THE REAL CHANGE AI BRINGS

According to 2023 research by OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania, accountants and auditors are among the occupations with the highest exposure to AI.

But will AI take over the accountants’ jobs, or replace the tasks that accountants perform? At this juncture, redefining the “work” accountants do is necessary.

Over the years, technology has transformed the world of accountants and the very work accountants do. Accountants were collecting data, entering the figures into software, organising them, ensuring the correct application of accounting regulations, compiling financial statements and tax returns, and reviewing/analysing them. Now, accountants have moved on to more analytical and advisory work as data and information handling and management is more a technology function than a human function. AI takes this change forward, and at a very fast pace. Without AI, software programmers manually wrote the software code to automate more and more of the work of accountants. It was a tedious, time-consuming, and costly path. With its machine learning and natural language processing capabilities, AI can process large volumes of data very quickly and actually learn from the data, without requiring programmers to write the software code. In other words, software companies with access to years of accurate accounting, tax, audit, payroll, etc. data, can now use AI to make such software far more capable. For example, you may not need to set “rules” to classify a transaction; the AI software can do so automatically from learning from billions of transactions that accountants have classified over the years. And, this is just one example.

HOW TO THINK AHEAD OF AI

Think of all the work you do and how that relates to the relevant “data”.

Think further about what you do with that data and how, and then think about how AI can learn from that data to do what you now do. Any work tasks based on defined rules and regulations can be easy for AI to gobble up.

You would, therefore, want to treat AI as your intelligent, modern data assistant. (Yes, AI should and must report to you.)

You’d like to get as much data work done by AI as possible. Think of new, much higher efficiency, accuracy, and productivity that AI will make available to you.

In the increasingly AI-driven accountancy profession, if your work involves being closer to “data” handling, AI will likely highly impact your career.

Let AI help turn you into an AiCCOUNTANT®, not replace you. AI won’t replace you, but an accountant augmented by AI will.