Ten years ago, if you had told me that I would see a driverless car, I would have thought you are mad. Those cars are a reality today; they just haven’t arrived on our shores yet.
Just as people were not comfortable using unmanned lifts in buildings, I am not so sure I would like to hitch a ride on a driverless vehicle. However, I do know that the technology behind them is getting refined by the day and their proliferation is just but a matter of time.
Driverless cars use artificial intelligence (AI). They know which roads to use to get to the destination faster. They can read traffic lights; stop when required to and proceed when it’s time to. What a fantastic world that would and is likely to be in our lifetime? How futuristic? More powerful chips are being developed to proliferate AI.
The 2025 Future of Jobs Report by World Economic Forum (WEF) – which took place in Davos in January this year – suggests that AI will take away millions of jobs in the next five years.
The report notes that 47 percent of work tasks today are performed mainly by humans and 22 percent by technology. About 30 percent are by a combination of both. By 2030, the report says, employers expect those proportions to be almost equal.
In five years, 77 percent of employers plan to prioritise reskilling and upskilling their workforce to enhance collaboration with AI systems.
The report predicts the fastest declining roles to be clerical, such as cashiers and ticket clerks. Amazingly, accountants and auditors will most likely follow suit. For many accountants, this sounds demoralising.
It is true that AI is simply unavoidable. You cannot ignore it. The average smartphone today can reproduce speech into written words. You can use it to track your steps as well as heart rate as you exercise.
The other day news about DeepSeek – a Chinese-owned AI company – broke and threw the markets into turmoil. Big players in the US stock market lost billions of dollars from drops in share value. DeepSeek had just released an AI model that exceeded expectations: a much cheaper product performing better than existing ones.
Newly inaugurated into office, President Donald Trump met up with investors who committed to inject approximately $500 billion into AI development in the next four years. And now the race is on – between the West and the East – to see who will first come up with super AI and literally control the world.
Everyone has a reason to take a pause and study the evidence. In February this year, accountants at Crowe Global – from all over the world – met in Nairobi to have intellectual conversation on this very topic. Many conclusions were inferred at the meeting. But none spelt doom.
After three plus decades in this industry, I say AI is both an opportunity and a trap. The technology is still in its infancy and its long-term gains are unknown.
AI will most likely enable us to work more efficiently and a lot faster. Accountants globally can harness the use of AI in doing business; reducing costs but at the same time being able to produce more. In the long run it is a tool to improve output while increasing revenue and profit.
Crowe Global has adopted AI modules into its working environment. We're using it in several aspects of accounting. We are using it in taxation: it is good at executing various tax cases around the globe.
We are using it in writing reports and audit. But we – human accountants – are fully in charge: making sure that we feed it the right information.
Why check? Machine intelligence is artificial and hence not real. AI is not human and my prediction is that it will never be. My prediction is that the human brain’s cognitive abilities will remain powerful even in future. Needless to say, the human touch is expected to maintain ethical standards of the work we accountants do.
Obviously, if you make a mistake in just one variable, AI will yield the wrong information. The human being must remain the overriding power. It cannot – should not – be an excuse to furnish a client with wrong reports.
And yes! We will still need accountants in future. But future accountants will be those who will have learnt the tools AI is availing to us today.
Therefore, no accountant should fear for their job. Even so, accountants learning AI tools must first be knowledgeable to be able to correct the mistakes it’s likely to proffer.
If you don't have the knowledge, AI is dangerous. Because you'll end up signing on reports whose authenticity cannot be verified by peers.
AI cannot know if new information that was just released this morning is available to be globally shared out.
AI is smart enough to guide me as an accountant on parameters that guide international financial reporting standards. But I have to know which particular standard and whether that standard is applicable to the jurisdiction within which I am operating.
I expect that accountants – especially those who are freshmen in the field – will seek to relearn and not rest on their laurels; satisfied for merely passing the CPA exams.
Here is the good news: the WEF report shows that while AI and information processing technology are expected to displace nine or so million jobs, they will create 11 million other jobs. But those 11 million jobs will be for the taking by those who will have adapted to the new tools technology has brought us like AI. You either adapt or perish.
The writer is the Managing Partner of Crowe Erastus & Co, a Certified Public Accountant and a Fellow of the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya
