Artificial Intelligence(AI), Friend or Foe?

When we think of AI, many of us immediately picture the robot that will one day fight humanity. I am neither supporting nor denying that thought, however, I wish to invite your mind elsewhere for the purpose of this article.

So what is AI? It is ultimately the creation of computer systems or applications which are capable of carrying out tasks typically performed by humans. AI has revolutionised the way we approach problem solving and it continues to learn from experience. It would have never been possible to come this far without human beings feeding various types of data onto the internet.

In whichever industry we can think of, AI is becoming a major topic, it is therefore relevant across the board. There are areas that AI has undoubtedly created improvements, significant achievements and transformation and will continue to do so, the medical industry is one of many, scanning machines have become able to predict possible health issues in a patient which have not yet even developed, they are able to do this by having gathered intelligence from a huge pool of similar patients and easily spot trends leading to lifesaving preventative measures.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Friend or Foe? However, there are many areas where AI has become a major area of concern. I have come across a restaurant in Kenya where robots are serving the clients, this was seen as a very controversial move considering the huge supply of labour in Kenya as opposed to the lack of opportunities.

Moving into the Accounting world, AI is still seen as an aid to Accountants, a lot of the manual accounting has been reduced significantly from the pre – accounting systems era making the work of the Accountant far less labour intensive, this was naturally a welcomed development.

The next advancement we have seen was the automation of data entry, the ability of AI to extract data from invoices, the performance of tax filing with a much less chance of human error, the ability of scanning through large data volumes to spot discrepancies which are key for Audit.

As you can see, many of these tasks are treading over the work of junior Accountants. Although AI makes work more efficient, removing the need for junior Accountants will eventually mean less senior Accountants are produced, we can see where this is going. As AI gets more intelligent and becomes more able to perform heavy analysis work, easily spot trends and anomalies, more of the analytical side of the Accountant’s role will also be disrupted.

There is a glimmer of hope however, despite its inevitable progression, humans will always require a human touch when it comes to practicing judgment, presenting the analysis with reliability, providing possible strategies and plans to mitigate any risk and ultimately providing businesses with tangible solutions that are catered for them specifically. This however means one thing, Accountants must up their skill sets significantly to remain relevant and not risk AI taking over completely.

Another question which therefore offers itself is will Accounting become obsolete? Well quite simply, I believe eventually many jobs will become obsolete but there’s still a long road ahead of us before we get there, let us make use of this time when we are still in charge and evolve more into consultancy as that is possibly going to be where our human strength lies.

By ACCA Razan Al-Mahdi