Trade Secrets: The Calculator Never Killed the Accountant

I don’t grade diamonds. I spend my days helping businesses work out what to do when a machine quietly gets better at a job a person used to do. And by that measure, something has already happened that a lot of the trade is trying hard not to notice.  

The people who actually grade stones are the ones telling us about it. The Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the lab everyone treats as the gold standard, now leans on artificial intelligence to grade clarity, the trickiest of the 4Cs, working with IBM. Pritesh Patel, who became GIA president and CEO in 2025, said it plainly while he was still the institute’s chief operating officer: Clarity was the last frontier, and AI cracked it. The GIA expects the machine to handle seven or eight out of every 10 diamonds it sees.  

That is not a player talking. That is the referee. 

There is a player talking, too. Sarine Technologies’ David Block, who until this summer ran the company that builds the grading machines, will tell you that automated grading will eventually do all of it. Of course he will. He sells the machines. What you can’t wave away is that the referee, the one with nothing to sell, made the same call. 

Not everyone agrees. The chief of the International Gemological Institute (IGI) has looked at the same technology and said it helps, but he doubts it can replace the human eye just yet. He is half right, and telling which half is the whole game.

Here is the strategist’s read.  

We have bundled two different jobs under one word and called them both grading.  

The first is measurement. Is this stone a particular color or the shade below, this clarity or the next one down? That is arithmetic, and machines own arithmetic. Ask three tired people to measure the same room with a tape that stretches, and you will get three answers. In 2023, Canadian broadcaster CBC’s Marketplace bought diamond rings from three big Canadian chains and had them regraded. One ring lost nearly a quarter of its value on the second opinion. The stores’ own defense was that grading is subjective. A machine isn’t. It gives you the same answer on Monday morning and on Friday afternoon. 

The second job is judgment. The odd stone the software has never met. The color a clever cut throws off. The customer who needs a person to explain what a report can and can’t promise. No machine does that yet. 

The calculator didn’t kill the accountant; it killed the accountant who refused to become an adviser. Hand the counting to the thing that counts better, and move your best people to the judgment, the disputes, and the trust: the part for which a customer will always want a human. 

Elle Hill is the founder and CEO of Hill & Co., an AI-forward management consulting firm specializing in the global diamond, gemstone and fine-jewelry industry. She holds nonexecutive director roles in the industry, sits on two advisory boards covering fine-jewelry sustainability and technology, and was appointed to the CIBJO Technology Committee in 2022. 

Main image: Elle Hill. (Hill & Co.)