We spend a lot of time defining jobs by the work people produce. Accountants prepare returns, lawyers draft contracts, journalists write articles and so on. Those outputs are tangible products with specific formats that make them easy for AI to produce.
But the finished product isn’t the job. The real work is the process of creating something.
The story isn’t the transcript
I heard Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Verge, talk about this at the Thomson Reuters Institute AI event in Chicago. He pointed out that AI can attend a city council meeting, transcribe everything that happened and write an article about it.
As the mom of a journalist, I immediately understood the distinction he was making.
A good reporter isn’t sitting in a meeting just to record what everybody says. They walk in with years of experience processing situations and determining what actually matters enough to include. The journalist in the room is there to figure out:
Who has a vested interest
What isn’t being said
Which piece of context changes the story
What questions still remain
Two reporters can sit through the same meeting and walk away with completely different stories because they noticed different things.
Accounting is like that too.
The same numbers with different insights
Two accountants can look at the same set of numbers and come away with completely different ideas about what matters. One might see a tax opportunity; another sees a cash flow problem coming six months from now. Someone who knows the client well might see a number that looks completely normal on paper and immediately know something has changed.
That’s the part of professional expertise that gets lost when we talk about all of the things AI can produce for us.
AI is getting really good at producing answers. It already has access to more information than any individual accountant could ever know, and it can process that information faster than we can.
But having all of the information doesn’t automatically tell you which piece of it matters right now!
That requires context, strong relationships with your clients and an actual human brain with years of experience understanding the work.
What will you do with the time AI gives you?
Still, AI can give us something incredibly valuable. Time!
We’ve spent so many hours producing work that we haven’t always had enough time to think about what the work is telling us, but that doesn’t have to be the case anymore.
We don’t have to painstakingly input numbers and stress about making sure the return is perfect. Now, we can spend less time getting the answer and more time figuring out what to do with it.
If AI can prepare the return in five minutes:
What are you going to notice when you look at it?
What do you know about the client that changes how you interpret it?
What question are you going to ask because of what you see?
That’s the opportunity I see for accountants. We get to spend more of our time doing the thinking that comes after the answer. The finished product will keep getting easier to produce. Our value is everything we know to do with it once it’s in front of us.
If the return is all you’re selling, what happens when the client knows AI can do it?
