At a glance
- Reports conflict on whether AI will cause job losses or worker shortages.
- AI replaces tasks, not jobs, transforming what accountants do on a daily basis.
- The four-way “job split” framework helps accountants adapt their roles to new technology.
Australian accountants are hearing two very different stories about their future.
Like many people in professional services, accountants are surrounded by talk that artificial intelligence (AI) will take over their jobs. Some global research seems to support that view.
The World Economic Forum (WEF)’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report predicts that accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll clerks will rank among the fastest-declining roles globally. It cites automation as a major cause.
Graph: Largest declining jobs, 2025-2030
Source: World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Survey 2024; International Labour Organization, ILOSTAT
But other forecasts paint a different picture.
A recent report from the Future Skills Organisation predicts that finance, business, and technology industries will face a collective shortfall of nearly 250,000 workers by 2030. Some of the steepest shortages are expected in bookkeeping and accounting clerk roles, with projected gaps of 27,100 and 26,000 workers respectively.
So what’s behind this slew of contradictory information?
According to Professor Marek Kowalkiewicz, Chair in Digital Economy at QUT Business School, much of the confusion stems from a misunderstanding of how AI affects work.
“The biggest misconception is that people think AI replaces jobs. AI does not replace jobs – AI replaces tasks within jobs. And what it really means is that AI transforms jobs,” he says.
“An accountant today and an accountant 10 years from now may have the same title, but what they do on a daily basis will be very different because of AI. This shouldn’t be surprising, because accountants 30 years ago were doing completely different things to accountants today.”
While predictions of mass job losses might be overblown, there’s no doubt that AI is changing what it means to do the job of an accountant.
The challenge now is to make sense of these shifts and identify the areas where accountants’ professional value will endure.
Beyond the ledger: What is the real job?
The first step in understanding how AI will affect a profession is to separate the day-to-day from the deeper purpose of the role, says Kowalkiewicz.
He refers to Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s concept of “jobs to be done”. Christensen’s view suggests professionals are not hired to complete certain tasks for clients; rather, they are hired to help clients achieve a particular goal.
For example, clients don’t hire lawyers to review paperwork; rather, they hire them for peace of mind and protection from risk.
And the same can be said for accountants.
“Accountants are not hired to do bookkeeping,” Kowalkiewicz says. “Accountants are hired to ensure there are no issues with the business. They are hired to create trust and to ensure compliance. Bookkeeping is just one of the tasks they’re performing.
“So we need to start asking ourselves: what are we being hired for? What are our clients really paying us for, and how can we provide that value?”
By homing in on what clients and stakeholders are really hiring them to deliver, accountants can start to identify the core parts of their work. This process helps clarify which tasks they can, in time, delegate to AI.
A framework for the future: Drop, defend, elevate, reinvent
To help professionals make sense of how jobs are changing, Kowalkiewicz uses what he calls the “job split” framework. It breaks the work of any profession into four categories – drop, defend, elevate, and reinvent. Each shows a different way in which AI is reshaping tasks.
- Drop refers to tasks that can be handed to AI without loss of core value. This might include basic reports or standardised summaries.
- Defend covers the human-centred elements that must remain in-house, such as interpreting anomalies in context or providing strategic judgement.
- Elevate is where AI becomes a tool for enhancing human work. Says Kowalkiewicz: “Think about fraud detection – it may need to be done by a human, but AI tools can point you to the right place to look.”
- Reinvent, the final category, is about creating entirely new offerings made possible by AI-enabled capabilities.
“This is where you ask yourself: now that I’ve automated what I can, and dropped, defended, and elevated tasks, what becomes possible that wasn’t before? For example, if I’m an accountant with the tools to find irregularities in data, maybe I could apply that skill to different types of data beyond finance.”
“Accountants are not hired to do bookkeeping … They are hired to create trust and to ensure compliance.”
Professor Marek Kowalkiewicz
By thinking in these terms, accountants concerned about AI may find it easier to shift from worrying about automation to actively shaping their futures. The more they drop, defend, elevate, and reinvent, the more they can diversify into areas where human judgment, accountability, and trust will remain indispensable.
Skill and workforce planning in an AI era
For individual practitioners, the “job split” offers a way to adapt at the micro level. For firms and business owners, however, the challenge is systemic.
Traditional workforce planning, where long-term staffing strategies are usually set based on stable role definitions, is losing relevance as the pace of change accelerates.
“Workforce planning becomes a bit of an oxymoron in this world of AI,” says Kowalkiewicz. “Every plan you create is irrelevant the day after it’s finished.”
To adapt to this new reality, the goal of workforce planning needs to go from predicting the future to preparing for constant change, he says.
“Workforce planning has to shift into an ongoing, agile exercise, where you try to keep track of what’s happening out in the outside world: what are the trends that are impacting us, and how can we adapt? It’s one of the hardest questions for everyone at the moment. But, with all the businesses I’ve worked with, there’s one thing the successful ones have in common. And that is that change and workforce transformation starts with and continues at the very top.
“It’s the CEO who continuously experiments. It’s the CEO who’s continually curious, the CEO who asks, ‘Have you seen this?’ And it’s the CEO who enables their people to experiment.”
To encourage experimentation, he recommends leaders convey that responsible AI use is welcome. This message must be supported by clear governance around legal and ethical boundaries.
“It’s not a world of grassroots innovations and the CEOs waiting for new ideas,” he says. “They need to be leading by example.”
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