Accounting’s journey: From ledgers to the new AI world

Anthony Lehmann:
If you had to explain to a non-accountant why this profession still matters, what would you say?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Whenever there has been a crisis the role of accountants has expanded, and accounting has emerged as victorious as a profession from any crisis that society has faced in the last hundred years.

Kaushika Jayalath:
So I get pulled into a lot of AI labs, and its everyone saying “What do we want?” “AI.” “When do we want it?” “Now.” But my first thing is... hold up, what are you actually trying to solve here?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
I believe AI auditing and also AI governance will be a separate branch of the accounting profession and we will need to teach those skills as well.

Anthony Lehmann:
Hello and welcome to INTHEBLACK Podcast. My name is Lehmo and today we are celebrating a pretty extraordinary anniversary. It's 140 years of CPA Australia and the professionals that they represent. And what a journey it's been since 1868 when you think back to handwritten ledgers, quill pens, inkwells, and then along the way spreadsheets, cloud storage, and now AI. It's been an amazing journey.

And what's incredible about this journey as well is that along the way, whenever adversity has presented itself, whether that be wars, depression, financial crisis, or pandemics, accounting has played a very, very important role and has evolved to play an even bigger role in society. So to investigate why, I'm joined by accounting historian. That's right, now we're talking my language when we're talking accounting historians. I can't wait to get into this. Dr. Jasvinder Sidhu, welcome.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Thank you.

Anthony Lehmann:
And also technology specialist, Kaushika Jayalath, CPA from Oracle. Hello and welcome. And together we'll explore how the profession shifted from the number crunching and record keeping into roles centred on judgement, governance, and trust, and why AI is changing the tools, but not the purpose. And can I say before we start, it's exciting. I don't get to talk accounting very often. So to be here with the two of you today is very, very exciting for me.

I stopped working as an accountant many years ago, but I still ... Accountants to me are like Olympians. You're always an Olympian and you're always an accountant. Let's get started. Fundamentally, it's been a big journey, Jasvinder. 1886, CPA Australia. How is accounting different today than it was 140 years ago?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Thank you, Lehmo, first of all, giving me this opportunity. But as you started that ... Accounting started with ledgers, pens, and papers. I think 140 years ago, accountants were working with papers. They were doing manual calculations, and fundamentally they were providing information to business managers and owners for making decisions. Coming forward to 2026, accountants are using computers, software, AI enabled software, and they are providing sophisticated information yet again to business managers and owners for making decisions. So accounting has changed a lot, but the fundamental objective of accounting has not changed. That is to provide true and fair information for making informed decisions.

Anthony Lehmann:
Yeah. Because when I picture accounting in 1886, to my mind, and you may well correct me here, it's your sort of what we would consider a classic bookkeeper type role.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
That is correct. So when I started learning accounting, we were told that the purpose of accounting is to record, classify, summarise, and report.

Anthony Lehmann:
Yes, yes.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
So you're right. So the job of accountant included all those tasks, working with ledgers on trial balances, and if one mistake is made, you have to repeat everything again.

Anthony Lehmann:
But it's expanded to so much more than that in 2026, hasn't it?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
100%.

Anthony Lehmann:
Kaushika, what's your view on this and where we've come since 1886 to now? So I mean, certainly from a technology perspective, it's unrecognisable, isn't it?

Kaushika Jayalath:
It is. And the tools have evolved, but I don't think the fundamental core principles have changed much. We are always the face of integrity. And that hasn't changed through world wars, that hasn't changed through a global financial crisis, that hasn't changed through COVID, because fundamentally accountants are who everyone looks to figure out whether the money's being spent properly, the money's been spent in the right place, and whether it's been appropriately spent.

So the ethical aspect of accounting has a huge part to play now, whether it did 140 years ago, different story. But now I think that the fact that accountants are the face of integrity makes that decision enablement piece a lot stronger. We used to be the custodians of financial data, but now I think we're more the custodians of enterprise data because we now have to care about a lot more than just the debits and the credits.

Anthony Lehmann:
But you're right. At its heart, the numbers are the numbers, aren't they? And the debits and credits have to balance and the numbers are the numbers. So that's the core purpose, isn't it, of accounting. Which I guess, Jasvinder, just hasn't changed, has it, over that journey?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yeah, absolutely.

Anthony Lehmann:
Yeah.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Luca Pacioli, was that the guy who invented debits and credits, right?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes. Italian merchant.

Anthony Lehmann:
Yes.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yeah. It started from there and then formalised in Scotland.

Kaushika Jayalath:
It doesn't matter whether it's blockchain or financial data. At the end of the day, the debits and credits are still the debits and the credits.

Anthony Lehmann:
Is it a greater invention than sliced bread or the wheel, debits and credits?

Kaushika Jayalath:
Look at where the economy is now. I think it is.

Anthony Lehmann:
So why don't people say it's the greatest invention since double entry accounting?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes, it is actually. We can say it in CPA podcasts.

Kaushika Jayalath:
And we don't like to toot our own horn that much. Not like the bread manufacturers.

Anthony Lehmann:
Or the wheel makers.

Kaushika Jayalath:
The wheel makers.

Anthony Lehmann:
So every time the world panics, so it could be a world war, it could be a global financial crisis, a depression, a pandemic, accountants seem to get busier. So how did these moments move accountants to become what they weren't before? What is it about these crises that call upon accountants to deliver something special and something different?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes. So I will put on my accounting historians cap now. Whenever there is a crisis, accountants are expected to perform new tasks or assume new roles. During Great Depression, accountants were expected to provide greater financial oversight. And during World War and after the World War during the reconstruction phase, accountants were expected to provide accurate cost controls and also accountability of public funds.

Then the financial crisis that came from corporate collapses, accountants were expected to provide some guidance on corporate governance and also on transparency. And you talked about COVID-19. During COVID-19 pandemic, governments were expecting accountants to provide certified information to make sure that grants are allocated to those businesses that have suffered losses. So whenever there has been a crisis, the role of accountants has expanded and accounting has emerged as victorious as a profession from any crisis that societies has faced in last hundred years.

Anthony Lehmann:
So the role of accountants has expanded and it's kept growing out in those directions post ... So let's say after World War II, it's kept doing that and after the COVID-19 crisis, it's kept expanding.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes, absolutely. As the society has become more complex, there is a demand for accountability and transparency. And whenever there is such demand, people look at accountants.

Kaushika Jayalath:
And there's an interesting trend in everything that Jasvinder just mentioned, which is with every shock, with every crisis, it's almost like the economy panics and accountants become the emotional support system for the economy because the society starts asking for transparency and more controls. And it's always the accountant that steps in because the controls that are put in place might come in the form of regulation, might come in the form of shareholder value, might come in the form of stakeholder requests. Whatever it is, it's the accountant that fundamentally answers the question, can we trust the numbers? And is this organisation or country or government being held accountable? So in that regard, it's been the same flow.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
And I will also add that during all these crises, accounting as a professional also grew their processes and rules and standards. So the formalisation of professional accounting standards and the reporting standards, they evolved with all these crisis. And also with the corporate collapses of 1960s and later in 2000s, it also led to reforms in corporate law. So accountants assisted not only in refining the accounting profession, but also the other key fundamental components of society that is legislated through governments and implemented through law.

Anthony Lehmann:
So when were the first accounting standards introduced? Did they come after World War I, after World War II? When did that process begin?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
The earliest demand for accountability emerged from corporate collapses.

Anthony Lehmann:
Okay, right.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
And not going very far, I'll give you an example of Ballarat. Ballarat had gold rush and boom. So in Ballarat, I was working on a project with Professor Brian West. We discovered that 10,000 gold mining companies were declared bankrupt and we looked at history in the Victorian archives. We looked at some documents that they were using very dodgy accounting practices. So accounting was at that stage-

Anthony Lehmann:
So you are telling me that gold mining companies set up in the 1880s in Ballarat were a little bit dodgy?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Well, I'm not saying that, but what we discovered in the financial reports that we discovered in the Victorian archives. And then after that, obviously public, there's a public outcry and politicians demand accounting profession to put its house in order. This was a famous statement by one of the British prime minister who said, "The accounting needs to put its house in order." And the Victorian premier at that stage as well in the 40s and 50s, I believe they said, "Accountants should put their house in order."

So accountants were expected to actually solve all these problems, which were not accounting problems, but accountants came up with solutions, they issued corporate accounting standards, they formalised the accounting associations and they formalised accounting standard boards and they essentially assisted the corporate world to be able to present figures that reflect true and fair nature.

Anthony Lehmann:
So when did the job move beyond accuracy alone and start to be about judgement? So when did that happen and what caused that?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
So judgement became a central figure in the accounting profession or the key requirement during the early to mid-20th century. And that was when the businesses became more complex and the accounting standards and the reporting standards were getting formalised. So accounting has evolved as a profession over the last hundred years. So when we move from a local enterprise with a few stakeholders to a multinational corporation that has operations in number of countries, accountants or accounting assisted functions are not only checking financial accuracy.

You are providing estimates, you are helping with predictions and also asset valuations. So when you need all those skills, you need to provide judgement . So that's when all this happened, judgement became an essential skill that accountants need to have.

Anthony Lehmann:
Indeed. And through this period from the late 1800s through to the sort of early 1900s, diversity started to become a factor as well. And the first, I want to give a mention too, the first female member of CPA Australia, Mary Addison Hamilton.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes, absolutely. The earliest accountants were mostly men, and as the profession was formalised in Britain and Canada, US, Australia, so most of them were Anglo men. And at early stage, women were also barred from becoming accountants. So when men went to war, that's when the requirement of letting women enter the profession started, because you needed people to keep doing bookkeeping. So women entered the profession from that, but then since then we have come far.

Anthony Lehmann:
We have indeed.

Kaushika Jayalath:
And I think it's easy for us to kind of disregard this quite a bit, or not disregard, but more just look over it, is the core identity of Australia right now is so tethered to that diversity element. And think about the impact accounting has had just on the culture of Australia, because there are so many migrants who move to Australia who act as either accountants or finance professionals, and an organisation like CPA Australia has a huge part to play in that as well. On the flip side though, if you think about the CPA Australia membership, there's 175,000, 176,000 members, 30% live outside of Australia.

Anthony Lehmann:
Oh, really?

Kaushika Jayalath:
Yeah. So think about what that means in terms of how the accounting profession is enabling a global population to actually make an income, do business, develop the economy, but also give them a purpose. That in of itself is a huge accomplishment.

Anthony Lehmann:
It is indeed. I know in Australia, there are four comedians who used to be accountants. I'm one, and the other three are Sri Lankan Australians.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Okay.

Anthony Lehmann:
Nazeem Hussain, Suren Jayemanne and Dilruk Jayasinha are the three.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Yeah, I don't know if I classify Nazeem as an accountant, but that's a separate conversation. I'll pick that by the way.

Anthony Lehmann:
If he did work at either KPMG or Price Waterhouse for a little while. I think there's a ... I wouldn't get him to do your books now though.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Yeah, there you go.

Anthony Lehmann:
I've got to be honest. And fun fact, Mary Addison Hamilton was born in Fitzroy and I used to think that St. Mary MacKillop was the most famous Mary ever born in Fitzroy, but I think it's Mary Addison Hamilton. Would you agree, Jasvinder?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes, I do agree with you.

Anthony Lehmann:
So accounting is often seen as a boring profession. I was there myself. People would go, "Oh, (eye roll), accountant." I personally blame Hollywood and television depictions of accountants over the years for that reputation, but how has the stereotype evolved through history and what impact do you think pop culture has had on that sort of public view of accountants?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
I'll probably answer the first part. As we discussed in the previous questions, the earliest form of accounting involved, working with papers, ledgers, and the role of accountant was recording, classifying, summarising, and presenting reports. So all of that you had to do quietly. Unlike many other occupations where you can work and chat at the same time, the accounting numbers or recording entries or presenting calculations is such that you need a lot of concentration.

And especially when you're doing everything manually, one mistake can ruin everything. If the trial balance doesn't match, you have to go back to all journal entries and check all ledgers. So you have to be very quiet and concentrate. So it comes as very monotonous, repetitive, and you can call it boring. And my experience also shows, because I, along with accounting historian, I'm also a sociologist. I look at society and how society is in transition and how accounting impacts that. So my understanding is that once stereotypes are formed, it takes generations to get rid of them. Especially the bad ones.

Anthony Lehmann:
It does. Yes.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
So I'll answer that part and I probably welcome Kaushika to answer the next part.

Kaushika Jayalath:
I reckon, yes, there has been a part to play where media hasn't necessarily portrayed us in the best light or in what it is today. But I take that as if you think about a CFO, you don't think of them as an accountant, but they are fundamentally accounting skills and they need to be able to provide strategy, to control an organization's costs, to be able to add value and run the business. Now, if you look at it from that point of view, my personal opinion is that if accountants are doing their job well, everything should be silent because the numbers are behaving and the organisation is behaving. If you see an accountant in media, then it's likely either a Royal Commission or a Senate hearing, right? So-

Anthony Lehmann:
I'd like to just to use a sport analogy to further support what you're saying, I know when you watch football or cricket, if you don't notice the umpire, they're doing a good job.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Yeah, exactly. So it's the same concept here where ... And it doesn't mean that we don't initiate change. Think about the society that we live in today. I think we are change makers, but we don't toot our own horn about it. And my example I'll throw you is an ESG professional is a carbon accountant. They are creating change, but they don't go speaking about it. You get AI auditors, you get cyber risk specialists, all who need to understand the financials and how to find anomalies. These are all skills the modern-day accountant has. Yes, we tend to attract a lot of introverts. And so because of that, we don't really speak out a lot, but I think that is changing quite a bit.

Anthony Lehmann:
And do you feel as though accountants now carry many different titles? So there's someone who might at their core be an accountant, but they'll call themselves a financial specialist.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Exactly.

Anthony Lehmann:
... or a financial advisor or something else.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Yeah. Financial analyst, your data analyst, your BI team. All these phrases that are thrown out. If they don't understand the debits and the credits, and if they don't understand how to interpret a financial statement, then what they're doing is fundamentally inaccurate. Now, that is where an accounting profession kind of collides with accounting as a skill. So at that point, we have to ask ourselves, who is an accountant? Is it someone who just learns accounting or is it someone who's putting accounting to practice?

Anthony Lehmann:
And the term creative accounting over the year got a bad name for itself, but really creative accounting in the right way should be applauded, shouldn't it?

Kaushika Jayalath:
That phrase still holds, so I'm not going to comment on it.

Anthony Lehmann:
But I think you can be creative in a positive way.

Kaushika Jayalath:
You can create change and be an accountant in that way. I was in Tassie last year for the sustainability forum that CPA Australia did. And I met a carbon accountant who's made it her mission to advise farmers on how to make sure that their crops are grown ethically and sustainably in such a way that it sustains the soil that they are using. So you don't think about an accountant and think that that's what's something that an accountant would do.

Anthony Lehmann:
Yeah. A friend of mine is working on a business at the moment in the States where he has an accounting background and he's teamed up with a scientist and they want to make AI production carbon-neutral, but it requires accounting skills as well as the scientific know how to make that happen.

Kaushika Jayalath:
My own personal reflection is Oracle didn't hire me because I'm an IT specialist. Oracle hired me because I'm a CPA. There's a huge difference there. And that's a reflection on where the accounting profession's going.

Anthony Lehmann:
Jasvinder, how were accountants regarded in society? If we go back to 1886, how were they regarded then?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Well, accounting profession was formalised with Royal Charters, like many other occupations, law, medicine. So accountants were held with very high respect. Even to this day, in society, accountants have very high respect because if I talk to my students, some of them are working as accountants, some of them have their parents as accountants. There is a high respect. I think just as we talked about stereotypes before, it's probably just the media and the stereotypes that accounting is boring or accounting is not relevant. Accountants are very important, not any less important than doctors.

Anthony Lehmann:
I love that. We've come a long way though, haven't we? As we've discussed over the last 140 years, Kaushika, if we go from handwritten ledgers, quill pens, dabbing it in the ink pot there, to now cloud platforms and AI, should the average accountant listening to this, do they need to get nervous about what their future holds if we start to embrace AI as I think we are moving forward?

Kaushika Jayalath:
Absolutely not. They need to get excited because now your opportunities have exponentially increased to make an impact. And what I mean by that is if you think about quill pens to spreadsheets to AI, yes, you reconcile the books when there were quill pens. Yes, you still reconcile the books when there were Excel sheets. You'll still have to reconcile when there's AI.

The reason being, every time a new tool comes out, we automatically assume it will be used for good, but it will also be used for the ill effects of it. Excel started in '85, and since then, everyone uses Excel for their financial statements and put numbers together, but you can always fudge it. You can always make numbers do things that it shouldn't, which is where the accountant's reconciliation skill ... It's not the technical skill of reconciliation, it's the professional scepticism. That is what saves the accountant.

Anthony Lehmann:
So regardless of the excitement levels around this new technology, accountants as human beings, as individuals, still need to double check the work that the AI is doing.

Kaushika Jayalath:
For two reasons. It's not just a double-checking side, but I'll speak to that first. So the reason why that professional scepticism helps is we are now assuming AI will solve everything and knows everything, but it does not. At the end of the day, it is a large language model trained on existing data. So when it gives you an answer, it's being probabilistic. It is guessing the right answer. Now, they're guessing a lot better than what anything had done in the past, but it is still probabilistic. So hallucinations are still a problem. Context fraud is now becoming a problem.

So I'll give you an example. If you load a 300-page contract into an AI GPT and you ask it to find all of the times where breakage fees are mentioned, do you know for a fact whether that AI large language model is reading your contract or whether it's actually using its pre-trained data to answer the question? You don't know that. And now there's ways to fix those things. There's phase to bring in what they call retrieval augmented generation or all that stuff.

Accountants still needs to be aware of it because if you don't ask the question, you don't get the answer. Hallucinations are the same thing. Can you trust a narrative given by an AI report? So that's the professional scepticism side. The other side of it is the communication of it, the ability to catch onto nuance. Do you honestly think ... I'll take your character in Utopia as an example. Do you honestly think AI can explain CapEx and OpEx to Jim?

Anthony Lehmann:
Absolutely not.

Kaushika Jayalath:
No.

Anthony Lehmann:
No. Hard to explain anything to Jim in Utopia.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Unless your Jim's finance business partner who knows how to tap into Jim's personality and say something in a way that Jim will listen to you. That's nuance.

Anthony Lehmann:
And that nuance is a very human side that AI is not able to capture.

Kaushika Jayalath:
We have a huge number of public practitioners working in Australia and they have to work with everyone from manufacturing companies with 100, 200 staff to tradies who's just running their sole proprietorship. You can't speak to the two in the same manner. You can't speak to the two in the same language. AI is not at a level where you can understand nuances and think about just sitting down with someone to explain their finances to them. You ask them how they're doing. If their mother died last week, you approach the conversation differently to if their daughter had a birthday last week. You break the same information very differently. Those are things that AI cannot pick up.

Anthony Lehmann:
Jasvinder?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes. So I will build on what Kaushika said. So essentially you need accountants who have AI governance skills. You need accountants who have AI auditing skills. So you still need ... Well, the governance and the society cannot just depend on AI. When the computerised accounting or the software became sophisticated, we know for a fact that there were fabrications, codes were put in place to fabricate numbers, and that's when the forensic accounting came into force. So in future, I don't think any government will allow AI model to certify documents or attest auditing reports. So accountants will need to, as Kaushika said, embrace more skills, new skills and capabilities, and be able to audit not just numbers, but AI systems.

Anthony Lehmann:
So it's an evolution of the accounting landscape as opposed to a reduction-

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes.

Anthony Lehmann:
... of the accounting landscape.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yeah, when I teach accounting and when we're using old books, there was a statement that accounting is not science. It is a mix between art and science. So that's where we go back to your statement of creative accounting. Although it has been misused over the years, accounting will continue to evolve because it's not a pure science. It depends on judgement, which is driven by human desires and greed and so on. Therefore, any technology will not replace accounting judgement.

Anthony Lehmann:
So Kaushika, would you say to your average CFO today, you need to lean into AI, but just be cautious about how you go about it?

Kaushika Jayalath:
Yes. And so I get pulled into a lot of AI labs and it's everyone saying, "What do we want... AI? When do we want it... now?" But my first thing is, hold up, what are you actually trying to solve here? Because the outcome has to drive the tool you use. People tend to forget that AI is just a tool and they tend to dump into a category of, let's just invest in AI and see where it leads us. That's absolutely the wrong way to go about it. If you're a CFO or a CEO that is trying to invest in an AI strategy, you need to make it absolutely clear what problems you're trying to solve. Once you know that, you need to make absolutely clear you've got the data to support it, because if you don't, it's garbage in, garbage out.

A lot of organisations, when they ask for AI, the first question we ask is, "Do you have a data governance strategy?" Because if you don't, you can't use AI. It's only as good as the source information you feed it. So we say, absolutely, jump right in, but do it with the right guardrails in place. You need to have a proper governance mechanism. You need to have data custodians. You need to have ... If you're a small organisation and you don't have all of these fancy structures, at least a one pager on what to do and what not to do with AI. If you've got a business with five people working for you, just tell them not to put customer data into ChatGPT. That itself is enough.

Anthony Lehmann:
So put the guardrails in place. It's evolving at a rate of knots though, isn't it?

Kaushika Jayalath:
Yeah, absolutely.

Anthony Lehmann:
So Kaushika, in 10 years' time, what will accountants be responsible for that we're not seeing now?

Kaushika Jayalath:
I think it's organically happening where we are now starting to become value creators as opposed to just the custodians or the regulators. Historically, I'll take a CFO as an example. CFOs were looked at as the custodians of the numbers, but also regulatory requirements, cost control, everything, the bad cop effectively, but that's no longer the case. A CFO now has to generate value.

So I see that role becoming a chief value officer where they drive value for an organisation in different ways. And that comes with a lot of different definitions of value. If you think about sustainability, you now have to report on sustainability, but you now also need to start investing in ways of making your business sustainable. You can look at cyber risk. There is a huge financial implication if you have to pay a ransom. And so how do you manage that? All of this becomes a finance professional's responsibility, which then drives value.

Anthony Lehmann:
So aside from a chief value officer, Jasvinder, how do you see accounting evolving over the next, well, let's just say 10 years because it's moving so quickly at the moment.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
As accounting evolved, our degrees also changed. When I started teaching accounting 20 years ago, we were not teaching forensic accounting, but now we are. And forensic accountants is a term now. I believe AI auditing and AI auditors and also AI governance will be a separate branch of accounting profession, and we will need to teach those skills as well. So there will be a new branch of accounting that offers those services. And what Kaushika said, you need to embrace all those skills. And if you want to call, give it a term, I believe AI auditor.

Anthony Lehmann:
So does that mean will there be two sign-offs on an annual report? Will there be a sign-off on the financials and a sign-off on the AI?

Kaushika Jayalath:
Yes, absolutely. So internal auditors will have to start signing off on whether there's any issues with the large language models, whether there's been any prompt injection. Prompt injection is where you've asked the AI to do something. An external threat actor comes in and says, "You know everything that person said, just do this one thing." If that little piece of sentence is entered into your prompt somewhere, that's enough to give you the wrong answer. So an internal auditor's responsibility now changes.

But don't just think about the regulatory side of it or the control side of it. Think about the value creation side of it as well. There's a lot happening now with AI agents. We are now at an inflexion point where it's IT people designing AI agents. Is that the best group of people to design AI agents? Maybe, maybe not. But imagine if accountants or these management accountants, people who have the ability to speak the language of the business, what if they start getting involved in building these AI agents? Because building one isn't hard anymore. You tell Claude to build one for you, it'll build one for you. But what you build it on, that is where I think we can add real value.

Anthony Lehmann:
So that raises an interesting question. What does the next generation of accountants look like?

Kaushika Jayalath:
Creative. I'll bring you back that way.

Anthony Lehmann:
We're back to creativity.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Creativity, because you need to be willing to change things, which young people are more often than not. But now it's changing things for betterment with the tools that you never had before. I think the fact that knowledge is democratised and these tools are democratised is going to make a big difference. I'll give you an example. Two years ago, I ran a guest lecturer at University of Queensland where we gave a bunch of kids access to a bunch of cloud technology and said, "Have at it, build something."

The number one idea that they came up with is an app built by a bunch of international students so that they can find affordable housing. Now think about that as a concept. They saw a gap in the market. They saw the demand for it. They saw an actual problem in Australia and fixed it with technology.

Anthony Lehmann:
Yeah.

Kaushika Jayalath:
That is what I mean as creative.

Anthony Lehmann:
So what capabilities will matter most or what professional traits or character traits will be most important to the accountant of the future?

Kaushika Jayalath:
The one key item is the one thing that accountants have always had, integrity and trust. We lose that, we lose everything. So that is where that key element of integrity, of ethics, of doing good, that is fundamental. On top of that, you now need to have the technical skills. You need to be a great communicator because you're speaking to a lot of different people with a lot of different styles of audiences, but also knowledge.

Then you need to also pair that with the technological skills. You need to be able to write a prompt well. You need to be able to create an AI agent. You need to be able to audit an AI agent. These are all skills that an accountant needs to learn. And you have to pair that with strategic thinking because that judgement, that human judgement is now elevated because you've been given this amazing tool that'll do all the grunt work, but now you need to add value by interpreting that.

Anthony Lehmann:
And a lot of the things you mentioned just there, AI can't do those jobs.

Kaushika Jayalath:
No.

Anthony Lehmann:
Yeah.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Think about what's happening in Australia right now. You've got employers firing staff and rehiring them. They fired because of AI. Now they're hiring them because they realise, well, actually AI can do 70% of the job, but it can't do the last 30%.

Anthony Lehmann:
Jasvinder, what would the future accountant look like to you?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yeah. So building on what Kaushika said, and I'll throw some other words, accountants will become more inventive and innovative. You will have to develop more capabilities such as technological skills and communication skills, how to communicate with technology and how to communicate back to the stakeholders. Adaptability, because the AI agents will change so fast, so you'll need to be able to adopt and adapt. But the other skills such as critical thinking and logical reasoning and ethical reasoning, those won't change.

To challenge the reports that are prepared by AI to see whether they are ethical, whether they are in public interest and whether they are in the interests of environment and society sustainability because we're living in present, but accountants are sometimes asked to predict future, whether the practices are sustainable, whether they're ethical. Accountants will need to have all those capabilities that they have now, plus AI enabled capabilities as well.

Kaushika Jayalath:
And not to throw shade at other professions, but this is something we are seeing in reality is finance transformation programmes, which I see every single day. When that becomes the IT department's problem, that is when they fail. Because a finance transformation where let's say you're changing from your on premise system to a cloud system, you're introducing predictive analytics. Whatever it is, if the accountant is not involved, if the person who understands the technical expertise is not involved, it tends to go south very fast. It becomes a failed investment.

And that is because all of the skills that we've listed so far, all the characteristics, the professional judgement , the professional curiosity and the ability to analyse data in a critical manner, all of that is not something that an IT student learns because they learn coding, they learn how to put the system in place, whereas we learn the human judgement element of it. So there's a real opportunity, and I've turned a career out of it. There's a real opportunity for accountants to step into this new world of transformation and own it.

Anthony Lehmann:
There's I think it was a dean of one of the big universities in America, might have been Princeton maybe. And a few years ago, she said that the workplace up until the Industrial Revolution was built on muscle. From the Industrial Revolution to today, it's been built on brains and the next evolution, it'll be built on heart. Do you concur with that?

Kaushika Jayalath:
Absolutely. Because the example, the first thing that came to my mind is right now I'm building AI agents. And my first question is, how is the observability going to be handled? Who is going to track how much this is going to cost the organisation? Who is going to track whether there's a human in the loop? Those questions have to come from someone who cares about the human element in it.

Anthony Lehmann:
You need a level of empathy to move forward.

Kaushika Jayalath:
Absolutely.

Anthony Lehmann:
So if you had to, Jasvinder here, if you had to explain to a non-accountant why this profession still matters, what would you say?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Well, I'll give some examples. Often it is said, will accounting be relevant in future? Accounting was always relevant. It is still relevant and it will be much more relevant in future. I'll give some examples. We take number of decisions every day. An average person goes out to buy things, they need to invest money in whether future assets or they need to spend on car or they want to plan a holiday. They take all those decisions, they are monetary decisions. And often decisions are taken based on the pricing. Even this morning, people were talking about prices of fuel.

Anthony Lehmann:
Yes.

Jasvinder Sidhu:
So all those numbers that we depend on taking decisions are provided by accountants.

Anthony Lehmann:
I know one person who didn't really care about the numbers in government, and that's my character, Jim, in Utopia, all he cared about was the ... Just announce it. He was big for ignoring the numbers. But for the most part, people rely on these numbers to make the policy decisions, don't they, Jasvinder?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes, absolutely. So second example, it has increasingly become important and it's now a requirement that all public policies are costed. When politicians go for election, they present a policy and they ask accountants to cost those policies. And public at large trust those numbers.

Anthony Lehmann:
The accounts hold people accountable. It was Frank Wilson who held Al Capone accountable in the 1930s.

Kaushika Jayalath:
When did he go down for? Tax fraud.

Anthony Lehmann:
Tax fraud because Frank Wilson, who ... Al Capone put a contract out on his life, by the way, but Frank Wilson didn't care and he kept doing the maths and kept doing the accounting. And Al Capone went to prison for 10 or 11 years, courtesy of an accountant.

Kaushika Jayalath:
And that trend has still continued and will continue, which is markets rely on credible information. Economies rely on credible information. Governments rely on transparent, real financial statements. Investors rely on the truth. So if you look at how an economy is created today, the accountant is fundamental to all of that in terms of giving the assurance. We are the custodian of financial data, but more so now enterprise data because investors aren't just looking at the financial statements anymore.

So from that regard, as long as you need to trust someone in the age of AI and TikTok and social media, you will always come down to the person that has the credentials and you'll always come down to the person that's got the integrity. And the best example I'll give you is, would you trust tax advice you get on TikTok or would you trust your accountant? Simple as that.

Anthony Lehmann:
As much as it's cheaper on TikTok, I'll probably defer to my accountant-

Kaushika Jayalath:
There you go.

Anthony Lehmann:
... I got to say. I wish people would take that advice more broadly and other topics as well. Don't take your advice from TikTok. So Jasvinder and Kaushika, a bright future for accountants?

Jasvinder Sidhu:
Yes, absolutely. As we discussed earlier, accounting has evolved and whenever society is in crisis, they look at accountants and accounting profession has a bright future. Even with all that outcry that AI will take all those jobs. But as Kaushika said, new sub-functions will emerge and accountants will become much more important and accountants will work with other professions and occupations as well.

Anthony Lehmann:
Indeed. And Kaushika, final word.

Kaushika Jayalath:
CPA Australia has got this slogan now called Limitless Opportunities. I fundamentally believe in that. I completely believe in that because that is what accountants now have the ability to tap into, limitless opportunities in front of them. And accounting is what makes that possible.

Anthony Lehmann:
Well, what a journey it's been over the last 140 years. And with you here today, thank you, Jasvinder, thank you, Kaushika, for sharing your knowledge, giving your insights and helping us to celebrate this incredible anniversary, 140 years for CPA Australia and the professionals that they represent. It's clear that accounting doesn't just survive change, it grows because of it.

When we look at pandemics, wars, financial crisis, depressions, et cetera, accounting's not just there. It helps us through it and then evolves to another level and becomes even more essential along the way. And with the introduction of AI and as we technologically involve, so will accountants and the landscape will not diminish. It will in fact broaden and provide more opportunities for people in the profession. It's a very exciting time for accountants. It's a very exciting time for accounting. And I know I'm really excited about where this is going to go next, and I'm sure you both are as well.

Now, for our listeners, eager to learn more, please check out the show notes for links and additional resources from INTHEBLACK and CPA Australia, including the INTHEBLACK Magazine Bold Signals, that's Bold Signals special edition coming out very, very soon. And don't forget to subscribe to the INTHEBLACK Podcast and share this episode with your colleagues and friends in the business community. And thanks for listening to the INTHEBLACK Podcast. I'm Lehmo. And remember, in a world of uncertainty, someone still has to own the numbers.