To ensure the human edge is not lost from client service delivery, accounting professionals must better demonstrate advisory value and showcase intuition – but simultaneously, be willing to roll up their sleeves and readily embrace new technologies, according to a Xerocon panel.
No excuse for not using AI
Speaking earlier this week at Xerocon 2025, on a panel session discussing how accountants can retain the human edge in an AI-driven world, Kayur Patel – a director in PwC New Zealand’s Generative AI team – argued that professionals must prepare to dive in headfirst on emerging technologies if they are to remain competitive in a shifting landscape.
Juniors at the Big Four firm, he said, should only be submitting work that has been produced using AI, “because only then can they work in this new paradigm”.
Investing real time and energy into upskilling, and incorporating those learnings into daily operations, is something that is essential to accounting professionals across the board.
This said, Patel was not convinced that the human edge in accounting is going anywhere.
Technology, he said, “is able to do a whole bunch of things, but as long as our customers and our clients are human, humans are going to be able to decide what it is that humans do and what it is that technology does”.
“I think we're spending far too much time talking about what AI could do, and not enough time talking about what we think it should do,” he mused.
“A lot of the commentary around the impact that AI is going to have on our profession is from people that haven't actually got their hands dirty with AI. I'm really confident about the future of our industry, and that's coming from someone that genuinely uses 50 AI agents a day to help me do my work.”
Practitioners’ accountability won’t change much in the age of AI, Patel suggested, noting that the review process for work at PwC is “exactly the same as it was two years ago when we started our AI journey”.
“If we send a piece of advice out to the client and I put my name on it, that's on me. Now, two years ago, I never said to a client, ‘Here's a piece of advice, but just bear in mind I used my most useless interns’. In the same way, I don't say, ‘Here's a piece of advice, but bear in mind I use AI, so, watch out for it’. At the end of the day, it's on me. I'm accountable, and I just have a different tool in the toolkit to use when it's most appropriate,” he said.
To this end, the human edge in accounting will remain, no matter how much practitioners dive in and utilise such new technologies.
Demonstrating value
However, Patel said, the retention of such humanity in client service delivery is dependent on accountants showcasing value in different ways.
One of the things that accounting doesn’t do well as a profession, he said, is articulating value, so that clients can better appreciate what part of the value chain will be impacted by productivity tools.
“No one in their right mind would think we shouldn’t have as many pilots [in the age of AI]. But because risk isn’t obvious in our profession, we have to do a bit of work to help somebody understand,” he said.
“When you pay some money to get an outcome, how much of what you pay is for the answer? How much is for the document that contains the answer, how much is the time that is spent providing the answer, the experience I've got, the tools that I use, the process?”
When asked how best team leaders can help their teams upskill to use AI more efficiently, Patel said, “just get your hands dirty”.
“Sign up to the safe version of one of the well-known democratised AI tools and just get people to start. There's too many people trying to figure out AI strategies who have never actually got their hands dirty and tried stuff. Just give people the time and the space and the encouragement to try and build things and then share what they've been doing and learn from each other,” he said.
“Prompting skills are really important, and that'll take you from a hallucinated 30 per cent correct answer to a 100 per cent correct answer. But you won't learn that from a textbook, mainly because this is so new, that textbooks don't exist.”
This is one of those things you've “got to have time in the seat for”, he said.
The importance of intuition
Also on the panel was Soon-ee Chea, the EGM of AI products at Xero, who highlighted the importance of intuition for accountants in retaining the human edge in the current climate.
“The concrete example for me is my uncle, an accountant who specialises in prawn farming here in QLD, [who has] built an intuition about how to advise prawn farmers about how to run their businesses. [In instances of quarantine], the biosecurity department can just decide to pour bleach into all of your tanks, because there might be an outbreak. So, how do you manage that risk?”
“There's intuition that he's built over the years that is not going to be replicated. It's just not going to be replicated anytime soon.”
Governments will regularly publish information about prawns, Chea said, “that is really hard to follow”, and for an accountant like his uncle, it is exciting to think about how technology can support accountants to use their intuition in an advisory capacity.
These are, he said, “things that only you know, that you have learned over time, working with your clients over so many years, and combining that with the ability to reach out across the Internet to see all that other information that [for clients] is just not practical to stay across”.
Will Flint, a senior principal AI engineer at Xero, also spoke about the importance of intuition: when asked for some low-barrier ways that accountants can get started on their AI journeys, he said: “Start building an intuition around the different tasks that you would do every day, just by typing it into your phone. Just see what comes back.”
“Nothing bad's going to happen when you ask for a recipe. Do something like that, and just get started,” he said.
Given the pace of change with such emerging technologies, such a trait is what will place accountants in good stead, Flint noted.
“I think it's more about intuition than skill sets at this stage, to be honest. Having an intuition for the way this stuff interacts with what you give it, because in the end, it's what you give it that lets it output anything,” he said.
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