Impacts to Accounting & Finance by Artificial Intelligence Automation

As business implements more and more technology to streamline their operations the benefits of saving time, minimising costs, increasing productivity and better accuracy are starting to be realised. This means this is hardly a trend that will fade anytime soon. If you or your business are not 'there yet' it’s better to catch up now rather than being left behind with the rest of the competition.

We've moved on from the times when cloud technology was an unknown territory for especially for Accounting and Finance but the industry players are now fully aware, prepared or in cloud. This leaves us to ponder where to next? I think people are now starting to set their attention to the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and we can see that this is happening at a much faster pace.

Both Data and work as we know it will be strongly affected by AI. With bots now able to determine and sort the information into different accounts by themselves, meaning AI is already delivering solo performances in the field. Further to this, Bots can tell and organise data coming from the same source into different categories, so if you have a monthly subscription and or one off purchases coming from the supplier, bots will automatically understand that they are of a different nature and will set them under different chart of accounts. Machine learning is also observable since these bots can learn from various human inputs to make better judgments and to adapt to accounting professionals’ behaviour patterns.

The effect or major changes due to AI on the typical Accounting and Finance role will have one of two observable outcomes:

• The menial / administrative tasks as they stand right now are slowly becoming scarcer, even some operational tasks traditionally performed by accountants, such as dedicated accounts payable and accounts receivable ones, are already being performed by AI or are outsourced.
• The other observable is the way accounting and finance will be structured within the organisation more than likely a small footprint but they have a greater impact.

The results of the above inevitably are better performance and enhanced cost reductions and although AI is already finding its way into the finance and accounting industry, it’s not been fully adopted quite yet. Without a doubt, the accounting industry has a bright future ahead with a focus more on value add than the menial.

Part 2 of this article might be a review of the tools avaialble. What do you think? Was my assessment fair? Leave comments, or feel free to reach out on social media.