4. Artificial Intelligence: The Future or Failure of the Accounting Industry
The world keeps improving from the moment humans stepped foot in the world. From our history of various objects that were immensely large before to now relatively small such as Bell’s box telephone to a lightweight phone that one can bring anywhere. This does not apply to objects but to humans and its industries as well. With each passing day, there is always development and change in each industry. As the world evolves, technology proliferates. As it increases, technology has advanced its innovation specifically the ever-known Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI.
Artificial Intelligence is a system robot that is being controlled by humans. It is performative, efficient, and has a high level of intelligence. With the use of this newly discovered technology, Artificial Intelligence has become of use to many industries and softwares. These softwares include ChatGPT, Voice Recognition, Virtual Assistant, and such. These softwares made by Artificial Intelligence is being utilized by different industries such as the arts, education, medicine, business, and even accounting.
Like Artificial Intelligence, the accounting industry evolves in its many ways, from its development in Mesopotamia in terms of writing, counting, and recording these accounts to an improvement and widespread of accounting firms that helps other businesses in bookkeeping, planning, raising funds, reporting and recording in these types of accounts such as finances, costs, taxes, and managerial accounting.
It is without a doubt that accounting is a challenging course in the workfield for its numerous accounts of collecting data, auditing its finances, balancing the checks, and summarizing financial statements. Accounting creates difficult and tedious hours of work in order to keep every account in line and maintain the records clean. Now given its intricacy and specificity in the field, how can Artificial Intelligence contribute to the accounting industry? Is this the future or failure of the accounting industry?
In the corporate world, it has become more and more fast-paced yet repetitive lately. Accountants would often face Excel sheets for long hours everyday just to make ends meet. However, if the company uses Artificial Intelligent softwares, time can be more efficient for the workers. It can help accountants’ workload easier because Artificial Intelligence could contribute knowledge in accounting because of its development and adaptation to its nature. By creating a software, this alleviates the tedious and cyclical work of accountants.
Moreover, Artificial Intelligence defines and notices accounting errors than a normal human faster and more accurately since Artificial Intelligence is a technology that is expected to not commit errors because of its advanced development. Artificial Intelligence can foresee data that are unpatterned or unbalanced in every balance, record, and account. With these advantage of efficiency and error-free checks to accountants, they have more time to think about other creative strategies in improving their development in the accounting industry.
Artificial Intelligence does give a great deal of benefits to humans but the controversy about Artificial Intelligence is this question, can Artificial Intelligence replace humans? Definitely not. Sure, Artificial Intelligence can balance accounts faster in terms of accuracy however, before Artificial Intelligence, humans have been doing these since ancient times. Moreover, when interpreting the data after everything has been checked and balanced, humans explain better. Although one can say that Artificial Intelligence has more knowledge, humans have a better way of interpreting data because one thing that Artificial Intelligence does not comprehend is to be humane. Humans understand humans better than anyone or anything.
We should be reminded that Artificial Intelligence is still made by men. Humans are not made by robots or they are not technology itself but somehow, the world in accounting takes the humane out of humans because of its workload. Truly, it is ideal to use Artificial Intelligence as a tool for humans and it makes the work less demanding and most probably makes the accounting industry move forward instead of being in place for so long for they get stuck in this loophole of checking numerous accounts. But we should not forget that the people are still as important. If we are to go back to the question, is Artificial Intelligence the future or failure for the accounting industry? We can say that it is the future for the accounting industry but it will never replace the humanness that people put into the accounting work.