Streamline Your Document Processes with Sales Development Automation for Accounting

How to create outlook signature

welcome back friends to another video in 2013 oxford university released a research paper on artificial intelligence and automation and in this paper they state that there is a 95 probability that all accounting and auditing jobs will be replaced by computers on top of that there is a 99 probability that all tax accountants will be replaced by computers this paper sent a shockwave through the accounting community so we're going to take a closer look at what this paper really said and what has happened since this paper was published i'm also going to give you a different perspective on why artificial intelligence cannot replace accounting jobs [Music] i get asked a lot of questions on this youtube channel but the question i get asked the most is will accounting jobs be eliminated through artificial intelligence and automation there is this huge fear in the accounting community that all accounting jobs will be wiped out and this fear all comes from this one paper from oxford university in 2013. it is shocking the huge impact this paper has had on the industry here is the paper the future of employment how susceptible are jobs to computerization this was written by carl benedict frey an economist who studies automation and michael a osborne an artificial intelligence software engineer it is important to realize that neither of these authors are accountants and they probably have no idea what an accountant actually does in this paper they create a list of 702 different occupations ranked on probability of being automated by computers basically if you ranked high on the list you will likely lose your job within the next decade or two and be replaced with a computer accounting auditing and tax ranked very high on the list with accountants and auditors having a 95 probability of being automated and tax accountants having a 99 probability of being automated overall the paper claims that 45 of the u.s job market would lose their jobs over the next decade or two this paper was written in 2013 and we are now eight years later in 2021. 45 of us jobs have not disappeared so what happened obviously the paper made some mistakes somewhere so let's take a closer look at their analysis the paper uses a list of 702 occupations and evaluated each one on two main criteria number one they ask the question can the tasks of this job be sufficiently specified conditional on the availability of big data and be performed by state-of-the-art computer-controlled equipment basically is the job a set of repeatable tasks that you can automate two they did an additional analysis to determine if the tasks were the type of tasks that would be difficult for a computer to perform so they looked at three areas social intelligence or do you have to interact and persuade others creativity or does it involve unique problem solving or perception and manipulation so does it require coordinated movement like screwing in a light bulb based on these areas they made a judgment call they looked at accounting and said that accounting jobs are full of repeatable tasks that require no social intelligence or creativity and then they assigned accounting jobs a score of one which stands for the highest level of automation potential with this high score they then ran through their probability calculations and came up with the results that 95 of accountants will lose their jobs and 99 of tax accountants will lose their jobs unfortunately this analysis is not correct these researchers clearly do not know what an accountant actually does for them to say that accounting is just a set of repeatable tasks that requires no social intelligence and no creativity shows that they don't know what an accountant does in fact if we look at what has happened since this paper was written the number of accounting jobs in the u.s has actually grown if you go to the website for the us bureau of labor statistics they predict that employment of accountants and auditors is projected to grow four percent from 2019 to 2029 which is expected to follow the growth of the economy now i'm focusing on this one research paper but there have been a number of papers that have been written that all say the same thing they identify accounting as a prime area for automation to replace humans with computers almost all of these papers suffer from the same problem they're almost never written by accountants and they misidentify what an accountant actually does so what do these papers miss well i'm going to give you three main reasons why artificial intelligence cannot automate accounting jobs number one the point of accounting is to watch the money you need to have a set of human eyeballs to do this now unfortunately the business world is full of shady people if employees have the opportunity they will often walk off with your money if you have an accounting department you have a group of trustworthy people throughout your organization that is watching the money and making sure that none of it walks off to use an analogy if you were running a bank even if you had a high tech computerized security system you would still have an armed guard on site in case the computer system goes down the same thing happens in a business if you were to get rid of your accountants and replace them with computers it is a lot easier for your employees to steal money from a computer than it is from a good accountant let me give you an example imagine you had an employee take a sales trip to california now imagine that salesperson while they're in california decides to take a personal trip to disneyland on the company credit card if you have an accountant watching the expense reports they will instantly catch that your employee is stealing your money to pay for their personal trip to disneyland a computer is not going to know the difference between the disneyland tickets and a legitimate business trip expense that's just one simple example the point is that accountants are not just sitting at their desks performing mindless processes they are your first line of defense against your employees stealing all of your money and i think you are a fool if you hand over that responsibility to a computer number two software engineers have an agenda you have to ask why accountants are singled out in these research papers out of all the white-collar jobs that are out there why accountants why not automate customer service or sales or project management or administrative assistance or operations or scheduling or quality control or it or hr i would argue that some of these other areas have more repetitive tasks than accounting and yet accounting keeps showing up in these research papers why the reason is because accounting is a very lucrative area for software companies much more than other business areas the software companies benefit from convincing you to automate accounting the average erp accounting system annual fees range between a hundred thousand dollars to two hundred thousand 000 depending on how big your company is that's a lot of revenue and it's consistent revenue because it is difficult for businesses to switch once they sign up these research papers are a sales pitch software companies will say if you fire your accounting staff at sixty thousand dollars a year salary each you'll actually be making money by giving software companies two hundred thousand dollars a year instead what they are not telling you though is all of the risks you're taking on by replacing humans with a computer you need to realize that when someone is urging you to take all of your money out of the hands of accountants and put it into the hands of software companies that they have their own best interests at heart not yours they want your money number three accounting is about decision making this is a concept i have been talking about in every video on this channel for the last five weeks a business decision is data plus judgment computers are really good at processing data but really bad at judgment well processing data is only half of what an accountant does and it's not even the most important half and if you think that accounting is just processing data you're completely missing the point for example if you need to make a decision that impacts stock price are you concerned about stock price in the short term or the long term because that could result in different decisions the answer requires judgment that is not possible for a computer it's not possible because judgment is driven by humanity's vision for the future business is about growth and change all a computer can do is take the world as it is and try to optimize it and that is the difference a good accountant uses judgment to make decisions that improve their business so those are three reasons why artificial intelligence cannot automate accounting jobs the point of accounting is to watch the money software engineers have an agenda and accounting is about decision making just to be clear i am not against automation of course just like in any job there are many accounting tasks that can be improved through automation we should always be looking for ways to use computers to improve the effectiveness of accountants but i disagree with this research paper that claims that all accounting jobs will be replaced with computers that is just not true and the data shows that it's not true accounting jobs have actually grown since this paper was published eight years ago the reason this is so important is that people are making real life decisions today based on what this research paper says and it's wrong and that's a real shame people are making career decisions based on this idea that all accounting jobs are going to go away and that's just not correct more than ever the world needs good people to become accountants society will always need a group of people who are trained to watch the money so if you are watching this youtube channel and this interests you just know that accounting is meaningful work that you can do that can have a positive impact on the world whenever i make a video on automation i always get a lot of angry comments from software engineers and that's okay i want to hear what you have to say so go ahead and leave a comment down below let me know what you think do you think that we should replace accountants with computers let me know thank you so much for watching i'm zach from wolves and finance let's go out and make some money you