Accounting is, famously or perhaps infamously, the realm of number-crunching and virtual boatloads of data.
As a discipline and pursuit, it tends to attract the more math-oriented crowd within a business school’s program. In addition to that, it also just attracts anyone who is looking for a well-paying job outside of college.
And as with most fields, its practices evolve over time, and more or less ceaselessly. Such is the way of things in a world that is forever innovating.
As of right now, one of the biggest sources of accounting’s continual evolution is the remarkable innovations that the field of A.I. has seen in the recent decade, especially over the last two or three years.
Below, we cover some of the ways that the field of accounting is seeing a lot of change on account of (no pun intended, but appreciated nonetheless) artificial intelligence.
Getting Creative with Accounting and Generative A.I.
Accountants are not all doing math, at least not exclusively.
In fact, a fair deal of the job involves creativity, especially with regards to creating communications for internal and external information sharing.
What this often involves is the writing up of a report or the creation of a graph or spreadsheet or what have you that passes on the requisite info in question.
At times, this may even entail the creation of a short video that concisely communicates to the viewer some essential finding or principle.
In these cases, an accounting firm usually takes care of this stuff in-house. And for many of the works, the information is perhaps too specialized or technical to reliably pass on to someone without the knowledge.
And so the employees in the old days of accounting would have had to tackle the creative projects by their lonesome. But given the rise of generative artificial intelligence (Gen A.I.), creating these communications becomes much easier and less time-consuming.
That, in turn, leaves more time to the actual, well accounting work that accountants do throughout their work day.
Gen A.I. platforms are becoming increasingly popular anywhere with an Internet connection.
Text-Generating Platforms
As of this writing, the text-generating platforms are likely the most powerful among the offerings. Using these for typing up something like a quarterly report for a client, with only non-sensitive client data given to the Gen A.I. platform, can be a good time-saving use for an accountant.
We emphatically recommend keeping any sensitive entre nous client data away from Gen A.I., for security reasons. Augmenting an A.I.-generated report with one’s own sensitive-data additions can be a good and favorable compromise in using Gen A.I. to create private client reports.
The image-generating stuff is of course pretty impressive stuff–let us not be desensitized to the wonders of technology by our familiarity with high-tech innovations–but can be finicky depending on the scope of the project, although admittedly the same complaint could be made about the text-generating platforms as well.
Something like a visual graph about recent trends in the financial markets can be just among many interesting uses of image-generating Gen A.I. platforms.
Then of the main mass-appeal Gen A.I. platforms there are the video-generating options. This kind of A.I. is still in its training-wheel stages, although admittedly it is still quite impressive nonetheless.
Increasingly, A.I. companies are trying to offer their Gen A.I. suite under the guise of a single platform, so that it acts as a Swiss Army Knife for content creation. For accountants, you can expect such A.I. to hit the market in the coming years.
Reviewing Accounting Transactions
All competent accountants recognize that they find God and the Devil alike in the details.
Sweating the small stuff, for an accountant, is a large part of the role.
A good A.I. platform will go through a comprehensive training phase where it is shown oodles of data relating to the task at hand. Here, a good transaction-reviewing A.I. platform will have feasted its digital eyes on countless financial reports to detect the godlike and devilish details alike.
This has, you can imagine, more than one use.
Perhaps the most obvious here is that it can detect errors. Then, like a thorough editor, it can bring the errors to the attention of human accountants to review with human eyes.
But another big one is that it can detect instances of fraud, which is one of the biggest challenges in the financial world. By detecting such a thing early, accountants can help save their clients money.
That, in turn, leads to better client satisfaction for accountants.
Customer Relations in Accounting
Lastly, having a dedicated in-house chatbot that can converse with potential and existing clients can save accountants a lot of time in answering more broad questions.
Of course, the more sensitive conversations should be left to the humans.
But a chatbot that answers general questions about a firm’s services and practices can help attract and retain clients for a firm.
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