Shamus Rae, CEO of Engine B, which creates generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for professional services, will be addressing ICAEW members at the Annual Conference in October. Here, we bring you a preview of his speech and Engine B’s plans.

“In terms of productivity, we’re aiming to get rid of 20% of labour hours in three years,” Rae says.

“And that’s a low number,” he says, as he outlines Engine B’s ambitious plans to unveil a series of AI agents, or copilots, that will “augment team members”.

Over the next 24 months, Engine B is set to roll out 10 to 15 of these AI agents, radically overhauling audit and accounting processes. The agents will cover areas such as substantive testing on accounts receivables, testing on accounts payable and inventory lease accounting, employee benefits, and risk planning, among others.

“Everybody who works in audit won’t have to do data entry or copy and paste numbers. They won’t have to go through large documents trying to find the right paragraph – all of that will go. Then they can focus on the value-add piece, which is reviewing the work, making the judgements,” Rae says.

Engine B is also creating an AI agent that will help auditors review the work, too.

AI agents and copilots both encompass a large language model’s (LLM) capabilities by intelligently summoning external functionality, such as sending an email, he says. He refers to AI agents as having different personalities – such as the auditor, the audit partner or the trainer – allowing users to be able to summon up the different personalities as and when they need them. “It’ll totally change the life of an auditor,” he predicts.

Agents can work separately within a solution, determining which functions a user needs. A copilot, on the other hand, is a type of agent that works alongside a user and relies on the user interaction.

At the conference, Rae will outline how in lease accounting auditors have to carry out the time-consuming work of analysing myriad components such as the terms and conditions of the lease, as well as understanding the requirements of IFRS 16, the general ledger and the fixed asset register.

“You’ve got to look over all different data sources and you’ve got to make judgments, and review the accounts to make sure that they are reflecting that lease in the right way. The accuracy level in lease accounting in firms is about 80 to 90% currently. The accuracy is not high, but it’s quite complicated,” he says.

The AI agents that Engine B is creating will be able to carry out this complex work at the auditor’s prompting, reducing days’ of labour to just a matter of minutes.

“It’s a totally different step change in productivity,” Rae says. “You’ll be able to create a team of mini agents all working on one task. And sometimes they can be competing with each other to get the right answer. You could have an agent that’s trying to prove it’s an operational lease, while another agent is looking to prove it’s a financial lease. You’ve created a whole series of junior team members who are focused and specialised in certain things.”

While AI agents are working on new cases, they are also simultaneously ‘learning’, which in turn will improve quality, Rae explains.

Engine B, which was bought by US professional services firm CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen LLP) in May, aims not to replace accountants with technology, says Rae, but rather “enrich people’s lives and ensure they are engaged in the review process” aided by AI agents “and not bothering with the boring work”.

The long-term aim, he explains, is that these AI agents can then be deployed with non-audit clients who want to better understand lease accounting, for example, on a pay-as-you-go service.

“The digitalisation will flow right across and everyone will be able to have access to these tools,” Rae says, as he invites ICAEW members to reimagine the world of accountancy.