Why you should care about generative AI

If AI feels like it’s everywhere at the moment, it’s because more companies are realising its full potential. In the last six months, thousands of new AI products have entered the market, underpinned by the Open AI framework: the motherboard powering Chat GPT.

Chat GPT and Open AI have effectively democratised AI, offering a range of free and paid options that are available to everyone. By making it generative, a tool that can learn from and respond to prompts to produce new and original content, the AI floodgates have opened.

But why should accountants take notice of generative AI, and what could it do for our industry?

While it won’t replace essential human touch tasks of an accounting business anytime soon, generative AI can save you time and money by automating key processes, providing more accuracy through error reduction, avoiding duplication of tasks, reducing your own time completing manual tasks and data analysis.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded in a broad range of daily business activities, the risk of falling behind early-adopters grows. Increasingly, AI is a competition-enhancing tool. A 2023 report from McKinsey found generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy through productivity enhancement. The report found about 75 percent of the value that generative AI use cases could deliver falls across four areas: Customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D. Familiarising yourself with the technology now could be the key to building your competitive advantage in the not-too-distant future, because AI is here to stay.

Too busy to boost your productivity?

If you feel too busy right now to upskill on generative AI and learn new systems, you’re missing the point.

When it comes to pouring time into learning generative AI, enhanced productivity is an inevitable outcome.

Research from MIT suggests workers who incorporate Chat GPT into their days complete around 37% more work each hour than those who don’t. This means you’ll get roughly a third of your time back in your day.

So, investing a handful of hours now to understand what AI could do for your business, will ultimately save you time – and fast.

Working smarter.

AI isn’t here to replace the humans on your team, it’s here to enhance their capabilities. Tools like Chat GPT can transform time-consuming admin tasks into seconds and minutes, rather than days and weeks.

And the time saved can ultimately be spent on the tasks that only a human can perform. For example, the soft leadership skills and human-to-human relationships that help businesses gain new clients, nurture existing customers, and retain employees.

So, where to start?

Jerzy Filatow We predict AI will impact accountants and bookkeepers in these five areas:

1. Automating processes

All businesses have to deal with repetitive tasks that take time, such as data entry, appointment scheduling, document management and task assignment. Using AI to automate these processes means the time currently spent doing these repetitive, and often unrewarding, tasks is instantly unlocked.

While AI gets to work on the day-to-day admin tasks that underpin your business, your team can focus on higher-value tasks like business development and service delivery, or building new business connections.

2. Informing decisions

Using data to inform decision-making makes sense, and helps validate where you’re taking your business. But, using data meaningfully often takes time and requires accessing and collating data from a range of different sources. AI can perform advanced data analysis, providing insights on financial forecasting, performance tracking and even marketing activity.

By automating how this data is collected and analysed, you can make better decisions about your practice’s productivity, efficiency and strategic direction.

3. Managing risk and compliance

Identifying potential fraud, ensuring regulatory compliance and managing risk have always fallen into the ‘time-consuming but important’ basket of accounting work. Until now.

AI can support all of these essential functions, saving considerable time and mitigating risks, resulting in fewer disruptions to your business and priceless peace of mind. The regulatory landscape has become highly complex, and this will continue to be the case due to the ongoing evolution of obligations. AI can collate requirements, read and interpret them, formulate strategies for incorporating obligations into existing business practices, and reporting on these to management and regulators as required. Saving hours of time and resources.

4. Client servicing

While clients value personal, human interactions, there are some aspects of client services that can be automated using AI. For example, project management, onboarding and even some advice can be enhanced by automated and managed by AI, with real-time, personalised outreach.

This in turn frees up your people for the human aspects of customer service, helping your customers feel cared for and valued. And happy clients mean more referrals, repeat business and glowing reviews.

5. Content and communication

Content creation is time-consuming, whether it’s writing emails, generating reports or creating content for marketing outreach.

AI can aid in content creation and communication, meaning your people can focus more of their time on the tasks that require their specialist expertise, rather than churning out content for LinkedIn and writing meeting reports.

Stay curious.

As AI evolves, it will bring increasingly sophisticated tools to the table. Keep an open mind and stay curious about what it could do for you.

Because the accountants who evolve to embed these tools are the ones who will ultimately thrive in the future.

Jerzy Filatow, technology segment lead, MYOB