Accounting’s AI future and the human component

There’s a clear message reverberating through the tax and accounting profession: What made you successful in the past will not make you successful in the future.

Gone are the days where accountants provide value by crunching the numbers and completing routine tasks behind the glow of a laptop. Those tasks are increasingly being done by AI agents and offshore workers.

While thought leaders trumpet the importance of innovation and AI proficiency, they’re often missing one key component.

I’m referring to the need to sharpen human skills that can’t be outsourced to AI.  Storytelling, leadership, and presentation abilities are just a few examples of the type of human skills that are increasingly important in accounting.

AI as a collaborative partner

To answer the call for innovation, I suggest a collaboration process that pairs human intelligence with AI’s unique superpowers. It’s also helpful to break the innovation process into three phases made up of ideation, evaluation, and execution.

Before we get into it, let’s discuss one critical point.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to collaborate with AI. Used correctly, it can supercharge your expertise. Used incorrectly, you risk becoming an “AI regurgitator”, and as MIT found, you may even experience cognitive decline.

Let’s explore the right way to tackle the ideation, evaluation, and execution phases of the innovation process using AI as your collaborative partner.

Ideation

You should start off with a clear understanding of what you’d like to solve and accomplish. You’ll need to articulate this well in an AI prompt to kick off your collaboration.

This is not an outsourcing exercise; it’s essential that you are an active participant. To that end, you should have an idea or two that you can feed AI to help communicate your line of thinking. Don’t worry if your initial ideas have obvious flaws or are half baked. The point is to give your GPT collaborator something to work with.

Start off by prompting AI with the context of what you’re trying to solve and accomplish. Include the ideas you’ve been tinkering with, and describe how you’d like your AI partner to help. The more robust the prompt the better. 

AI can be particularly helpful to provide a list of alternative solutions or a list of probing questions that might spark an idea you hadn’t considered. 

Be clear that you’re not looking for a surface-level response, and that you’d like to see novel ideas and first-of-kind solutions. Try not to gravitate to any particular idea right away. You really want AI to help you uncover a high volume of potential solutions.

Evaluation

Once you’ve ideated with your AI partner, it’s time to evaluate the most promising solutions, and test their validity and efficacy.

You can ask AI to elaborate on a particular solution or for clarification on how that solution would achieve your goal. You can direct AI to provide you with a list of pros and cons from an accountant’s point of view. 

Be mindful of how you interpret AI’s response. Research from Princeton University found that AI tends to tell you what you want to hear, so be sure to ask AI to play devil’s advocate and offer opposing arguments.

After chatting back and forth with your AI collaborator, you’ll realize whether you’ve got the beginnings of a good solution or if you need to revisit the ideation phase.

Execution

When you’re ready to execute this is where your AI bestie really shines. It’s time to plan out how you’d like to bring your innovative solution into the real world. 

You can ask AI to create a roadmap that outlines actionable next steps. You can request a one-pager that suçcinctly communicates the problem, solution, and expected outcome. You can direct AI to create a persuasive proposal that describes the expected impact of your solution.

One of the most helpful features is to have AI create materials for you. The output can be in a variety of formats such as an email, slides, charts, visuals, an audio overview, or a document of speaker notes for a future presentation. 

Accountability

You should consider the output that your AI partner produces as a rough draft, not a final product. It’s likely that you’ll want to apply heavy revisions before you pass off this work as your own. 

AI may have helped get you to this point, but now you need to take ownership. If your AI collaborator made any errors or missteps along the way that you didn’t catch, you are accountable. Be prepared to stand by your work if it gets pressure-tested or criticized by others. 

Accountants that mask their knowledge gaps by copy and pasting AI output will eventually be exposed. AI doesn’t replace the need to be a subject matter expert; it just empowers those experts to have an even greater impact. This is why it’s so important to apply your own critical thinking throughout the ideation, evaluation, and execution phase. 

The human side of AI

When it comes to bringing your idea into the real world and sharing it with others, this is where your human advantage takes the spotlight. You need to leave your AI partner behind. This is your work product. Your words, your voice, your thoughts, and ideas. 

Accountants will become financial storytellers, engaging presenters, and add value through personal experience and insight. We have been trying to rebrand ourselves as trusted advisors for more than a decade. AI will help expedite that transition.

This means more face time with clients, deeper relationships, and a greater emphasis on building trust. These are areas where AI can’t help which is why it’s essential for accountants to hone these uniquely human skills.

The future proof accountant

In today’s AI era, the most successful accountants will drive innovation by treating AI like a collaborative partner. They’ll also master the human skills to excel where AI struggles. That’s a winning combination for accountants that are looking to future proof their career and thrive in today’s evolving workplace.

Editor’s note: Many thanks to our author, Mike Manalac, for his creative drawings for this article.