Halfway through a recent round table on artificial intelligence (AI) at Chartered Accountants’ Hall, ICAEW President Malcolm Bacchus delivered some sobering remarks on the changing face of accountancy careers.

“If you’re looking to get into tax advice, tax compliance, accounting or general bookkeeping, forget it,” he said. “There aren’t jobs there in the future, full stop. There will be lots of new jobs – but AI calls for a different mindset. In the past, we hired people who were good at interpreting tax laws and giving tax advice. But frankly, in the future, unless you’re a multimillionaire, you won’t be seeking those services from a person.”

Bacchus’s thoughts highlight how vital it is for the profession to do all it can today to develop the AI-focused skill sets of tomorrow. But how should it set about that critical task and what obstacles are in the way?

With Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Alan Mak MP listening in at the table, ICAEW members from the profession and industry put forward their ideas and perspectives.

Flawed curriculum?

Several speakers underscored the importance of early intervention. In the assessment of Crowe UK Chief Innovation Officer Katy Bayliss, the current school curriculum is not built for students to think in a technological way that suits workplace purposes. “Without even having a curriculum that would help us tackle the skills gap, universities are having to do lots of training – but perhaps can’t quite do enough,” she said. “That leaves companies to pick up the pieces and ensure they have the required skills to meet regulatory standards.”

The youth-level skills gap was also a concern for Sarah Saxty, Head of Finance at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, which operates a chain of AI-driven drive-throughs. “I use ChatGPT every day and encourage my team to do so,” she said. “However, I have the knowledge to understand whether the output is right or wrong, whereas I’m not sure young people do.”

For Tribosonics CEO Glenn Fletcher, whose company makes industrial sensing equipment, the government should work with business to provide more apprenticeships and placement opportunities for kick-starting science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) careers. It should also encourage companies to do more STEM outreach work in schools and colleges.

“Regardless of young people’s experience in the curriculum, you can take them through real-time, practical applications of digital skills on live innovation projects,” he said. “Plus, you can help them understand how businesses should be building values and culture, and promoting a ‘no fear of failure’ ethos. As well as helping prospective apprentices and students, work placements give parents a feel for which options their children can pursue.”

Fletcher stressed: “In our own STEM outreach work, our message is, you don’t have to be a technologist to work in a tech company. You don’t have to be an AI expert to be a data scientist because you can build up those skills in work.”

Moore Kingston Smith Partner Becky Shields, who leads the firm’s Data Analytics and AI team, noted: “We took our internship online this year so we could reach hundreds, rather than the handful of placements you may be able to accommodate in-house. The interest was huge. Students are eager to find out what’s happening in the workplace.”

Stimulating capacity

Members also cited apprenticeships as worthy of stronger government support. Fletcher said: “Industry is facing two problems: a multiplicity of AI models and consultants, making it hard for companies to know where to start, and lakes of unstructured data. We’re building and embedding our own AI models to make our data insightful, and we’ve got a senior data scientist who’s training people through our own, internal apprenticeship. Government could identify, fund and promote training to bring people through in that way.”

Forvis Mazars Director of Innovation and Digital Skills Robbie White went a step further: “There’s a real opportunity here to embed AI skills across the board. Instead of having a pure ‘AI apprenticeship,’ why not make AI a key part of apprenticeships in other areas?”

Jo Muncaster, Head of Finance at AI-enablement specialists digiLab, pointed out that initiatives such as the recently announced AI Growth Zone for Culham would stimulate much-needed capacity building. She also called for a Turing Institute-like, parallel AI expert body that would be drawn from the business community rather than select universities, and help companies tackle the skills challenge.

Future focus

Deloitte Partner, Algorithm and AI Assurance, Mark Cankett warned that the skills gap goes to the highest level: “Many large, global institutions – some of which are heavily regulated – are already struggling in their compliance divisions to find the right types of knowledge and skills around AI regulation. If they’re struggling, I suspect it’s even harder for smaller businesses.”

Bayliss wondered whether closing the skills gap would mean retraining current staff or hiring all new people. In either case, how should companies best manage the task while awaiting the very regulatory framework that those employees would be required to meet?

For Shields, though, a major part of the skills gap stems from accountants not doing enough to promote the attractiveness of the profession – not as it stands now, but as it will look in years to come.

“We’re talking about technology that can completely revolutionise the way we work,” she said. “Real-time audit will be a game-changer. If we want to preserve our industry, we need to start talking very openly and honestly about what the future looks like. Thinking back to when I joined the profession, if I’d known what it might look like five years from then, it would have felt much more attractive to me. So, in terms of our skill sets, we need to stop thinking just two or three years ahead and think much longer term than that.”

She added: “We still think we’re talking ourselves out of jobs. What we’re actually doing is creating much more interesting jobs. We’re currently seeing a drop-off in the quality of candidates – and whether we’re losing good people to other professions, we’ll never have that level of data – but I’m certain that if we talked more about what the future profession might look like, that quality would improve.

“If we want to keep intellectual capital in this country, we need to start setting that future state and aiming for it.”