For the past couple of years, Dr Roel Boomsma, Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Accounting, Governance and Regulation at the University of Sydney Business School,, has been integrating emerging technologies including new and developing AI tools into the university’s Masters of Professional Accounting and Business Performance.
Recent attention on AI developments has cemented the integration of AI in the curriculum, with the university announcing last year that its post-graduate accounting program was being restructured to incorporate AI, big data and cloud-based accounting technology tools.
“We aim to cover a range of exciting new technologies in the Masters program,” says Boomsma.
“In the early part of the degree, we explore the role of technology in accounting, looking at emerging technologies, data analytics, cryptocurrency and how digital tools in accounting have shifted over time. The emphasis now is much more on AI and what it means for the future.”
Students examine applications of accounting software and learn about big data, before using Power BI to visualise and analyse that data. They learn to use AI tools to identify patterns in financial data – building familiarity with ways AI tools could be used by auditors to identify anomalies or organisations to identify fraudulent transactions.
“We’re constantly evolving the content we cover and the ways we assess students so that we’re incorporating new technologies and ensuring our students are workforce-ready,” says Boomsma.
And while universities have always been bound to ensure students are ready for the workforce they are entering, they have rarely been arming students with knowledge and skills that will reshape their industries to the extent they are today.
The degree focus Boomsma describes would, only a decade ago, have been almost impossible. And this shift may allow ChatGPT to do what so many accounting platforms have attempted: unseat the spreadsheet as the CFO’s weapon of choice.
Critical thinking about AI
Over the past two years, Boomsma has worked closely with Janine Coupe, Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Accounting, Governance & Regulation to introduced a new type of assessment based on unique business cases.
It’s designed to present a realistic business challenge and move assessments away from interpreting lists of transactions in a textbook – simple data analytics that may be performed by tech tools.
“I wanted to encourage students to apply higher-level judgement and thinking and for the degree to be more participatory and meaningful, and involve hands-on experiences. We encourage students to apply judgement in determining what kind of accounting software is appropriate for a particular organisation,” says Boomsma.
Students have a limited amount of time to complete the assignment and they need to show evidence of their thinking and the steps taken to achieve an outcome.
“That means they’re not only submitting a final piece of work, but they also need to provide all the steps they took to get there,. This, for example, involves submitting a detailed report of user activity that is exported from the accounting software”.
Boomsma’s main objective in developing business cases was to create a more authentic assessment that reflects real-life scenarios, but there’s been an additional unforeseen benefit.
“It helps to address academic integrity issues,” says Boomsma, reflecting on the current furore over the use of AI to cheat in assessments. “The students don’t get to see any information before the assessment and each student works with a unique set of numbers. I personally write the cases and they’re different every semester.”“The students don’t get to see any information before the assessment. I personally write the cases and they’re different every semester.”
In this way, the assessment process mirrors the expectations students will face in the workforce, where AI tools are embraced rather than treated as ‘cheats’, and professionals who know how to select and use the right tools have an advantage.
“The business simulations are a valuable learning experience, but they’re also collaborative and I’m there to coach them and answer questions, but also to monitor how they work through the challenge.”
Managing the challenges of AI
Although there are concerns about AI compromising academic integrity, this doesn’t mean AI tools should be avoided – the risks should be understood and managed in the educational environment as they would be in any workplace.
Bias is an important consideration.
“These models are trained on a data set and if the data set has certain biases, these biases will be processed through the model,” says Boomsma.
Students must understand the limitations of the tools they are using. The tools currently lack human-like critical thinking, and their output is only as good as the data sets they are trained on and the prompts they are instructed with.
Education, then, needs to include not just technical skills in using AI tools, but also the critical thinking that enables thoughtful interpretation of results and consideration of ethical questions raised by the results.
“As educators, we need to discuss the risks of AI with our students. There are ways to use AI responsibly and we need to ask questions such as: ‘How can you prompt AI effectively to help your work?’, ‘How can advanced language models help in accounting practice?’,” says Boomsma.
“If you don’t know the right questions to ask, it will be hard to use these models well.”
The essentials are still essential
Despite the fact that accountants could realistically task an AI tool with elemental accounting tasks, students must still learn these ‘basics’.
To explain why, Boomsma uses the example of auditors, who would be trained to complete foundational audit tasks and thoroughly understand each before moving on to more advanced tasks.
“It could be a challenging situation for new graduates if AI has taken over all these basic tasks and our graduates are immediately required to review the output from AI,” says Boomsma.
“It’s very hard to review and assess information if you haven’t had experience in the production process. I think that’s one thing that we have to be mindful of in both education and practice.”
The constant eye on new technological developments, and continual integration into the curriculum, means that each crop of new graduates will bring new skills and abilities, new knowledge that will fundamentally change the work of accounting. And while Boomsma is updating materials and teaching methods, firms will do well to constantly assess how they are preparing to learn from and continue to teach their next new graduates.
