Accounting's future: mechanical muscle to mechanical brains: are you ready for roboCPA?

• Author: Monterio, Brad J.
• Position: Evolving profession

As a strategist and business consultant, I'm always watching for factors that drive change in business and society--be they technological, demographic, economic or other types. There are organizations, professions, population segments and individuals with a little more foresight and work to get ahead of change. They're on the bleeding edge to see where things are headed so they can stake a claim on the frontier before the competition arrives.

Then there are those that move with the general masses, as well as those that are late to the game.

Perhaps this is an oversimplified view, but it is nevertheless one that keeps me somewhere between that bleeding edge and a slightly less advanced leading edge.

To that end, I've worked with the accounting profession for the last 20 years, and often wondered what will become of accountants with the advent of increasingly sophisticated technologies, including automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. How will the profession change or evolve? Will software, robots or some type of sentient thing replace part of the profession?

These technologies have more recently found themselves crawling up any number of "top technologies" lists. An initial reaction to them among CPAs might include, "Those don't apply to me or my profession," or, "Those will only affect blue collar/lower skill level jobs."

This immediately reminds me of an ostrich with its head buried in the sand ... as well as bookstore owners, music CD producers, newspaper reporters, paralegals and many others who have fallen victim to similar tech advancements.

Age of Automation

Automation is nothing new. There have always been those who sought innovative ways to lessen the load on humans to free them for higher thinking and more specialized roles. They did this by leveraging technology and other factors to automate--or simulate--roles that humans and animals had served.

Witness the industrial revolution that created manufacturing assembly lines, machine-driven processes for cars or trains.

Automation moved us from human muscle to "mechanical muscle," as C.G.R Grey puts it in his 2014 Internet short film, "Humans Need Not Apply" (youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU). Grey, a well-known producer of web-based educational content, set out to show in this film how technology has moved us from human labor to mechanical muscle to automated mechanical brains and artificial intelligence.

What he calls "dumb robots," such as automobile assembly line robots, have...