I have been an accountant for over thirty years. I have watched our profession absorb spreadsheets, enterprise software, and more regulatory overhauls than I care to count. Each time, someone declared the accountant obsolete. Each time, the accountants who stayed curious came through stronger.
Artificial intelligence is the biggest shift I have seen so far, and it deserves honest attention — not breathless enthusiasm, not quiet dismissal.
One thing is certain. The adoption phase is over. The accountability phase has begun.
Most organizations spent the last two years running AI pilots and building enthusiasm. That phase is closing. The question is no longer should we use AI? But rather: is it actually delivering value, and do we have the controls to prove it? Seventy-four percent of CFOs report pressure to adopt AI tools — yet most admit that governance and oversight have not kept pace with adoption. That gap is where the real risk lives.
Accountants should rest assured that the work is not disappearing. It is moving upstream.
AI helps handle the repetitive work — data entry, transaction matching, routine reconciliations. What it frees up is judgment. The ability to look at a set of numbers and understand what they mean for the business, not just that they balance. In our context, that means faster job costing, better cash flow visibility, less time assembling data, and more time interpreting it. That is a better trade than it might first appear.
The caution is that speed without oversight is not efficiency. It is exposure.
The biggest risk from AI is not that it replaces experienced professionals. It is that it moves faster than the controls designed to check it. Good controls have always been the foundation of trustworthy accounting. AI does not exempt us from that responsibility — it raises the stakes for it.
The accountants who will be most valuable in the years ahead are the ones who embrace these tools with confidence and healthy curiosity — who know when to trust the output and when to question it, and who bring something no model can replicate: experience, accountability, and a genuine understanding of the business they serve. AI gives us more time for exactly that kind of work.
After thirty years in this profession, I find that genuinely exciting. The fundamentals we have built our careers on are not becoming less relevant — they are becoming more central. That is not a threat. That is an opportunity, and it is ours to take.
– Written by Annie Russo, Controller, Joe Taylor Restoration
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