Finance and accounting professionals can play a crucial role championing the adoption of AI across their organisations, writes Andrew Harding FCMA, CGMA, chief executive: management accounting at AICPA & CIMA, together as the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants.
When it comes to integrating artificial intelligence (AI) tools in business, almost every profession and industry have moved from asking “should we do this?” to “how do we do this?”. The finance and accounting profession is no exception.
Finance professionals are being presented with two choices: repeat old patterns, clinging to traditional models and risk being left behind, or evolve by harnessing the power of AI to shape the future. This is an unprecedented opportunity for transformational change.
Finance and accounting profession can steer AI adoption within the organisation
While human judgement and communication are still critical and irreplaceable, AI will prove invaluable at every level of the business value chain, transforming data into a strategic asset, and speeding up the data to decision-making processes, while improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of business operations.
In recent years, the AI landscape has undergone significant transformation due to numerous groundbreaking innovations. It has evolved from merely automating tasks and enhancing efficiency to playing a pivotal role in driving true business value—a crucial element at the core of the finance and accounting function.
The profession can help balance the risks and opportunities of AI
The finance and accounting profession has a critical role to play in the adoption and integration of AI into the organisation, and this includes providing a strong governance role in the ethical, safe and effective use of AI tools.
It starts with understanding and balancing the AI risks and opportunities:
- Job Displacement: While AI might make some roles redundant, it also creates new job opportunities. Either way, the transition could be challenging for many workers and needs to be managed. You need to be thinking about upskilling and reskilling employees to collaborate and actively participate in AI-driven productivity initiatives. AI is not about replacing humans but is about augmenting and leveraging human capability.
- Security and Privacy Risks: AI systems can be used for malicious purposes, from advanced cyber-attack techniques that might be difficult to defend against, to concerns about privacy and surveillance. The notion that AI might be used to perpetrate fraud schemes and other nefarious activity should come as no surprise. On the flipside, AI excels in pattern recognition, which makes it a powerful tool for detecting anomalies that could indicate fraudulent activities.
- Bias and Discrimination: AI does not ‘think’, it learns from existing data which means that AI systems can exacerbate existing biases if trained on biased data. That means you need to have confidence in the data that it is learning from. Traceability is key, so keep an audit trail. Trustworthy sources of data enable the trust required to make AI a useful technology for informing decision-making.
- Human Autonomy: Despite its many strengths, AI is still a tool that requires human oversight. The finance and accounting professional brings the ethical judgment, business acumen, and contextual understanding that AI lacks. Therefore, while AI can offer data-driven insights, it’s the human element that understands organisational culture, stakeholder concerns, and long-term business strategy.
- Ethics and Governance: You need to have a proactive strategy in place to sustain the ethical stance of your organisation when using this type of technology. The multifaceted nature of AI, coupled with its potential to impact decision-making processes, data security, and ethical considerations, underscores the need for a strategic and comprehensive approach to its development and deployment. Finance and accounting professionals emerge as crucial stakeholders that can navigate the complexities of AI governance.
- Control and Alignment Issues: There are fears about whether highly advanced AI systems could be controlled or would always act in alignment with human intentions, particularly if they develop unforeseen capabilities or goals. Humans will always be able to oversee AI systems, interpret outcomes, and apply critical judgment to anomalies that AI identifies but cannot contextualise.
- Manage Expectations: AI will not magically raise your organisation’s productivity rate if it is not deployed and monitored effectively. Think about how to measure progress and have a wide range of indicators and a timescale over which you expect to see improvements. Apply good management practice as you would with any other capital investment.
Of course, the adoption of AI is not only a forward-looking strategy but a necessary one to enhance and augment every function within businesses, but the road ahead cannot just be about adapting to the changes brought about by AI on a reactive basis. The finance and accounting profession must learn as much as possible about AI technology and its capabilities, both now and in the future.
We need to be early adopters of these technologies, not only to take advantage of the productivity and quality gains, but so that we can better understand how the AI technology works and its potential to fail.
Our role as finance and accounting professionals is to collaborate with AI, adding our experience, market knowledge, and strategic vision that AI alone cannot, to bring more value, insight, and efficiency to our organisations. This collaboration and understanding of AI and human expertise is key to unlocking new levels of performance and success across the business.