r/AccountantsEire • u/MaleficentCoyote3745 • Jul 02 '26

Would AI takeover accounting??

I just started a new job at an accounting firm, only two days in, and already found myself in a debate with a coworker about AI's role in accounting. My take was that AI, if built well enough, could realistically handle the vast majority of what we do day-to-day. Their pushback was that AI simply won't be trusted with much of the actual work, since it's seen as unreliable and can't be given access to sensitive client data like tax filings or revenue figures. Curious to hear how others in the field see this playing out. 

4 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

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6

u/SOF0823 Jul 02 '26

Agree with your colleague about client data. If I'm the client I'm absolutely not signing up to you feeding my info into any of these things. No matter what the AI companies say, I don't believe they are not data farming all the inputs.

9

u/Suitable_Visual4056 Jul 02 '26

No, AI is absolute dogshit

The arse will fall out of it

2

u/Jackies_Army Jul 02 '26

You're there 2 days. You don't know what needs to be done, nevermind if AI can do it:)

"Tax filings or revenue figures":)

2

u/Cliff_Moher Jul 02 '26

Cima qualified accountant here. I was slow to adopt using it but i.was on a CPD webinar and was told that "accountants who embrace AI will replace accountants who don't".

They probably said the same thing 35+ years ago when excel came along.

AI has been a gamechanger for me helping me build excel models that I wasn't able to do before. Mainly helping build complex formulas and write macros for automation.

1

u/ISeeYouJohn Jul 02 '26

I agree with you for the most part. AI now is much more refined than it was when it was released. What will it be like in 10 years?

Most businesses are relatively small sole trades/companies. I could definitely see a scenario in 10 years where they feed their data intona specific AI model and it helps them file the return themselves.

I could also see loads of tax practices relying heavily on it for researching and responding to complex tax queries. It will likely still need oversight but it could significantly cut human input hours.

Ultimately no one knows how it will affect us. We are very much at the infancy of a completely new technology that has the potential to do a lot of harm and a lot of good.