i study what happens when ai takes part in high-stakes capital decisions: who decides, where errors start and how far they travel, and when people should trust, override or audit the machine.

most of those decisions get made inside spreadsheet models, so that’s where i look, down to the individual cell.

what i’m working on

errors in real financial models
a corpus-scale study of 4,207 formula-bearing workbooks from two public datasets, the enron corpus and fuse. every formula is recomputed and checked against the value excel saved in the file.

• errors rise with model size: 60.3% (enron) and 41.5% (fuse) of workbooks with 1,000+ formulas have at least one high-precision finding
• private working models carry about 1.4× more hardcoded plugs than spreadsheets people publish
• 97.31% of fuse workbooks recompute with zero divergence across 4,033,846 formulas

methods, limitations and commands to reproduce: basis1.tech/methodology

humans and ai agents in the same model
how analysts and ai agents divide the work when they build and revise one financial model, which ai changes people accept or override, and how mistakes from each spread through dependent cells. the setting is affordable-housing (lihtc) underwriting.

algorithmic capital allocation
how model-driven selection compares with human judgment in early-stage investing, and whether it changes who gets funded.

traceable ai for regulated finance
design principles for ai whose every number can be traced and defended to a lender, regulator or investment committee. builds on 4 granted u.s. patents.

tools

basis: a spreadsheet engine that can tell you why a number is what it is. it recalculates excel workbooks independently, checks every result against excel’s saved values, and keeps a history for every cell.

before this

computational science: a phd in theoretical chemistry at uc irvine and a postdoc at lawrence berkeley national lab, working on numerical methods for large-scale simulation. papers are on the cv.

get in touch

open to collaborators, especially in information systems, operations and real estate finance. btkrull@gmail.com