I wrote this article with AI!

Confession time: AI helped draft this piece. Shocking? It shouldn't be. We don't send handwritten notes with balance sheets to prove our arithmetic. We don't scatter typos in drafts to prove we didn’t use spell check. So why treat AI like a guilty secret?

I'm old enough to remember the calculator debate at school. "You won't be allowed them in exams," we were told. We soon were. "Do you think you'll always have a calculator in your pocket?" We all do. The issue was debated and researched, and eventually it quietened down, and here we are, with scientific calculators on every smartphone.

What we're seeing with AI is shaping up to be more extreme. Take universities' initial reaction to AI. It was the definition of knee-jerk: ban it and brand users as cheats. And today still, instead of preparing students for an AI-driven workplace, teaching critical thinking about AI, and showing them how to interrogate its outputs and spot its limitations, some institutions are still deploying faulty AI detectors and treating students as suspects.

What does this mean for the next generation of accountants? Let’s go back to first principles. The value we bring as accountants isn't our arithmetic ability. Our clients value that we know what to do with the numbers. We help them stay compliant, recognise when things look wrong, and advise what the numbers mean. Clients want us to tell them whether an investment makes strategic sense, or which metrics are the ones that matter most right now, not whether we can replicate an Excel formula in longhand on a napkin.

Here's another way of looking at it. I recently had to write a farewell speech for our first-ever employee, who, after 27 years, was retiring. So I turned to CoPilot. With a three-line prompt from me, it developed an adequate speech in seconds. But I didn't use it.

I let it percolate. The first draft lacked emotion, colour, and human connection, so I re-briefed CoPilot several times, adding anecdotes and nuance that AI could never come up with itself. The result? A speech I was happy with, completed faster than working alone, but maybe not as quickly as that first mediocre version.

This is where the real value lies. AI handles mechanical work faster and more accurately than we ever could. Our role is interpretation, context, and human judgment. We add emotion, nuance, and strategic thinking.

Instead of shunning it, we should be engaging with AI, upskilling ourselves, evolving our roles, and remembering the value our human brains bring. This seems far better than inserting deliberate tpyos and deleting em-dashes to prove we didn't use AI.

White-collar moral panic

The current anxiety over AI isn't surprising when you consider the pattern. Blue-collar workers watched robotics transform manufacturing floors. Now it's white-collar jobs under threat, and suddenly the panic feels different because it's happening to us. The machines came for factory workers, and we told them to retrain. Now AI is coming for accountants, lawyers, and software engineers, and we're frantically looking for ways to prove we're still essential. The difference? We have the platforms and policies to fight back. But perhaps we'd be better served by the same advice we gave those factory workers: engage with the technology, upskill, and evolve.

As published ASA Magazine - February 2026.