t come back.
Finally, free to think
The campaign runs 3–12 March across Liverpool Street Station and Bishopsgate. Rather than defining ourselves as as another AI solution, we chose a different angle: not what the technology does, but what it gives back.
Come chat with us at our pop-up in Shoreditch from March 10 - March 12 in Shoreditch. More details here.
