The CEO of Platinum Accounting Australia, Coco Hou, has called on the accounting industry to consider incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their operations to enhance services and reduce costs, ensuring the sector remains financially accessible. The increasing evolution and sophistication of AI could be utilised to improve customer experiences, streamline workloads, and provide a more efficient and accurate approach to content creation and data analysis.

Hou highlighted the potential for AI to shoulder many of the time-consuming tasks that accountancy staff undertake, revealing, "Shifting a hefty amount of time consuming workload to AI generative technology can dramatically improve our own productivity and self-worth, not to mention that it saves money."

While acknowledging the complexities of Australia's tax system and the limitations of AI, she insisted that her proposal is not to give AI full rein, but to use it as a supportive resource. "Accountants should definitely embrace and utilise AI for a range of time consuming tasks that can be reliably transferred to AI," she stated.

With rising business costs and the scarcity of skilled labour in the sector, Hou believes AI adoption is key to delivering services and marketing activities in a cost-effective manner, and to ensure accessibility to valuable clients.

Chatbots, she suggests, could handle repetitive customer queries, and AI systems could be tasked with maintaining a company’s social media presence. "AI in social media can be used for tasks like content creation and forecasting... It can be an effective and powerful tool in keeping up that all important social media presence," Hou stated.

Beyond customer service and communication, AI can help manage content creation for website blogs. She cited generative AI's efficiency in keeping websites updated with minimal efforts. She also noted the role AI could play in conducting research, analysing data, and summarising findings, all tasks where AI's accuracy can surpass humans' due to its immunity from human errors like typos or miscalculations.

Advocating for AI adoption, Hou said that automated tasks can drive operational efficiency and free up time for humans to focus on more complex tasks. She pointed out that AI could reduce workplace stress, beat human procrastination, and optimize business processes.

Highlighting the transformative potential of AI, Hou hoped her fellow accountants would consider AI in a new light: "The advancement of AI has been a breakthrough in many ways and has the power to change the way we operate our businesses... I'm hoping that accountants will now view AI in a new light and give it a go!"