By the time 2040 rolls around, you may not recognize the work accountants are doing, how they're doing it, or how they prepare for and manage their careers, according to a major new report from the AICPA and CIMA.
"Effectively, we're saying compliance will be gone," said Tom Hood, executive vice president of business engagement & growth at the AICPA and CIMA, which this week released its new report on the future of the profession, Rise2040: Shaping the Future of Finance and Accounting. "It will be gone in the sense that we won't be doing it, we will be overseeing it and applying judgment to it, but that accountant of the future will be AI-enabled, obviously, and technology-savvy, and they'll be applying judgment over all of the technology."
Built on a months-long process of surveys, focus groups and forums, research, data analysis and more, Rise2040 offers a detailed picture of the day-to-day work of future accountants:
- Strategic guidance: Accountants will offer business modeling, anticipatory planning and multi-scenario planning, and resilient stress testing.
- AI oversight: Accountants will supervise teams of AI agents, audit algorithmic systems and set ethical guidelines for autonomous processes — and often they will do it relatively early in their careers.
- Data translation: Accountants will use advanced analytics and predictive insights to find and tell the story in the data.
- Human-centric advisory: Accountants will provide the emotional intelligence, context and trust that technology on its own cannot deliver. AI handles the data and analysis (as well as the compliance work), while humans provide the judgment, the interpretation, the relationship and the trust.
These new roles will require new levels of technological savvy on the part of the profession to go along with their current technical prowess, as well as a much larger suite of "soft" skills.
"The big element there is, it's not just about being technically proficient over the accounting data, it's about having the discernment and judgment, critical thinking skills, and the communication skills to communicate that well, and at a very much earlier point in your career," Hood explained. "Literally in the first couple years of a job, these folks will be supervising agents and not ever even touching transactions that they will have to apply judgment to as they move up in the chain, right to the rest of their organizations, whether they're in public accounting or corporate."
'The human in the lead'
Technology and artificial intelligence will obviously be central to the profession in 2040, but not on their own: They'll be intricately connected to accountants' long-held position of trust in the market.
"If we're really going to be trusted advisors the way we have been, and we're custodians of the market reporting — whether it's Main Street for a bank loan or a public company — the idea is, if we can become that 'human in the lead,' looking over all the data and supervising the bots and the AI that's going to be accessing it, then our domain broadens as the data and AI broaden."
The theme of the "human in the lead" of artificial intelligence emerged so strongly from the Rise2040 discussions that the AICPA has trademarked it.
AI was top of mind for the more than 6,000 accountants who participated in the Rise2040 process, and a subject of significant concern — at first.
"I would bet it was half or more who were afraid of AI at first, especially the younger people," Hood said. "At least 50-60% were apprehensive or anxious about the impact of AI on our future, and you heard things like, 'You know, the robots are coming; we're going to lose our jobs,' and those kind of things."
However, part of the Rise2040 process involved participants identifying opportunities amid the many challenges the profession faces, and that process helped changed their attitudes.
"A great deal of optimism came out of these, because there were definitely people scared to death in some of those forums, but by the time they worked it through and had conversations, they turned that into, 'You know we can do this and these opportunities are pretty bold,' so at that stage we saw that 80% of all the respondents were somewhat or very optimistic about the future, which is a powerful mindset to start with," said Hood.
Background and process
Rise2040 is the most recent of three long-range visioning exercises spearheaded by the AICPA, which started with the CPA Vision Project in 1997 and the Horizons 2025 project in 2011.
All three relied on input from the profession, but Rise2040 had by far the greatest reach, according to Hood, with almost 6,300 participants from 25 different countries, and significantly more involvement by corporate accountants.
The process iterated a number of discussions built around futurist Daniel Burrus' Anticipatory Organization framework, which allows participants to effectively predict the future by identifying hard and soft trends and elaborating on what they mean and how best to respond to them. The results of each level of discussion were subject to data analysis by AI, and that analysis was then elevated to another level of discussion, interleaving human predictions with technology-derived insights, and finally subjecting both to judgement by leaders of the profession to keep "the human in the lead."
The final result is a compelling and detailed picture of accounting in the future: "The profession of 2040 and beyond will be defined not by tasks, but by trust …," the report says. "As routine work becomes increasingly automated, occurring in the background, the value of discernment, foresight, and ethical stewardship rises."
It describes technology not as a threat, but as a force multiplier: "The opportunity is not to compete with machines, but to design, guide and govern them responsibly."
And all the while, the report highlights the overall importance of the trust placed in the profession: "Trust is the integrating layer — anchoring technology, enabling value, sustaining governance, and defining the profession's identity," it says.
Why it matters, and what's in the way
The accounting profession has faced significant change in the past, but Hood warned that with the pace at which current changes are arising, accountants need to step up quickly.
"At the speed we're going, we're risking irrelevance for a big chunk of our profession if we can't get people to move," he said. "When the profession has to, it's pretty creative and can be adaptable, but the problem is that it doesn't like to do it if it doesn't absolutely have to. We haven't had anything moving this fast — other than COVID — facing us before. We tend to be linear thinkers in a world that's exponential."
With that said, Hood was encouraged by revelation of how many participants in the report recognized that accountants' unwillingness to change was a major problem.
"The fact that they all admitted that, 'We have met the enemy and he is us' — that was huge," Hood said. "I did not expect that at all; I expected them to blame it on technology or whatever else, but something like 93% of people used the word 'ourselves' in some fashion in their answers. … The No. 1 barrier — and this was validated with our data; our data scientists went and ran data science against all the data that was in there from all the [forums and surveys] — the No. 1 barrier to progress was ourselves."
With that in mind, he said that the report poses a significant question: "Will we adapt fast enough to keep our relevance as a whole profession?"
