Mark Cuban got a bit of an internet smackdown the other day when he suggested that CPAs might go the way of the dodo bird thanks to Artificial Intelligence.
"[We will] see more technological advances over the next ten years than we have over the last thirty. It's just going to blow everything away. I would not want to be a CPA right now. I would not want to be an accountant right now," said Cuban.
CPAs — not usually vocal about such slights — hit back, agreeing that while some of the specifics of accounting might change, the value of CPAs would only increase as big data, small data, FinTech, AI and cloud-computing converge.
One of the best reactions came from Lindsay N. Patterson, from the AICPA, who actually ran into him in the lobby of the building where her office was located, cornered him, and then wrote this blog post about her adventure: "That Time I Told Mark Cuban He Was Wrong About the CPA Profession."
The upshot is that rather then driving CPAs out of business, technology makes the skills accountants use now even more valuable.
Automation actually frees CPAs up to perform higher value services for clients and organizations. It also enables entry level and junior staff to focus on deeper responsibilities than they have in the past. As Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist for Glassdoor, explained last year, “Even as technology has helped to automate some aspects of the tax and insurance markets, the remaining jobs in these fields require lots of human judgment and creativity that is very difficult to automate.”
We made a similar argument in a presentation and post a few months ago, which you can find here...
...suggesting that instead of being a threat, these technology trends hold tremendous opportunity for accountants because the higher-level skills and abilities CPAs have mastered doing taxes, audits and bookkeeping, combined with a proven aility to earn trust, can increasingly be applied to so much more of a company's business.
Data is everywhere, but the skills to understand, explain and help companies react to it aren't.
Mark Cuban, 0, CPAs, 1
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