He spoke about how a new era of data relevance is re-shaping enterprise management. Accounting information and reporting based on conventional precepts is no longer sustainable or fit for purpose. The focus on historical financial information retained by accounting systems is premised on a notion that this is helpful to decision makers in determining organisational actions to pursue. Such a view disregards the universe of structured and unstructured data that can provide a better and more comprehensive basis for guiding enterprise pursuits. Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents are starting to discard the value of information that is narrowly bounded by conventional accounting reporting and replacing human-based decision-making.
AI agents can bypass the notional path of data needing to be converted into information to enable analysis, derive consequent decisions and ultimately act. Instead, machine can go from data to action without the need to assess formatted information. Systems information that is slower to extract more constrained in breadth, and reliant on establishing causality, is unlikely to remain useful as organisations make advances into the emerging AI agentic economy. Professor Bhimani noted that we are in the very near-term transitioning into spaces of artificial general intelligence that will then forge entry into artificial superintelligence presiding in organisations.
This will trigger transformational changes affecting the accounting profession, the financial intelligence underpinning the field, as well as create major shifts in the activities of those whose work is tied to accounting information production, reporting or analysis. He drew out implications for the direction accounting expertise may take, the role of accountancy bodies in the future, and what accounting educators need to do to assist enterprise contexts experiencing the effects of new AI-based technologies re-shaping our world.