Is accounting threatened by AI?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our accountant’s firm used AI for data collection this year and it was positively horrid.

The kinks will get worked out very quickly. That's the hallmark of AI.

AI doesn’t have any hallmarks, it’s just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, like flying cars.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Every white collar job is information based

It's all in trouble

Some of you people have seen Terminator too many times. Or read too much science fiction.

And some of you haven't been paying attention at all.

Some of us remember all of the other technologies that were going to upend our lives. Occasionally we take Segway tours on vacation.

And as for flying cars, they already exist. They just have bad economics and we can't figure out how to handle big problems like traffic control, mini-airport siting, and visual pollution of the blue sky. Heck, you can even fly a bathtub, locally.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many people today work in jobs that just did not exist 20, 25 years ago. Think of all the tech roles. In the 80s into the 90s, the early tech scene wasn't cool or lucrative, it was geeky. I had a few friends whose fathers were among the early coders and they made a comfortable income but nothing like today's 250, 300k+ salaries for experienced coders.

Other kinds of jobs have nearly disappeared or halved in numbers. Entire supermarkets today are staffed by seemingly half the staff they had 20 years ago. Yet the population is much larger!

I'm not afraid of AI. AI will eliminate jobs everywhere but it will also open up new opportunities. Especially in unexpected areas. The other thing about AI is that someone needs to run the programs and tell the systems what to do and reformat the output into a presentable report.

You have to believe this or you will get depressed.

Before the Internet, there were no web designers or SEOs or Netflix, Meta, Google et al.

At the same time, the number of travel agents declined 95%…yet unemployment is still just 4.2%.

Exactly. Not scared. Being a medium-level travel agent was not a hard job. Just an ordinary white collar, knowledge worker job. I don't think a ton of people who were travel agents had trouble finding new work.

There still is work today for the kind of people that sold travel insights, curate experiences, provide high touch services, etc. There's plenty of jobs in tourism that people who love travel can do. There just aren't a lot of people acting as a meatware interface to airline ticket booking.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work in Finance FP&A and a lot of CFOs have an accounting degree rather than finance degree or mba. Even if accounting tasks like posting JEs etc are outsourced, understanding the fundamentals of the financial statements is crucial to making sound business decisions. CFOs who don't understand this or don't have a strong controller to lean on, do not do well. I have a finance MBA but if i could do it again, i would have gotten a cpa. One less year of school and for me, but ending in the same place. I an encouraging one of my kids to do accounting and marketing. He is very outgoing but also enjoys business math. Social skills + Accounting = competitive combination.

+ 1. Accounting knowledge is the backbone of finance.