Accountants vs. Bots: who will do your taxes in 2020?

By Lauren Maffeo, a senior content analyst at GetApp (a Gartner company).

It’s that time of year: December has passed and left an onslaught of “X ways AI will disrupt X industry in 2019” pieces in its wake. Amidst these predictions, I worry that too much nuance will be lost in the noise.

It’s true that automation will change many jobs. Any rules-based, repetitive task will be outsourced to machines in the not-too-distant future. Since several jobs largely consist of such tasks, it’s true that increases in automation will impact some industries more than others – and accounting is one of them.

As accountants are more likely to see their jobs automated than retail salespeople and technical writers. Widespread consensus from experts within and beyond the profession agrees that it’s not if, but rather how automation will change accountants’ jobs.

But most conversations about automation do not tell the full story. Just because many accounting roles will be automated doesn’t mean that business owners can trust machines to balance their books alone.

“Automation” isn’t synonymous with “replacing humans”. Small business owners who can discern which accounting tasks are best suited to machines vs. those that humans should keep doing will save up to 167 hours of productivity per employee per year. If that number surprises you, consider how most people say they’d like to engage with AI in the workplace.

Research from Gartner (available to clients) shows that 52 per cent of workers surveyed would prefer to work with AI as an “assistant on demand” and a further 32 per cent would like to work with AI as a “proactive assistant”. GetApp (a Gartner company) expects these numbers to grow as companies keep investing in cloud software over on-premise options.

We predict that by 2021, more than 70 per cent of business users will be substantially provisioned with cloud office capabilities. We also predict that in 2021, AI augmentation will provide $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity. This has two implications for accountants.

The first is that an increasing number of accountants will use cloud accounting software to manage clients’ finances and automate time-consuming tasks. As one example, Xero released a range of machine learning (ML) features within its accounting software earlier this year. These included using ML to speed up time to pay and extract/auto-populate details from any PDF bills straight into Xero.

The second is that accountants’ main value to businesses will evolve. As cloud accounting software becomes more widely adopted, more and more users will be exposed to automation via the features within these software tools. In tandem, accountants will outsource tasks like cash disbursement to their software and spend more time giving financial guidance to clients.

Automation will shift accounting from a functional job to a strategic role. Financial planning, risk management, auditing, and business development still need a human touch – and will for the foreseeable future. To gain business value from automation, don’t replace employees with machines. Instead, assess which tasks are best suited to software vs. people.

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