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The finance world might be in a state of high anxiety over AI and whether it’ll replace jobs. But for some of the accounting world’s leading lights, the technology’s giving them a case of deja vu.
Every time a new innovation comes out, pundits claim it will put accountants out of business, Mark Koziel, CEO of the AICPA, said during a keynote speech at that organization’s Engage conference.
And that’s been happening for a long time, he added. “The creation of the electronic calculator was the major innovation in the 1930s,” he said. “And you know what they said back in the ’30s? ‘Wow, with this electronic calculator, I don’t know why we’re going to need all these accountants anymore.’”
The same thing happened when the microcomputer debuted in the 1960s and the spreadsheet in the 1970s, Koziel noted. (In fact, demand for accountants and management analysts actually rose after the advent of spreadsheets.) The advent of AI, he predicted to CFO Brew, means the profession will go through “a temporary blip of trying to figure out what AI” can do and where talent needs to be redeployed.
Tom Hood, EVP for business engagement and growth at the AICPA, likewise took a tempered, but still optimistic, view of AI.
“All the major CFOs we’re working with are saying they’re not thinking of AI as a headcount reduction [tool] in the immediate term,” he told CFO Brew. “In five years, they think they will be slowing up new hiring as they upskill their existing finance skills.”
But he also believes that AI will accelerate financial accounting’s transition toward “higher-value strategic roles,” he said. “And we’re, in fact, seeing that all over the place.” Newer workers will need to upskill quickly, he said, but will spend less time on the “soul-sucking, entry-level work that all accountants have to do.” They’re also “going to have to have the level of understanding how AI works to be able to understand whether its output is legitimate or not,” he said.
All this has happened before: But Koziel isn’t that concerned about the profession’s ability to upskill. Accounting has had to do so multiple times in the past to keep up with technological change, he pointed out.
“What I did as an auditor 30 years ago, as a new associate, [and] what auditors are doing today, are night and day,” he noted. Before he became an auditor, success in that field was measured in terms of “being able to add up a trial balance within a short amount of time,” he said by way of example. But by the time he entered the field, auditors were uploading trial balances into Excel or audit platforms, and that skill didn’t matter so much anymore.
Accounting’s now facing another “learning gap,” Koziel said. Firms and academia will need to update their training to prepare new accountants for an AI-powered workforce, but the profession’s not “quite there yet.”
AI’s creating opportunities for accountants: AI comes with opportunities for the profession, Koziel said. Accounting firms are actually adopting AI more quickly than general businesses are, he pointed out, which means that firms can help clients implement AI.
And he thinks accountants could be called upon to provide AI oversight, in much the same way the profession provides SOC reports on companies’ data security practices. “We are the trusted profession for assurance over many things,” he said. “And I think AI is going to be a piece of that as well.”
The AICPA has also dipped its toe into the AI pool by building Josi, a chatbot solely for professional standards and guidance. “What’s cool is it’s a closed instance,” Hood said. “All of our data stays in there.” Unlike, say, ChatGPT, it doesn’t contain any outside data that could lead it to make the wrong inferences, he explained. Josi’s outputs come with source references, so CPAs can readily check it against the authoritative standards.
“That’s our beginning of doing something big with AI as an association,” Hood said.