"People do not lose jobs to AI, but they lose jobs to people who know AI," Mr Heshana Kuruppu, President of South Asian Federation of Accountants (SAFA) said. He was speaking at a seminar on the ‘Impact of AI on our profession’ organised by the Kuwait Chapter of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India at Crowne Plaza hotel.
"The worry of losing job to technology is not something news. Even 50 years back when technology was introduced for the first time, people were worried that they might lose jobs," Mr Heshana Kuruppu, who is also the president of the Institute of Chartered Accounts of Sri Lanka, said.
The accounting profession has a long history of adapting to technological changes. From manual book keeping to use of calculators and to computers, now accounting professionals are using the latest software’s for their day to day work. This is how we adapt and up skill our self, he said
AI will change the way how accounting professionals work. If you are working on a monotonous and routine works, then there are chances that your work can be replaced by AI. The automation is to support the profession and to add values to your profession.
"Today Tools are available even to make a power point presentation on your topic or on your report, which I personally experienced," he said.
Over the year, the role of finance professionals has evolved thanks to technological advancement and is now more of managing the entire organisation towards making strategies and plans. Today finance professionals are playing more like a business advisory role in the organisations.
When majority of the accountants are playing the role of value reporter by ensuring that relevant information is presented to the management for decision making purposes or like a value preserver by looking into risk management, controls and internal auditing, there lies the challenge of new AI based automation, which can take up these roles. However Mr Heshana said that if you transform yourself as a story teller along with value reporting, your role will be transformed into that of a value enabler, which support the decision making for the management. "Beyond just presenting the numbers as report, start telling the story behind the numbers that is a real value addition. Then you will be automatically get upgrade, which can’t be replaced by AI," Heshanna said.
You must learn about AI before AI learns you. Our role is to think about this technology and see how to innovate, how to transform this place to a better world with these technologies, Heshanan said.
The seminar was attended by number of CA professionals and invited guest. Earlier, the ICAI Kuwait Chapter Chairperson CA. Rabin Gonsalves and Vice Chairperson CA. Aditya Dhanuka welcomed the audience. City Group CEO Dr Dheeraj Bhardwaj also spoke during the event. The seminar was followed by Iftar.