AI Could Increase the Demand for Accountants

In a recent blog post, Tomas Pueyo asked the question, When Will AI Take Your Job? He considered a number of different types of jobs and professions. An analysis that he performed (below) identified that the number of accountants has been increasing, despite the fact that technology has made accounting tools more accessible. (The observation was counter-intuitive to Pueyo, since, according to him, “Anybody can use Excel!”)

Pueyo speculates that demand for good accounting has grown faster than technology’s ability to increase the supply of good accounting output. Organizations simply want more and more good information for making decisions.

Because technology has not reduced the number of accountants previously, it’s not a foregone conclusion that artificial intelligence (AI) will put accountants out of their jobs in the foreseeable future. In fact, there may be good reasons to believe that the opposite will be true.

AI Will Unlock A Universe of Useful Accounting Data

If organizations increasingly want good information for making decisions, then increases in the accessibility of useful accounting data could lead to an increase the demand for accountants who will analyze and interpret that data.

To brainstorm AI’s potential for making useful accounting data more accessible, I asked ChatGPT to extract useful accounting data from a random article on Seeking Alpha, a website for investor analysis. The article discussed audience reception of a recent special on Netflix. ChatGPT identified several elements of useful accounting data.

Then I asked ChatGPT to present the useful accounting data in “structured form,” which generally means presenting the data in a table of organized rows and labeled columns. As you can see, in the transcript of the conversation, ChatGPT presented a ranked table of the top ten titles by weekly streaming ratings for the week of March 6-12, the platform where they were streamed, and the billions of minutes spent streaming each title.

Increasing the accessibility of this information in a timely fashion may be useful to investors, creditors, advertisers, acting agencies, producers, screenplay writing services, cloud computing platforms, internet service providers, merchandise retailers, entertainment journalists, and others.

By structuring the data in tabular form, ChatGPT unlocked the data for analysis in its most accessible form because tables are easily imported into popular data analysis tools, such as Excel, Power BI and Tableau.

ChatGPT has not been designed for finding and structuring useful accounting data; however, an application specifically designed for that purpose might be able to use GPT-4, the technology that powers the latest version of ChatGPT, to find useful accounting data in a wide variety of sources and structure the data for analysis.

It’s All About the Data

Technologies that turn natural language and written articles into readily accessible accounting data could lead to more relevant, timely data for business decisions. And competition could drive more organizations to seek to organize, analyze, and interpret that data.

That means people who organize, analyze, and interpret information for business decisions may be in higher demand in the near future. Generally speaking, that sounds like good news for accountants.

To put a twist on the tweet at the top of this post: Imagine thinking that a technology that unlocks a universe of useful accounting data from the Internet—which then needs to be analyzed, interpreted, and presented for business decisions—will eliminate the need for accountants.