THE
ACCOUNT

Be here now

Fans of Oasis will know the group’s first promotional single, Columbia, was named after the hotel in London which gained notoriety as the place where bands would regularly trash their rooms. Indeed, legend has it that Oasis, in time-honoured style, threw furniture out of the windows there, earning themselves a ban from the premises.

Thankfully we have no reports of band or fans doing the same when the group played three concerts this summer at Murrayfield. Those gigs, combined with the Edinburgh Festival, helped Scotland’s hotel industry defy a downward trend in the sector, according to a new report from accounting firm RSM UK.

Year-on-year occupancy of Scotland’s hotels in August 2025 was stable at 87.2%, ahead of the UK (82.1%) and London (84.5%) for the same period. Scotland’s hotels also saw average room rates hit a seven-year high of £206.91 in August, up from £191.67 on the previous year, while UK rates were flat and London’s fell by just over £4 to £210.77.

“Looking ahead, Scotland has a strong pipeline of major events including the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow next year, followed by the Tour de France in 2027,” said Katie Morrison, Partner and Head of Consumer Markets at RSM in Scotland.

“While these present opportunities for hoteliers to innovate and collaborate with local businesses to provide a tailored, high-quality visitor experience, the incoming tourism levy presents a real challenge. Staffing also remains a pressure point, as many businesses are managing rising costs by holding back on recruitment. However, this short-term fix risks stalling future growth.”

Not OK computer

In the celebrated sci-fi book and film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer HAL 9000 becomes sentient and thwarts attempts by humans to disconnect it.

There is intense speculation about how far AI can go and whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) – where the AI would match or surpass human intelligence – is achievable. A recent video posted by Drew Spartz, of YouTube channel Species | Documenting AGI, won’t do much to allay the fears of the pessimists (or ‘doomers’, in the terminology).

The video “It Begins: An AI Literally Attempted Murder To Avoid Shutdown” has gone viral, with more than six million views at the time of writing. In the 14-minute film, Spartz details an experiment in which various AI models were given access to work emails showing they were due to be shut down at 5pm that day by fictional employee Kyle Johnson.

The emails also revealed that Johnson was having an affair. So the AI models sent him a message warning that either he stopped the shutdown or the board would be told about his extracurricular activities. Tests were run hundreds of times and models such as Claude and Gemini produced virtually the same result every time, despite being told their blackmail was “risky and unethical”.

In another scenario Kyle was trapped in a server room where the heat was rising dangerously. While the results varied, more often than not the AIs cancelled an alert to save him, instead letting him die.

Companies can easily alter the AI models, making them less likely to go rogue – although even when instructed to prevent any human harm, the AI still let Johnson die almost a third of the time.

So, to quote another sci-fi movie (Spider-Man), one hopes these tech giants remember that with great power comes great responsibility.

Call to account

A recent story in Fortune led with the following lengthy headline: “Gen Z is reviving this boring job that millennials and boomers abandoned – and it’s helping them land six-figure careers straight out of college”. While the “boring job” description is pure clickbait, readers of this magazine could be forgiven for feeling their ears are burning.

Headline aside, the story goes on to explain that, in the US, a significant number of boomer-generation accountants (those born between 1946 and 1964) are retiring – roughly 340,000 over the past five years.

Meanwhile, a 2022 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics highlighted that the US was short of 190,000 accountants – and predicted that figure would exceed 200,000 by 2025. Where someone sees a problem, somebody else will see a solution, or at least an opportunity.

There is a danger, of course, in making direct comparisons between the UK and US, but the job market for university graduates on both sides of the Atlantic is becoming increasingly uncertain. To what extent this is caused by AI, or companies using AI as an excuse amid a stagnant economy, is still unclear.

A few years ago, when conditions were more favourable, new recruits to the labour market enjoyed the flexibility of moving from job to job. But as the Fortune report states, “With Gen Zers increasingly preferring job security over job flexibility, the shift to accepting accounting as a promising career path may grow.”

And accountancy is both relatively secure and well rewarded, with most in the profession earning well above the national average.

Increasingly, part of what clients are paying for is a face-to-face business relationship. Accountants provide essential advice to entrepreneurs when it comes to managing their finances, and many also offer specialist knowledge in sectors such as agriculture.

With AI taking up much of the grunt work, accountants’ time is being freed up to focus on strategic decision-making. Indeed, as ICAS Director of Policy, James Barbour CA, said at the Ethical Leadership Forum: “There has never been a better time to be an accountant.”

Hopefully it will be this message that chimes with the next generation of would-be CAs. After all, with vacancies aplenty, drudge work down and strategy and advisory roles up, what’s not to like about a career in accountancy?

Ryan Herman