Whether you are ready for AI to be in your professional lives or not, the fact is this next level of automation is here to stay, and it is time to get comfortable with some aspect of it.
But at issue isn’t so much why so much as it is what makes the most sense for an accountant to use. To do that, we must break things down in the most basic and practical manner possible — something that needs to be done with more frequency if adoption, and proper use, is to grow.
First and foremost, accountants must understand that AI isn’t software. It was not, and is not being built, to resemble or behave like it.
To put it simply, software applications, while they do automate tasks, are designed with a specific purpose and essentially only do what they are built to do. Anything beyond that will require an “add-on” or some API to be involved. In short, software exists in an “if/then” scenario and hits a proverbial wall beyond that directive.
AI, however, at least as it stands now, is your assistant. Think of it in two ways. The first is almost as a child or inexperienced individual that comes with a seemingly endless amount of upside potential. A genius of a child, but a child nonetheless. It needs you to tell it what you want, and the more detail the instruction, the better.
The second analogy is, in a way, the most important, and it is that of a high-powered vehicle. It has the potential to perform in ways you have never imagined, but it needs the best fuel you can find. That fuel is data.
To break it down, AI (right now, anyway) will work best for you when it knows the tasks you want performed and that you fuel it with accurate data. The point I’m getting to is AI needs you, and as an accounting professional, you understand the needs better than it does, can verify the data you fuel it with is up to snuff, and ultimately ensure it performed the job you wanted it to do.
Make no mistake; like any child or “junior level” worker, it will fail and even get things wrong. The “magic” of AI, much like most people, is that it can learn from failure and improve. Sometimes, it will need to do that in order to get better. And again, the more accurate the data it has to learn from, the more consistently it will perform the task as well.
Now, I am no tech expert. I have been around business technology and its myriad uses for several decades and can say this AI is beyond next-level; it is next-universe. That fact does scare people and immediately minds race to human replacement and obsolescence.
No one has a crystal ball, but for where we are at now, AI and the things it can automate do require humans, the more experienced the better. And at least in the foreseeable future, it will continue to.
For specific tasks and use cases, there is a growing number of videos and Looms from some pretty darn expert minds in the profession that will walk you through what exactly you can do with AI in your firm.
But as for the replacement narrative, like cloud before it, AI will likely replace tasks as automation tends to do. The ideal is reduction of time and, eventually, errors for the most rote and time-consuming tasks. But people? Trained professionals with human knowledge and the most important of all, empathy, will unlikely be replaced.
Don’t ever forget why you got into accounting. Yes, it is a job with the potential for a high financial upside. But at your core, accountants are helping people. They rely on you to help keep their financial health and their dreams of also serving other humans through the products and services they provide in safe hands.
And because people will always need other people for connection and assurance, AI will remain a tool that, hopefully, you all will learn to use to your benefit, and the benefit of your clients.