Accountants are justly proud of their position as the economy’s “most trusted advisor,” a position you have earned through your integrity and the value you have consistently delivered to your clients and communities.
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The question is, what are you doing to keep that position?
If your answer is that you’re doing just what you’ve always done, then that trust you’ve developed is at risk — though not in the way you might imagine. Clients aren’t going to suddenly start shunning you, nor are regulators likely to start stripping the profession of its position as guarantor of the reliability of public markets. Even after the low points of Enron and Worldcom at the start of the century — when markets were howling, “Where were the auditors?” — the sacrifice of Andersen and the introduction of a regulatory overseer were enough to clear up any misgivings and restore the profession to its favored position.
No, the risk is not that accountants will become untrustworthy pariahs — it’s that they’ll become quaint irrelevancies, while others start delivering the services, the trust and the assurance that businesses need in the 21st century. If you’re still focused on compliance work, for instance, at a time when artificial intelligence is poised to be able to do all of that just as accurately, much more quickly, and much, much more cheaply, you may find clients drifting away to other providers. Or if your attest services, say, are limited to endorsing financial statements, when what the market wants is assurance around the safety and reliability of AI systems, or the accuracy and honesty of a company’s reported carbon footprint, you may find your wallet share declining, and that you are losing out on more and more RFPs. Worse yet, if you’re giving advice to clients the way most accountants have for decades — reactively, as a sort of aside to a tax return or a monthly close, or only when they ask you — you may find that they ask you much less.
And who will they ask instead? Maybe Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, particularly as the answers they give get better (and they will get better, and soon), but more likely a different kind of advisor who has figured out how to build those AI tools into their services and their relationships, and how to solve the new problems that companies are facing and need professional advice on. As the tools get better, more and more people will leverage them, and they and their tools will begin to develop reputations for reliability and value.
People will still trust accountants, of course — you won’t have done anything to sacrifice that trust, after all. But if you aren’t trusted in the areas that are relevant to the future, it won’t matter. You’ll be trusted the same way church bells are — sure, they still mark the hour, but no one uses them to tell time.
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