Industry · Automation
Will AI help or hinder the future of accountancy?
A 2018 argument about automation and accounting jobs, and what it looks like with several years of hindsight.
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About this article
This post previously reproduced an article published by Accountancy Age in July 2018 in full. It has been replaced with a short summary and commentary, with the original linked, because we cannot evidence a licence to republish it. Read the original on Accountancy Age.
The 2018 article asked whether automation of audit, payroll, tax and banking work would displace accountants. Its answer was that automation would take the mechanical work and leave the judgement — freeing accountants from processing and moving them towards interpretation, compliance and advice.
What has held up
The central claim looks right. Document processing, expense checking and transaction coding have largely stopped being manual tasks in firms that have adopted the tools, and the roles have not disappeared — they have moved. The people who used to enter bills are reviewing exceptions and answering questions the ledger cannot.
What has not
The specific predictions have aged poorly, as specific technology predictions do. The article expected accounting tasks to be "fully automated" by 2020. They were not, and are not. Adoption has been uneven, and the parts that remain manual are the parts that were always going to be hard: documents that do not follow a format, decisions that need context, and anything where being wrong has consequences.
The part worth keeping
The useful framing is the one the article got right: automation is a change in what a person spends attention on, not a removal of the person. That has been our experience building accounts payable software. The extraction is the easy half. The review step — a human looking at the extracted data next to the source document — is the half that makes it trustworthy, and it is not going away.
Originally published on Accountancy Age: read the original article.
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