Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an essential part to the most demanding and faced-paced industries. The impact of artificial intelligence in accounting industry and financial sector has been phenomenal and it is completely innovating the way they function, create products and services. Many recent enhancements in AI are quickly transforming the face of the leadership and management in several ways. From catboats to actively taking care of management accountant, from tackling the enhanced regulations and demands from clients to taking care of time-consumed tasks. Several accounting professionals are now moving to a new type of workforce so that they can manage well all the tasks.

It is well-established that accounting is a data-intensive stream. It is filled with numerical, non-numerical, statistical and non-statistical data. There is data involved in invoices, purchase orders, employee salaries, daily expenses and a load of other things. Such enormous amounts of data can get overwhelming after a point. Accounting professionals have to undergo a tedious process to collect and analyze such enormous amounts of data. Moreover, the data is scattered at various sources.

With AI promising the greatest transformation in many industries, including tax & accounting, we need to begin asking what the implications of this will be. Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to promise the greatest level of transformation within many industries, including tax & accounting. "The global AI market was valued at $62.35 billion in 2020, and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 40.2% between 2021 to 2028," according to Grand View Research. Given this level of investment, especially among industries like financial services, we need to begin asking what the implications of this technology will be on the accounting profession. According to the 2020 World Economic Forum Outlook Report, the time spent on current work tasks by humans and machines will be roughly equal by 2025.

As an accounting professional, your clients expect you to help them navigate a fast-changing business environment so they can continue to grow and prosper. The advice many accounting practices provide today include compliance, current tax laws, and how to keep cost structures in line. However, it is also critical to keep up with the current technologies that can transform both your client's business and your practice. There are three core technologies – artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the cloud– that have an impact in virtually every market. The challenge is, even though your clients are aware of these technologies, most are not yet prepared to invest in them.

Finance and accounting professionals are under constant pressure from the C-suite to elevate the strategic relevance of their function. At the same time, they are under day-to-day pressure to help their organizations stay ahead of audit and compliance requirements, report on financial results, and manage ongoing accounting activities. These activities are all critical for business growth. As enterprise resource planning is meant to be both the primary source of truth and technology used to perform these tasks, it can play a critical role in improving the ease and accuracy with which they are completed. Having the right ERP technology can make or break a finance team's ability to focus on the strategic instead of the tactical.

If you read almost any article about the future of the accounting industry, you might be inclined to make a dramatic career shift. The statistics point to massive technological change. According to findings from a 2017 PwC study, 40% of the accounts payable process can be automated; other findings show that accounting and bookkeeping jobs are at the highest risk from digital disruption in the next 20 years. On its surface, this data might lead you to assume that AI and automation are like ruthless villains coming for our jobs. But the outlook doesn't have to be bleak.

Automation has been at the forefront of global accountancy for decades, and professionals are constantly hungry for new tech innovations that will enable them to improve effectiveness and efficiency levels for clients. Yet while demand has continued to grow for the availability of smarter and more dynamic accounting systems, adoption has been pretty slow – particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). It looks like that's finally starting to change. Computer scientists have been tinkering with AI for more than half a century, and the concept itself is quite simple. By utilising a series of defined algorithms, AI-powered applications are able to draw from big data sources and use deep, machine learning functionality to process data, perform high-volume tasks, recognise patterns and even make decisions – and while that may sound like space-age science fiction to some practitioners, AI-powered apps and modules have already started to make a serious impact across the global accounting sector.

We are living in the perfect era in which practically every industry has been touched by the magical spell of Exponential Technologies. Businesses of small and medium-size to large enterprises are adopting technologies and striving to accelerate business processes, the catalyst being the capabilities of technical models. Right from storing data, to accessing, processing and saving data securely, technology takes care of every aspect. Just to recapitulate, in one of my previous articles, I covered the acceleration of Sales through Technology and now I would showcase the wonderful outcome of the conglomeration of Financial Accounting and Technology. It is normal for human resources across industries to fear job displacement due to technological advancement; machine and adaptive intelligence taking over human intelligence.

The finance department isn't always regarded as being at the forefront of digital business transformation. But as artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to mature, one of the biggest drivers of AI adoption when it comes to accounting will be the fiduciary responsibilities of the chief financial officer (CFO). Accountants spend a lot of time laboriously matching invoices with other various statements of work to determine whether a payment should be made in, for example, 30, 60 or 90 days. Given the fact that these activities are largely an exercise in pattern recognition, it's only a matter of time before tasks such as these are more efficiently accomplished by machine learning algorithms capable of visually inspecting documents and determining what actions need to be taken based on rules defined by the CFO. In fact, SAP is already predicting that the days when organizations hire large numbers of accountants just to process documents are near an end.

By the year 2020, artificial intelligence would be able to completely automate accounting tasks, and other financial tasks as well, including payroll, tax, audits and banking. After decades of being stuck in research laboratories, AI or artificial intelligence is set for prime-time, which transforms if not disrupts all sectors of the economy the generate plenty of data, from technology to finance, energy, communications, mobility, healthcare or manufacturing. More than a lot of other industries, accounting has not witnessed much innovation since the creation of double-entry bookkeeping, which is a process of recording profits and losses and is conserved as one of the greatest advanced in the business and commerce history. But, this was more than 500 years ago! The great news is that the advancements in artificial intelligence and applying AI and machine learning technologies to bookkeeping, is getting to be a reality with most major accounting software vendors presently offering capabilities for automating data entry, reconciliations and at times, even more.