Just because you have an affinity towards numbers, you breezed through all your accounting classes and your books are always perfectly balanced, does not mean that your days of learning and adapting are over. In fact, for accountants to succeed currently, they are going to need to bring a bit more to the table than just an appetite. In a recent eBook by Flexi Software on accounting automation in the insurance industry, the desire to hire more well-rounded and future-ready accountants appears to be on everyone's radar to a certain extent. This does not necessarily mean automating everything and doing away with accountants or hiring fewer accountants. What it does mean is hiring accountants who are armed with more than just an ability to maintain the books.

Accountants can build the kinds of skills needed to stay relevant in a rapidly automating world that's increasingly taking advantage of technologies such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence to handle routine financial tasks, according to Institute of Management Accountants president and CEO Jeff Thomson. "It is a bit of a race where technology capability is really moving at warp speed, but it's not clear that the profession's ability to upskill and transform itself is moving at warp speed," Thomson told Accounting Today. "Therefore it's a race for relevance, creating the story, and telling the story of our profession because we want to attract technologists into our profession." He believes the accounting profession will need to do a better job of competing for students and finding ways to attract them to the profession, given its reputation for routine work that is increasingly being automated away. "We get to work with the latest technologies, but not if we don't make that part of our profession," said Thomson.

Accounting is an integral part of all kinds of business operations since ancient times. As technology evolved, so has accounting, and now Artificial Intelligence (A.I) is slowly becoming the part of the accounting process. Accounting profession and A.I have started going hand in hand. A. I have reduced the workload of accountants and has paved the way for accounting professionals to be more productive and efficient. In the earlier days, computers were used to store a large quantity of data and perform simple calculations to arrive at the profit or loss position of a firm. Nowadays, machine learning has been elevated to derive useful information from a large amount of data and generate reports needed by the accountants.

As we move past another busy season, we are seeing a change in the public accounting landscape like never before. The challenges we are faced with seem to be growing by the day. In the past, it was just staffing shortages and succession issues, which were enough to stress even the most level-headed individual. Now those issues have not gone away, but more issues have been added with the coming of artificial intelligence (AI), which is expected to dramatically impact our profession. Given this, one of the latest challenges we have been faced with as firms are how do we transition from compliance-based accountants into proactive advisors and entrepreneurial CPAs.

Does the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) threaten the accounting profession? Could accountants be replaced by automation, just like the switchboard operator, the film projectionist and the elevator operator? And how can you protect your career and prosper in the age of the accounting robots? The threat of technology is not new. Technology both ended and created jobs at least since the 1800s, when the advent of farming machinery wiped out many agricultural occupations.

Accounting firms often hear about the promise of data analytics and leveraging "big data" to drill down for insights to help their business clients. However, many smaller accounting firms don't have access to such technology, not to mention data scientists, analysts and researchers, to help their small business clients analyze vast databases to find ways to increase revenue, streamline operations, forecast more accurately, and better manage inventory to hold down costs. Hitendra Patil, director of practice development at AccountantsWorld, sees ways that data analytics and other advanced technology such as artificial intelligence can be leveraged by even the smallest accounting firms. "Audit technology seems to be the faster-moving one towards the future," he said. "One of the reasons is that audit is done on the existing data and information. Everything is already in various systems, so it's all a defined data set. It's easier to implement analytics and AI on audit data rather than future transactional data for accounting. Audit will definitely move faster. That's my personal take on where the technology is going to make a massive impact in the next 12 months or so."

Artificial Intelligence has matured from technology buried in computer science labs using complex coding techniques to more common algorithms and supporting technologies used as part of the design strategy of new generation products. Many of the developers have known of AI techniques for years but did not have a practical way to apply the algorithms because the compute overhead was too high, the sample of data was too small and the number of techniques that needed to be applied made the code too complex. With centralized computing in SaaS applications and cloud data centers, AI has become much more practical and accurate. We see a number of products that are running crude AI today and vendors that are pretty far along in their use of AI. Getting products that apply to small and medium businesses are more of a challenge, but we see efforts at Intuit, Xero, BQE Core, Citrix ShareFile, Thomson, CCH and most other products that apply to the CPA profession and to small and medium businesses.

Before exploring the many ways that artificial intelligence, or AI, is disrupting the accounting profession, it will be relevant to see what it is all about. AI is the ability of software and machines to display or imitate a sense of cognitive intelligence, which while promising to positively impact many sectors also raises great concerns about moral issues. A machine developed to think, learn and react like human beings is good for an hour of a sci-fi movie with a not too happy ending, but in real life, these aspects are being harnessed to bring about revolutionary changes in technology. AI has the potential and promises to be a disruptor as potent -- or maybe more -- than cloud computing. AI can be considered to be a great performance enhancement business tool, especially in areas that require a high level of technical precision and analytical judgments like accounting.

At first glance, the threats seem clear: One type of software will learn how to perform all manner of business functions, particularly in finance and accounting, while another will continuously validate any set of data or information. Between them, artificial intelligence and blockchain seem poised to disrupt -- or even destroy -- many of the core businesses of the accounting profession, automating or rendering irrelevant important traditional services like the audit. But while there can be little doubt that they will eliminate the need for human beings to perform many of the individual functions traditionally associated with accountants, both in public practice and in industry, they will certainly not eliminate the profession's overall role, or its importance. In fact, both AI and blockchain have the potential to help accountants actually boost their revenue, their relevance and their value -- provided they're willing to develop the necessary skills, and change their mindsets. Understanding why each of these two emerging technologies is less of a threat and more of an opportunity than they might seem requires a separate, deeper dive into each, as they're going to have different impacts on the profession, over different time horizons.

It wasn't long ago that cloud technology was emerging as a potential disruptor to the accounting profession. In the beginning, many didn't foresee that cloud adoption would become so widespread, but now it's becoming the standard and we're looking at an even larger potential disruptor: artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. As I'll share at an upcoming session at AICPA Engage, we are at another inflection point in accountancy. AI and machine learning systems are already powering the technology we use in our everyday lives, and now, accounting technology companies are experimenting with and implementing them in their platforms. A new report by Asian broking firm CLSA studies six sectors that will see material changes where AI and machine learning may cause some disruption, highlighting short-term growing pains in the tech and accounting professions.