AI isn’t accounting’s first rodeo

Will AI replace accountants? Don’t make them laugh.

“We’ve been through it so many times,” AICPA President and CEO Mark Koziel told CFO Brew. “Every time there’s some type of innovation that comes in—AI is going to put us out of business, blockchain is going to put us out of business, the advent of the personal computer is going to put us out of business.”

Obviously, accountants are still here. And in fact, they’re starting to embrace AI and view it as a force multiplier, Koziel and other AICPA leaders said at the association’s 10th annual Engage conference, held in Las Vegas.

Accountants worldwide think the profession has a bright future, the AICPA’s Rise2040 project found through a survey of more than 6,000 accountants in 25 countries. The survey determined that 80% of accountants were optimistic about the profession; 24% said they were “very” optimistic.

Rise2040 also resurfaced a classic theme: Accountants believe that trust and human skills will remain paramount and even take on increased value in the age of AI. At a time when deepfakes and altered audio and images are easy to create, trust is crucial, Sue Coffey, CEO for public accounting at the AICPA, said during a town hall session. “You don’t know what’s real, and we are obviously a profession that provides that trust, and we need to be prepared to deliver it,” she said.

AI’s ability to automate rote work can put a premium on human judgment, and will likely accelerate the ongoing shift from compliance to advisory work within the accounting profession. “What’s different now is that with AI tools, we’ll be able to see that preparation time” start to shrink, AICPA Chair Jan Lewis said during the town hall session.

Lewis, a tax partner at BMSS Advisors, said her firm uses AI to prepare tax returns, and she noted that though the technology saves time, there are some things it can’t do. In one instance, while reviewing a tax return, Lewis noticed an opportunity to recommend a retirement plan to a client with a successful business.

“AI is not going to know that. We know that. And that’s our job, to be the advisor,” she said.

Early days and speed bumps. The Rise2040 survey found that the majority of firms—58%—are “exploring” AI, while 30% are in the pilot stage and just 11% have scaled the technology.

That’s to be expected, Koziel said. “Our job isn’t to try and eliminate the adoption curve, because it’s always going to be [there],” he told us. “Our job is to shrink the timeline from beginning to end as these shifts occur, because we’re not going to have as much time to wait to bring the late majority along.”

Today, most accountants wouldn’t want to live without Excel. But there was a time when they weren’t sure they could rely on it, Koziel said, recalling an incident when an audit partner asked him to check Excel’s work, asking how he could know that it had calculated the formulas correctly.

But AI, which is probabilistic, is not as foolproof as Excel. Lewis recalled an incident when she looked over an AI-prepared tax return and saw an expense on one schedule that “really should have gone on another schedule,” she said.

The technology’s also created some unexpected headaches. Clients are telling accountants that Claude has found errors on their tax returns, Koziel said, when the problem is that the LLM is working with bad data.

“The practitioner has to explain to their client how wrong Claude is,” because Claude “could be looking at IRS rules and regulations that are actually 20 years old,” he said during the town hall session. But “now you have to justify yourself,” he added.