How Is AI Transforming Accounting?

75% of senior finance leaders now actively use AI in the finance function, up from 30% two years earlier, according to survey results from the Journal of Accountancy. Furthermore, 93% of U.S. companies plan to deploy or scale AI in finance within 18 months.

AI technology has shifted from efficiency tools to decision engines, and working accountants are asking a fair question: What does this mean for my career? The most pressing question is not whether AI will replace accountants — it definitely won’t. But, accountants who know how to use AI effectively will have an advantage over those who do not. They can work more efficiently, examine more information, and devote more time to interpretation and advice. Accounting education therefore needs to teach students both how to use AI and how to question and verify its results.

This article maps which tasks AI is taking over, which still depend on human judgment, how the skill set is shifting toward analysis and advisory work, and what professionals can do to stay valuable.

How AI Is Changing Day-to-Day Responsibilities for Accountants

AI is embedded in the work accountants do every day. According to PwC, AI agents now handle data ingestion, disclosure automation, and support for complex accounting estimates like revenue recognition and impairment analysis.

Here are core areas where AI is showing up across the accounting industry:

• Auditing: Ingesting large data sets, identifying anomalies, drafting testing documentation, and suggesting conclusions for auditor review.
• Tax preparation: Automating intake and draft return preparation, leaving review and sign-off to human professionals.
• Financial reporting: Streamlining reconciliations, generating disclosures, and preparing review-ready outputs across the close cycle.
• Fraud detection: Continuously monitoring transactions and flagging anomalous patterns that human reviewers would take far longer to surface.
• Forecasting: Improving forecast accuracy and enabling faster planning cycles.

The bigger shift is the arrival of agentic AI. Unlike a chatbot that responds to a single prompt, an agentic system is given a goal and executes a series of steps to achieve it, coordinating work across systems with limited human intervention between steps. That autonomy is why Deloitte has named agentic AI the top strategic priority for internal auditing in 2026.

The results are measurable. Organizations already deploying agentic AI report a 32-point advantage over non-users in observing significant improvements across core finance metrics like decision quality and forecast accuracy, per metrics pulled from survey results in KPMG data cited by the Journal of Accountancy.

For accountants, it’s clear that applied AI skills must now become part of their toolkits. Accountants, however, continue to have ownership and responsibility over the final work. For example, AI might flag an unusual transaction or draft an audit explanation, but an accountant must examine the evidence, assess the conclusion, and decide what to report.

Tasks Most Likely to Be Automated vs. Those Requiring Human Expertise

According to The CPA Journal, AI is well-suited to the high-volume data tasks that have historically consumed junior accountants’ time. While AI is strong at processing structured data at speed and scale, but struggles where accounting work requires interpretation, ethics, or persuasion. A machine can flag that gross margin has declined; a human still has to decide whether the cause is a pricing change, a customer mix shift, or a classification error, and what to recommend to the client.

The CPA Journal argues AI will not replace junior-level accountants but will transform the role, with more opportunity in strategic work as tedious tasks recede. Those who operate effectively alongside AI will outperform those who don’t, which is one reason career paths for master’s-level accountants increasingly emphasize advisory and analytical work over pure production.

The Growing Importance of Data Analysis, Critical Thinking, and Strategic Skills

The clearest signal of AI’s impact is not job loss but a rising bar on the skills that define good accounting work. The AICPA reports the profession broadly acknowledges the need to sharpen critical thinking, data security, AI ethics, and advisory skills, with creativity emerging as a competency alongside data analytics.

Skills gaining importance include:

• Data analysis: Turning outputs from AI systems into defensible conclusions.
• Critical thinking: Challenging AI-generated results and probing for errors or missing context.
• Advisory judgment: Translating financial data into recommendations clients can act on.
• AI literacy and governance: Understanding how models work, where they fail, and what controls they require.
• Ethical reasoning: Applying professional standards when AI-assisted work reaches ambiguous territory.

Meanwhile, labor demand for accountants remains solid. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of accountants and auditors will grow 5% through 2034, faster than the average for all occupations, with roughly 124,200 openings each year over the decade. The median annual wage was $81,680 in May 2024. The BLS explicitly notes that automation of routine tasks like data entry will not reduce overall demand and will instead make advisory and analytical duties more prominent.

Accountants who lean into the shift by building analytical depth and business judgment on top of technical fluency are the ones positioned to benefit from the change.

How Accounting Professionals Can Prepare for AI-Driven Change

Adapting to AI-driven change is less a single big move than steady, deliberate skill-building. A few practical steps carry most of the weight:

1. Build AI fluency. Get hands-on with the tools your firm uses. Understand what generative and agentic AI systems can do well versus where they tend to fail, falsify, or hallucinate.
2. Sharpen analytical and advisory instincts. Each time you produce an AI output, practice interpreting it as well. Ask why a number moved, reverify results and use this information to determine what to recommend.
3. Stay current on governance and ethics. Regulatory expectations around AI use in accounting are evolving quickly. Follow AICPA guidance, watch for updates from the PCAOB and SEC, and understand your firm’s AI risk policies.
4. Deepen technical accounting expertise. AI amplifies whatever judgment you bring to it. Strong command of GAAP, tax law, and audit standards makes AI outputs more useful.
5. Consider formal graduate coursework. A structured education can accelerate the shift toward advisory and analytical work. The online MS in Accounting curriculum at Pace covers financial reporting, auditing, and data-driven decision-making, and also helps students prepare for professional exams like the New York CPA.

Each of these moves extends core accounting fundamentals. The accountants best positioned for the next decade are the ones who pair technical depth with the ability to work fluently alongside AI systems.

Why Accountants Are Still Crucial

While machines can process transactions and draft documentation faster than any human, they can’t weigh ethical gray areas or carry the professional responsibility of signing off on financial statements.

Trust in the numbers is a human product, and it remains the profession’s core deliverable. The accountants who thrive from here will treat AI as a capable partner, layering judgment and integrity on top of what the technology produces.

About the online Master of Science in Accounting

The online Master of Science in Accounting prepares working professionals to excel in accounting roles at all levels of their organizations. The program blends real-world use cases with theory-based coursework, providing students with relevant job skills. The online MS in Accounting also helps prepare students for the CPA exam and licensing and other professional certifications in the field of accounting.

For over a century, Pace University’s Lubin School of Business has been preparing professionals for fulfilling careers in business. From responsive professor communication to hands-on, project-based learning, we do everything we can to help students succeed.

The Lubin School of Business and its Accounting Department are dual-accredited in business and accounting by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International. This elite distinction is shared by fewer than 2% of business schools in the world. With graduates thriving in companies like the Big 4 accounting firms starting with AIG, Nickelodeon, L’Oreal, Tesla, leading accounting firms (e.g., Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, and E&Y), financial institutions (e.g., Goldman Sachs, JPM Chase), and many others, Pace equips students with vital accounting knowledge while also creating the innovative thinkers that companies want.