‘The profession is here to serve society, not the other way around’

As ICAS’ groundbreaking Shaping the Profession research project gathers pace, leading figures from accounting, technology and ethics assembled in London for Beyond the Numbers to offer insight into the direction of travel

Words: Ryan Herman

The best way to predict the future is to create it.” So goes the oft-used quote attributed first to Abraham Lincoln, then more recently to Peter Drucker, the author and educator known as the Father of Management.

In an age of such a rapid pace of change, addressing Drucker’s challenge grows ever more complex. It is certainly true of the accounting profession. Recent reports, particularly in the US, suggest new technology is threatening jobs and students are not pursuing accounting as a career in the same numbers as before.

Meanwhile, finance professionals are working out how to work in harmony with the technology, exploiting its enormous potential without being hamstrung by its limitations. So any event designed to confront these issues head-on was always likely to create a lot of talking points. Beyond the Numbers, which forms part of ICAS’ Shaping the Profession (StP) programme, certainly didn’t disappoint. 

StP was launched last year to map out an ambitious future for the accountancy profession, the financial services sector and beyond. This event, held in London in early October, shone a light on what could happen in the near future if the profession fails to harness technology and use it for the greater good. Speakers also underlined the importance of ethical leadership and explored how the regulatory landscape might evolve in the coming years.

The opening address was delivered by ICAS President Alison Cornwell CA, who explained why we stand at a crossroads. “The difficult economic climate, the speed of emerging technologies, the dangers of climate change and the current state of geopolitics all present major challenges,” she said. “But they also offer opportunities for our profession to deliver value, ethical leadership and insight for the benefit of all.”

Cornwell was followed by Professor James Baird, formerly Managing Partner at Deloitte, who heads the ICAS Research Panel and chairs the Shaping the Profession steering group. Like Cornwell, Baird cares deeply about the profession and sees its huge potential for successful evolution, but stressed that it needs to be “bold and radical” instead of simply driving the status quo.

Baird set out the five key priorities for the StP programme:

• Asking what society needs from the profession, and how we can create better value for all.
• Defining what a 21st-century professional should look like.
• Exploring how technology is redefining the accountant’s role, how it might look in the future and how the profession will need to adapt.
• Equipping future accountants with the relevant skills, capabilities and knowledge to ensure accountancy remains a valued, purposeful and exciting profession for future generations.
• Exploring how regulation can become an enabler of change – should it focus on objectives and outcomes rather than rules?

Our surveys said…

This was followed by the results of two research projects. The first, which surveyed 710 CAs and was carried out by Dodds and Law for ICAS, looks into ethical behaviour.

We’ve picked some of the standout findings which provide some eye-opening insights about ethical challenges – for example, 41% of respondents say they have faced pressure, mostly from either clients or colleagues, to act unethically or not to raise ethical concerns.

The other research project, carried out by Taylor McKenzie, reports findings from focus groups of people representative of UK society, primarily outside of the profession. Among other things, it examines issues and challenges around the subject of trust, citing three ways in which trust in the profession is being challenged.

Living with technology

There next followed a lively panel discussion designed to understand how tech is changing our world and how we should approach it from a regulatory and ethical perspective.

Loree Gourley, ICAS Ethics Board Chair and Partner at Deloitte, cited the example of John Deere, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of tractors and farming equipment. The company uses generative AI to listen to the soil. Silent soil equals dead soil, which means no crops.

As John Deere gathers this information on a global scale, Gourley said, it can effectively have oversight of agricultural food production data worldwide. This raises some ethical issues; for instance, the potential geopolitical consequences of a large company being able to sell data clusters of where higher food yields might lie.

The topic of quantum computing was also discussed. We’ve been told for some time that a breakthrough is coming and it is simply a matter of when. As Jaci Badenhorst CA, Head of Software Engineering at NatWest Group, ICAS Council member and Chair of its AI working group, explained, the speed at which quantum can process huge amounts of data will be on a scale that humanity has never seen before. Against this, accountants need to position themselves as “individuals” – their human judgement will be their USP.

Major obstacles to progress include the building of new capabilities on elderly software and an over-reliance on a small number of providers. This was perfectly illustrated with the recent CrowdStrike crash, which caused chaos to Microsoft systems around the world, grounding planes, impeding financial transactions and even preventing emergency services from doing their jobs.

And finally…

Timandra Harkness, broadcaster, presenter and author of Technology is Not the Problem, delivered the keynote speech. Her speech was hugely entertaining (she is a self-styled “lapsed comedian”) but underpinned by very serious points about where technology is taking us and what it might mean for the jobs of the future.

An over-reliance on tech, with AI tools replacing certain jobs, runs the risk of creating an hourglass economy, with most jobs concentrated at the top and bottom and not much in between. How, in such a polarised society, would ambitious talent climb the career ladder?

On a more optimistic note, history tells us that with each technological leap, new jobs are created – we simply don’t know what they are right now.

All ears

At this moment in time, StP is ICAS in “listening mode”. Accordingly, the audience were asked to give their views on what the future holds for the profession, based on what they had heard during the day.

Among the key observations were:

• Accountants will remain relevant – our training gives us the ability to adapt.
• There will be a need for employees/accountants to upskill – a new mindset is required to counter business tech inertia.
• If, as in the airline industry, pilots' early learning is through simulation, how could this be applied to the accountancy profession where the foundational learning tasks are carried out by tech?
• Ethical considerations are very important as tech solutions are developed to mitigate the risk of bias.
• There is a difference between skills and knowledge: it is important to develop the humanity USP by applying soft skills.
• Regulation needs to react quicker. To be closer both to the “customer” (such as the person or organisation whose processes are regulated) and the end beneficiary (society), regulatory processes need to be streamlined and accelerated.

In closing, ICAS CEO, Bruce Cartwright CA, emphasised the importance of having honest conversations. We need to find ways to shape the future of the profession, he suggested, rather than the profession being dictated to by events.

StP is an ongoing project and there will be much more to come. Stay up to date by visiting the Shaping the Profession hub