"AI won't take away jobs in accounting," people often say, but they're wrong — artificial intelligence, along with plain old automation, is going to get rid of a lot of current jobs in accounting.
"It won't take away jobs," they say, "it'll just take away tasks." But jobs are just collections of tasks assigned to individual people, and if AI can do enough of those tasks, employers will start figuring out ways to consolidate the remaining tasks so that they can be done by fewer people — which means fewer jobs.
This shouldn't be a problem: The profession has lots of jobs that it's struggling to fill, so it should be a relief to be able to hand some of them off to computers. The real question isn't how much work AI will do in accounting, because it's going to end up doing a lot; the question is which work will AI do — and which work will accountants reserve to themselves?
During a recent Accounting Today virtual summit on AI, technology thought leader and Scaling New Heights impresario Joe Woodard brought up a useful historical parallel: Before they were the circuit-and-wire machines we know now, "computers" were actually people — flesh-and-blood folks with extraordinary math skills that they sold to businesses that needed lots of complicated calculations done fast. A similar transition may happen to "bookkeepers" and "tax preparers," so that in a generation, these titles that we now apply to people will instead be applied to programs driven by AI.
Bookkeeping and tax prep are tasks that take up huge amounts of accountants' time, and the usual suggestion is that being able to hand them over to AI will free accountants up to be "advisors" — and that's certainly true. But the real benefit is the ability to focus on whatever tasks you find most meaningful.
At 2022's Digital CPA Conference, workplace researcher Marcus Buckingham shared that truly engaged employees enjoy at least 20% of the work they do on a regular basis. They don't get much more engaged if they enjoy more than that — but they quickly become very unhappy if they start to enjoy less than that.
The point, I hope, is clear: If you and your employees only need to enjoy 20% of the work you do to be engaged, why not get artificial intelligence to do as much of the other 80% as possible? That way you can cherry-pick the most interesting, most rewarding tasks for yourselves and your human staff, and potentially boost engagement and satisfaction levels.
The simple fact is that AI will soon be capable of doing a great deal of what accountants (and many others) do every day, and we may all find ourselves in professions that need fewer people to do grunt work. The trick is to embrace AI early enough that we decide which work AI does and which we retain — and not vice versa.
