AI in advisory: What work is at risk for accountants?

AI in advisory: What work is at risk?

March 20, 2025 2:00 PM

While artificial intelligence is slowly making its way into advisory services (see "Staying ahead of AI"), not every field is at risk. The ones that will survive are those that are based on deep relationships that provide the professional the context necessary to fully understand a client's financial situation and become the trusted professional who is the first one they call with questions, concerns and ideas. We've seen how people achieve this in forensic accounting, estate planning, valuation and M&A advisory as just a few examples.

The ones that will not, on the other hand, are those that are primarily transactional and rely heavily on data analytics to deliver insights and advice. For example, the kind of financial planning and analysis that consists mainly of giving a firm some business data and receiving a report with charts and graphs in return is already being disrupted by AI and likely will not survive much longer.

What else is at risk? What else fits this description? What other advisory services should accountants no longer take for granted as part of their domain? Randy Johnston, executive vice president at accounting education and consulting firm K2 Enterprises, has observed a number of advisory fields that are starting to experience AI disruption and will need to either adapt or be eroded away in time. They include:

Internal process mapping and automation

Creating an advisory workflow in the cloud

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The market now sports AI-powered workflow process analysis tools that do much of what human specialists in this field have been doing for years. Johnston said that he has done manual process optimization for over 30 years, and compared to "traditional Six Sigma methodologies, AI-driven process optimization is a game-changer."

Anything that primarily involves financial modeling

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Financial modeling used to require specialized technical skills that many clients did not have, and so helping them construct those models in Excel was very valuable. "But now, you can run those same models through AI, and it does a much better job," Johnston said. "You still have to check the results, but it's far faster than starting from scratch."

Cybersecurity

Personal working on a computer with a large image of a lock on the screen.

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While cybersecurity as an overall field will likely grow, the kind of analytics-driven advisory on cybersecurity policies and controls that rely on one-off engagements without a deep understanding of the client will likely face AI disruption given the efficiencies it can produce.

"Just last week, I analyzed nine cyber insurance policies using AI," Johnston explained. "I've done this for years, but this time, I let AI do the heavy lifting. I had specific questions and built a table comparing the pros, cons and costs of each policy. The AI processed those policies in great detail, indexed citations within the contracts, and completed the work in under an hour — work that would have taken me 20 hours manually."

Transactional CAS

Online CFO - CAS - client accounting services

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Things like handling accounts payable and receivable, financial reporting, payroll and other bread-and-butter services often rely on fixed, repeatable processes that AI can easily take over. Similarly, CFO advisory that involves mainly financial strategy, budgeting, and forecasting will likely be disrupted by AI as well.

AI in advisory: What work is at risk?

Internal process mapping and automation

Tax notice management

Anything that primarily involves financial modeling

Cybersecurity

Transactional CAS