Protecting our ability to think.

At Elfworks, we are talking with hundreds of Australian public practice firms who are looking to streamline their business processes using AI. AI adoption can make you money through workflow efficiencies; this reality is playing out all across Australia at the moment. Yet firms who have adopted AI and firms still grappling with the decision to implement AI into workflow have some clear areas of concern, being:

1. Trust: Can we trust the output of AI?

2. Privacy: How do we use AI without breaching data privacy requirements?

3. Bias: If we use one model constantly, will this simply re-affirm our staff member’s bias/misunderstandings?

4. Ability to think: If AI works as promised, will my staff lose (or fail to develop) the ability to think?

   
   

   Previous blogs have considered the first three concerns in detail. This blog takes a closer look at concern number four – the loss of the ability to think – and sets out some of our guiding principles to address this concern.

“What’s a T-Account?” - Learning how to think like an accountant

Depending on when you started your career as an Australian accountant in public practice or in business, your formative years in the profession varied greatly.

Accountants who started their careers in public practice before the early/mid 2010’s likely had heavy exposure to the manual classification of client transactions when preparing financials, ranging from those nasty shoeboxes of receipts to the reconciliation of printed bank statements. Despite the inefficient nature of this manual work, this approach made people think like accountants; thousands of small judgements over time giving rise to an intuitive grasp of the transactions that make up the client’s business, allowing the accountant to spot issues, nuances, errors, fraud and opportunities.

Accountants who studied and started their careers after the early/mid 2010’s did not have the same grounding, apart from some having access to those special cluster of clients who refuse to shift to modern accounting solutions (some firms I know actively encourage a handful of clients to stick with their manual processes as they use these clients as ‘training fields’ for junior staff). No doubt the automation movement improved productivity and helped increase profits, yet what was lost along the way?

Similar concerns exists today with the adoption of AI in business workflows; “Yes we see the benefits, but what is lost along the way, not just at an individual and firm level, but at the profession level?”

The table below summarises some of the ‘lost along the way’ concerns from the automation and AI revolutions:

	Detail	Concern
Automation of accounts (widespread adoption from early to mid-2010’s)	No longer required to manually classify transactions for client accounts.	Erosion of fundamental accounting knowledge Loss of professional judgement development (the automation process has become the judge) Loss of ability to detect errors or fraud
Adoption of AI (current concern)	No longer required to grind through documents to build an understanding of legislation, Rulings, Case Law, Trust Deeds and other client documents	Will junior staff develop the ability to think? Will staff lose the ability to pick up nuances in client information If staff do not have a thorough grounding in the fundamentals, they will struggle to deal with ‘edge cases’ i.e. out of the norm scenarios that usually require a firm grasp of fundamentals to solve.

Elfworks approach to this concern

We see the adoption of AI into workflow practices and the potential loss of critical skill development as two sides of the same coin. When AI is introduced into the complex knowledge processes of a firm, there should be an AI driven learning solution that can address any loss of the ability to think that occurs with this AI adoption. We recognise this is a significant challenge for knowledge industries adopting AI and we don’t claim to have a silver bullet at this stage, yet here are the guiding principles we have developed to help address this concern:

• When AI is used to aid critical thinking on client problems (such as with the Advice function on the Elfworks platform), the same AI solution should be able to instantly produce a Learning Module with learning outcomes based around the critical thinking processes involved in that specific Advice function·      

• There should be the option to create Learning Modules around these critical skill areas that target different experience levels e.g., Junior, Intermediate and Advanced

• The Learning Modules created should be optional

• The Learning Modules created should be shareable within the organisation.

The beauty of applying AI’s sheer processing power at this problem means the Learning Modules targeting critical thinking skills can be hyper-personalised to firm clients and their issues. It also means AI can be used to create Learning Modules that address potential skill losses not just from the AI ‘revolution’ but also skill losses from the automation ‘revolution’ i.e., Learning Modules that simulate the manual classification of client transactions that occurred prior to automation of account from bank statements. “Ah, so that’s a T-Account. Makes sense.”

For senior staff, time saved with AI can be allocated to high-value client work. This is an obvious way to make more money within a firm. For more junior staff, part of the time saved with AI can be allocated to critical skill development to benefit the staff member, the firm and the profession as a whole. Over time, firms will arrive at a mix that works for them.

Data and Privacy

We have opted-out of storage and data-training with our enterprise subscriptions to Ai models, meaning client information is not stored or used for training the model post analysis; the data is deleted with only the analysis remaining.

Contact us for free trial

The next step is to experience the benefits of the Elfworks platform with skill development, research, advice drafting, client email responses and a wide array of productivity tools.  If you would like a free trial of the Elfworks platform, please contact us on info@elfworks.ai.