Is AI Making Accountants Less Intelligent?

AI is helping accountants and bookkeepers work faster, automate repetitive tasks and reduce cognitive load. But as AI moves beyond calculation and automation into writing, analysing, explaining, brainstorming and reasoning, an interesting question emerges: what happens to the thinking skills we developed by doing those things ourselves?

In this episode of the Accounting Apps Podcast, I explore how AI may be changing the way accountants and bookkeepers think. I look at neuroplasticity, the “useful struggle” involved in developing expertise, and why professional judgement becomes even more important when AI can produce a polished answer in seconds.

Technology has always allowed accountants to shift attention away from repetitive activities. Spreadsheets removed much of our manual arithmetic. Accounting software automated processes that once took hours. AI is another step along that path, but there is an important distinction between using technology to remove cognitive clutter and allowing it to do the valuable thinking for us.

Key Takeaways

• 🧠 Neuroplasticity and accounting expertise: Repeatedly completing tasks such as bank reconciliations builds pattern recognition and experience. When we stop practising particular cognitive skills, the way we use and develop those skills can change.


• 🤖 AI can remove cognitive clutter: Summarising information, drafting routine correspondence, extracting information and preparing meeting notes are examples of where AI can reduce workload and create more space for professional thinking.


• 🔍 Don’t outsource the useful struggle: Investigating something that doesn’t look right, testing ideas and forming hypotheses are part of developing accounting expertise. Rather than immediately asking AI for an answer, spend time developing your own view first.


• 💡 Use AI to challenge your reasoning: There is an important difference between asking AI, “Tell me what’s wrong,” and asking it to test a hypothesis you have already developed. AI can act as a second set of eyes while you remain actively involved in the thinking.


• 🎯 Professional judgement becomes more valuable: Materiality, professional scepticism, ethics, context, relationships and knowing when something simply doesn’t smell right become increasingly important as AI produces more of the first draft.

Episode resources and links:

Debunking Brain Myths: What’s Really Holding You Back from Change with Sarah McKay

https://podcasts.apple.com/bm/podcast/debunking-brain-myths-whats-really-holding-you-back/id792555885?i=1000700760179 

 

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392560878_Your_Brain_on_ChatGPT_Accumulation_of_Cognitive_Debt_when_Using_an_AI_Assistant_for_Essay_Writing_Task

 

Exam Study Expert

https://examstudyexpert.com/dr-sarah-mckay/ 

Dr Sarah McKay home page : https://drsarahmckay.com/ (Neuroscience for real life, with a focus on women’s brain health. For women, professionals and organisations.)

 

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/HeatherSmithAU/ 

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