For accountants, what isn’t AI, anyway?

Today there is a veritable universe worth of products that claim to use artificial intelligence or be powered by AI or are, themselves, an AI solution. But how true is that? Because while “What is AI?” is an important question (see previous story), another one just as vital is, “What isn’t AI?” It is difficult to understand what counts as artificial intelligence without also having an idea of what doesn’t count. Without this boundary, there’s precious little people won’t call AI, which only serves to confuse the issue. 

When we asked our panel of AI experts, though the particulars did vary, the strongest points of commonality were that, for something to count as artificial intelligence, it needs to be dynamic and adaptive, which excludes most deterministic rules-based systems like robotic process automation. With few exceptions, most of the experts we spoke to said that automation alone does not make AI — it needs to be able to approach novel problems and learn from them. 

Yet even within this framework there remain differences in what they chose to highlight. Some, like Aaron Harris, CTO of Sage, believed that AI cannot be deterministic, saying that AI — like human beings — operates on a more probabilistic basis, which serves as both an advantage and a disadvantage. Others, like Samantha Bowling, managing partner of GWCPA, pointed to the need for human intervention as a marker of something which decidedly is not AI. And some, like Wesley Hartman, founder of Automata, are skeptical that even the things we call AI are AI at all. 

What the following slideshow demonstrates is that while there is a general sense for what shouldn’t count as AI, the specifics can vary as people focus on different things. While AI will no doubt have a major impact on the accounting profession, just how this will happen, and with what kinds of AI, remains to be seen.