What can AI do, anyway? (2024)

So, let's assume we've somehow, someway, all come to agreement on what AI is (see previous story) and is not (see previous story). Not sure how we managed to actually accomplish that, but we did, at least in this thought experiment. So we've operationalized all our variables and we can finally say we understand the fundamentals of AI.

Not so fast.

Because beyond what AI is and is not is the question of what AI can and cannot do, a matter which also has a wide range of opinions. Is AI the wonder technology that will do anything and everything, ushering us into a new age? Or is it useless for anything but the most rudimentary of tasks? For AI experts in the accounting solutions space, the answer is somewhere in the middle. But it's a wide middle which contains a diverse set of opinions.

When it came to what AI cannot do, the most common answers centered around the inability to replace human judgment and initiative. They pointed out that AI really lags in its ability to contextualize information, and so has trouble approaching complex situations with the required degree of nuance. In this respect, many said that AI cannot replace human accountants in their entirety. At the same time, they noted that current models do have many advanced capacities that can greatly enhance the work done by these same human accountants. And so while AI–it is believed–won't replace accountants, it still will profoundly change the profession and the industries they operate in. Accountants will survive, but not entirely unchanged.

In this third part of the series, we hear our experts respond to the questions: In terms of accounting, what can't AI do that people think it can do? and In terms of accounting, what can AI do that people think it can't do? (See earlier installments on what AI is — and what AI isn't.)