How many of those W-2 Andy's used accountants back in the 80s/90s?

I'm pointing out a trend, technology slowly eroding a field that's essentially just numbers.

We can agree to disagree, but I wouldn't advise people in college today to get into accounting. The chance AI will do their job during their own career lifetime (within the next 30-40ish years) is good enough to consider a different career.

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Posted by tide06

Member since Oct 2011

23084 posts

Posted on 1/24/26 at 4:17 pm to jclem11

quote:
So your position is business owners and C Suites are going to offload their tax planning and guidance and 100% of their tax compliance to a chatbot?

Nope not at all.

But can we agree the number of people within an F500 giving tax planning and advice to the CFO and C suite is a really small percentage of the average headcount allocation?

If you’re senior manager or above your probably safe, but the junior people who are functionaries are the ones that will absolutely be under the gun and all that assumes someone like Trump doesn’t get a chance to simplify the tax code as he’s proposed numerous times which would really lead to massive RIF situations.

But the best data I could find has something like 7% of the accounting sector being tax preparers many of whom are basically H&R Block types and no I don’t think that will survive advanced AI but I agree that senior advanced tax guys will be fine and probably just using AI to accomplish their work more efficiently albeit with less staff working for them.

Then would you agree that ~30% of the field is general accounting and auditors? If not tell me your number.

Do all the auditors go away? No.

Do the senior auditors start using advanced AI tools to scan for irregularities that don’t involve locking junior people in a room to do the grunt work? Absolutely.

quote:
Are you serious? You realize that accounting is basically law with numbers and there are ranges of "correct" answers within the bounds of the law and GAAP, correct?

Yeah look at what’s happening within the legal field with AI. Was just talking with a huge PI firm a couple months ago and they were in process of implementing AI to replace large numbers of junior attorneys and paralegals within the next 3-5 years.

The systems basically bird dog the case law to help assist the filings and the senior attorneys review it like they would something from a paralegal and do the finish work.

Is it fully cooked? No.

Is it currently stand alone set and forget? Absolutely not.

Will it be within 10 years? Most likely.

Are a lot of people going to lose their jobs? Absolutely.

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Finally, these AI tech bros are not going to take the legal liability when their chat bot inevitable fricks up so you need some schmuck to warm the seat and put in prison when your vaunted AI inevitably fricks up.

Yeah that’ll be the senior managers responsible for managing the AI output just like they are when the Gen Z new hire who doesn’t know what they’re doing screws something up next week.

They’ll be reviewing it and signing off like the currently do, just more of the content will be AI generated and require fewer headcount’s as a result.

quote:
PwC (#2 accounting / professional services firm in the world) just released a astudy on AI

That’s absolutely true. A lot of what was being called AI wasn’t even really AI it was ML dressed up to be sold to a CEO or CIO who didn’t really know what they were looking at, the business use cases often weren’t very well defined, the execution was often poor or they took so long to implement it that by the time it was done no one cared anymore.

A ton of money was wasted and it’ll impact time to implement new AI infrastructure and solutions when people got burned.

But the next gen stuff that’s being worked on now isn’t ML. The stuff coming in the next 5-10 years is going to be disruptive to a lot of businesses, a lot of business processes and a lot of people who currently cash paychecks and the businesses who don’t adapt won’t be able to compete due to overhead costs when done so everyone else will rush to catch up because they have to.

And if/when the AI hits, whether the pessimists are right and it’s 20% of the workforce or the Altman/Elon types are right and it’s 30-50% over 15 years our labor force is going to be blown up with major impacts politically, economically and socially.

All I’m advocating for is controls so that real post AGI AIs don’t go out of control when given access to power grids, defense systems and other critical infrastructure and that we have some plan so that we can retrain people or adjust before a huge swath of our current workers get put out on their arse and start voting for AOC to give them free stuff.

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