When IFRS 16 arrived, the challenge seemed clear: identify leases, calculate liabilities and right-of-use assets, satisfy the auditors and move on. A few years later, we know that’s not how lease accounting works in practice.

Implementation was only the beginning. The real challenge lies in managing lease modifications, Consumer Price Index (CPI) reviews, renewals, reassessments and disclosures month after month, year after year. Compliance is no longer the differentiator. Efficiency is.

That’s why the next five years of lease accounting are unlikely to be defined by changes to accounting standards. Instead, they’ll be shaped by advances in AI and automation.

The real question is not whether accountants will disappear, but how their role will evolve.

The answer isn’t that they’ll become less important. It’s that they’ll spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time applying professional judgement.

Reading through a 200-page property lease to identify commencement dates, payment schedules, CPI clauses and extension options has never been the highest-value use of a finance professional’s time. Increasingly, AI can perform that task in minutes, extracting key information for review rather than forcing accountants to search manually through contracts.

That’s an important distinction. AI isn’t making accounting judgements. It’s reducing administrative effort.

Someone still needs to decide whether management is reasonably certain to exercise a renewal option. Someone still needs to determine the appropriate discount rate, assess whether a contract contains a lease and challenge unusual transactions. Those decisions still require professional judgement – in fact, AI may make it more valuable than ever.

There’s another misconception that deserves challenging. Some assume AI reduces the need for technical accounting expertise. The opposite is probably true.

The finance professionals who thrive over the next decade won’t simply know their way around the different reporting standards. They’ll understand how AI reaches its conclusions, recognise where it might make mistakes and know when human judgement must override an automated recommendation.

“Those who interrogate the outputs and use AI to deepen their knowledge are likely to develop expertise faster than any previous generation of accountants”

In other words, they’ll become controllers of intelligent systems rather than producers of manual calculations.

There’s also a risk that finance leaders shouldn’t ignore. AI is an extraordinary learning tool, but a poor substitute for understanding. Professionals who simply accept AI-generated answers risk becoming less technically capable over time. Those who interrogate outputs, ask why a conclusion was reached and use AI to deepen their knowledge are likely to develop expertise faster than any previous generation of accountants.

The accounting profession has experienced this before. Spreadsheets didn’t make accountants less valuable. They changed what accountants were valuable for. AI will do exactly the same.

The future of lease accounting won’t belong to organisations with the most sophisticated technology. It will belong to those with the best combination of trusted data, robust governance, intelligent automation and finance professionals who know when to rely on AI – and when to challenge it.

Modern lease accounting platforms are already moving in this direction. Solutions such as Rubli’s lease accounting platform use AI-powered contract extraction to remove hours of manual document review, while keeping finance teams firmly in control of the accounting decisions. That’s the future of lease accounting in a single sentence: not AI replacing accountants, but augmented intelligence helping accountants focus on the work that matters most.

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