ANALYSIS | Artificial Intelligence
Some may see this brave new world as
a threat to jobs and to the accountancy
profession. I see it as a real opportunity
both for individuals and businesses.
AI will be transformational, but in a
good way. As smart machines and
systems take away more and more
of the bookkeeping, accountants will
have more time to act in a business
consultancy role for their clients.
And as a result of these smart and
automated systems, will have all the data
available in real time to interpret and
use to give our small business clients
the information and advice and the
recommendations they need to take the
decisions that will help them grow.
In this new advisory role we will be able
to use our knowledge to help companies
make those strategic decisions, acting more
like financial directors for small businesses,
rather than straight number crunchers.
And, as a result of this change in our
role, we will also be creating more value
for the business and helping drive the
wider economy.
As this new landscape emerges there
will be different roles and specialisms
within accountancy practices. As well as
the financial advisers we will see systems
specialists developing, opening up new
jobs and opportunities in the sector.
These will be the highly knowledgeable
professionals that set up the automated
bookkeeping systems for businesses,
ensuring they are the right platforms and
are correctly integrated for their clients.
All this isn’t going to happen overnight.
It is a gradual long-term journey towards
full automation in all areas. And as that
journey takes place, standards will have
to be created and agreed along the way.
That will take time.
But make no mistake, AI is already
part of our daily lives – it exists in
smartphones, digital cameras, microwave
cookers, things we take for granted.
This new revolution is not something
we should fear; instead we need to
embrace the fact that it can be used to
unlock increased productivity both for
ourselves and our clients – strengthening
working relationships and allowing us to
create real growth. Q
Lee Murphy is managing director of
The Accountancy Partnership
Pandle.co.uk
[email protected]
Twitter: @Pandlecloud
dofonline.co.uk
Where
technology
and politics
collide
You can’t build a wall to keep the
robots out, says BBC’s Mark Mardell
M
achines are getting smarter
and smarter all the time.
They are just getting better
at learning, analysing, memorising.
This technology is now coming out of
the laboratory stage and actually doing
people’s jobs. Increasingly we’ll see this
happen in the world of insurance and
for lawyers and in medical technology,
perhaps even in journalism – anywhere
there is data that people need to go
through. Machines taking people’s jobs
is nothing new – it’s been going on since
the first Luddite smashed their loom. First
of all it was manual labour it replaced,
then it was semi-skilled, but now we are
talking about not brawn but brain – jobs
that once only humans could do.
The aim is for AI to do everything that
humans can do. What really fascinates
me about this is not that this is coming
but the moment it has come – after a year
in which we saw a political revolution
because we were told people felt left
behind, had lost their jobs, had lost their
income and the politicians were just sort
of juddering and shuddering and seeing
how they could cope will all that. Now
we’ve got this around the corner, taking
white collar, middle class jobs, what is
their response? You can’t build a wall to
keep the robots out.
I suppose theoretically technology could
eliminate all jobs. The aim is to build some
sort of artificial intelligence that would be
able to do anything. This raises not just
political but philosophical questions. How
much do we want to replace what we do
now with robots doing it?
I’ve seen predictions by one banker in
America that by 2020, one in five of his
employees – some 6,000 people – will be
replaced by machine intelligence. Some
people have said that by 2030 75% of the
jobs in the United States that exist at the
moment will go. That’s a very high and
extreme figure.
This technology is
now coming out of
the laboratory stage
and actually doing
people’s jobs
One question is how would the
market system cope with all these
changes. People are talking about rather
Utopian schemes, things like the Luxury
Automated Communism which means
that the robots do all the work and we sit
back and get the profits but that depends
on who owns the robots. Those sorts
of things are political decisions. People
talk about a universal citizen’s wage so
everyone gets some sort of income but
the political mood is very much against
that. The technology and the politics are
colliding at the moment. Q
This is an edited interview Mark Mardell
gave to Eddie Mair’s PM show on Radio 4.
DIRECTOR OF FINANCE
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