Skills
that help accounting professionals succeed alongside AI
By Ken Tysiac
January 29, 2018
There’s some understandable concern these
days about the possibility that increased use of artificial intelligence (AI)
will lead to job losses among accounting and audit professionals.
But Mike Baccala, PwC’s U.S. assurance
innovation leader, predicts that while accounting and auditing jobs may change
as AI use becomes more prevalent, those jobs won’t go away. Baccala is co-author of
a recent PwC report that predicts the effects that AI will have on the business
environment.
He said PwC already is working with AI
in a few capacities in client engagements. The firm is using an AI platform to
help nonaudit clients
extract data from their lease agreements as they implement the new FASB lease
accounting standard. Without AI, this extraction would take eight to 10 hours
to perform for each lease contract, and some clients have thousands of lease
contracts. With AI, that time is down to three or four hours per contract, and
it’s continuing to decline.
In addition, PwC financial statement auditors are using AI to draw data
out of client bank statements to help with substantive testing (證實測試) that’s required for auditing of cash. In both cases, Baccala said, the AI
hasn’t resulted in people being taken off the projects; instead, the people are performing
different duties.
The AI is pushing people toward performing
work that is more interesting,
Baccala said. For a long time, one of the more tedious tasks for accountants and auditors has been the
process of taking data and organizing them before they are analyzed and
audited. Those data could take the shape of a bunch of receipts and invoices in
a shoebox, or the form of various ledgers and spreadsheets.
AI can replace humans at the dull task of
extracting, organizing, and structuring the data. But those same accountants
and auditors working with AI perform different tasks. First, they teach the AI what data to
look for and how to organize them. Then they investigate anomalies. And because the AI
is working with all data rather than just a sampling (in the case of audits), there may be
more anomalies to investigate.
Meanwhile, the AI-enabled auditing of all data rather than just
samples is providing more value to clients.
“We haven’t actually removed anybody from
the practice [because of AI],” Baccala said. “We’ve freed them to do other
things, and we’re helping more clients with the process.”
Baccala acknowledged, though, that a significant
amount of “reskilling”
needs to take place to help accountants and auditors work effectively with AI.
He said traditional
CPA skills such as skepticism, judgment, analysis, and understanding technical
accounting will become even more important because those are qualities that AI is unlikely
to ever duplicate and, in a data-governed world, they are vital.
New
skills that help accountants and auditors succeed with
AI include:
l Fundamental data skills. “If you look at every client and the variability in their own
systems, processes, data, policies that affect that data and how the accounting
gets done, it’s a massively complicated web of different variables that can
change from client to client,” Baccala said. The most successful accountants and auditors will possess core data skills that allow
them to succeed as they serve clients with different systems and policies. These include data
strategy and data processing skills, as well as proficiency in statistics,
probability, and deductive reasoning.
l Storytelling ability. PwC is focused on training its people in the art of using data to
effectively convey meaning
and a message through storytelling. The AI can provide huge amounts of data,
but that’s useful only if accountants and auditors understand how to translate the data in a way that makes sense to their audience.
l Ability to automate. Accountants and auditors are likely to encounter processes used by
clients that could be improved through automation. Whether those are production processes or finance
processes, the ability to implement automation to improve efficiency and reduce costs will be a differentiator for CPAs.
Baccala cited studies pitting chessmasters against machines to explain that people
and machines working together
have been shown to be much
more effective than either people or machines working on their own. He
sees technology,
people, and processes as a three-legged stool essential for success
in any business. If you cut one leg short, the stool won’t support much weight.
So while leaders in business and the accounting profession embrace
technology, they should be careful not to neglect
their workforces and their processes, Baccala said.
“You cannot leave the people behind,” he
said. “Any organization that’s
trying to do this isn’t going to get very far with AI if they’re not upskilling
their people and using people as part of the process to move forward.”
—Ken Tysiac
(Kenneth.Tysiac@aicpa-cima.com) is a JofA editorial director.
