Accounting firms are hungry for staff with AI skills and they're willing to pay a premium to get them.
This was one of the findings of a
Just what exactly one means by "AI skills" can vary greatly depending on what, specifically, someone is looking for, as there are literally hundreds of possible examples. They include advanced robotics, semantic parsing, deep learning methods, computer vision, cognitive automation, decision models, dialogue systems, familiarity with Google Cloud ML Engine, familiarity with Nvidia Jetson, familiarity with Apache MADlib and much more.
Positions requiring such specialized skills are growing at a rapid rate. Such jobs have grown 3.5 times faster than all other jobs since 2016. The 2022 job market was the peak, and while demand eased a little in 2023, conditions remain highly elevated relative to other jobs. This is especially the case in financial services and professional services jobs, outdone only by those connected to information and communications. However, while the increase has been sharp in terms of proportion, in absolute terms growth has been in the single digits, going from less than 1% to between 2-3% in general. Still, the PwC report stressed this rapid growth is a sign of things to come.
"Today, there are seven times as many postings for specialist AI jobs as there were in 2012. In contrast, postings for all jobs have grown more slowly, doubling since 2012. Put another way, openings for jobs that require specialist AI skills have grown 3.5 times faster than openings for all jobs since 2012," said the report.
However, while AI specialist jobs are growing, the report also found that, in AI-exposed occupations such as customer services and IT, which have similar labor shortages to accounting, jobs are growing 27% more slowly on average (though, the report stressed, they are still growing).
"It is important to emphasize that job numbers in AI-exposed occupations are still growing. The data suggests that AI does not herald an era of job losses but rather more gradual jobs growth, helping to enable companies to find the workers they need," said the report.
AI says accountants should focus on specific AI skills
Accounting Today fed the entire list of skills into ChatGPT 4.0 and asked which of them were specifically relevant to accounting firms. The bot named:
- Automated machine learning: For automating routine accounting tasks and data analysis.
- Natural language processing (NLP): To process and analyze large volumes of text data, such as financial reports and emails.
- Optical character recognition: To digitize and process paper documents, invoices, and receipts.
- Amazon Textract: Specifically for extracting text and data from scanned documents.
- Natural language generation: To automate the creation of reports and summaries.
- Cognitive automation: To enhance the efficiency and accuracy of accounting processes.
- TensorFlow: For building and deploying machine learning models for predictive analytics and anomaly detection.
- Scikit-Learn (Python Package): For implementing various machine learning algorithms for data analysis and forecasting.
- Deep learning: To improve the accuracy of predictive models and automate complex decision-making processes.
- Feature engineering: To enhance data quality and the performance of machine learning models.
- Supervised learning: For tasks like fraud detection and risk assessment.
- Unsupervised learning: To identify patterns and anomalies in financial data.
- Recurrent Neural Network: For time series forecasting, such as predicting cash flows and financial trends.
- Gradient boosting: For building robust predictive models.
- Explainable AI: To provide transparency in decision-making processes, ensuring regulatory compliance and trust.
"These skills can significantly enhance the efficiency, accuracy, and capabilities of an accounting firm by leveraging AI technologies for various tasks and processes," said the LLM.
