AI tools are eliminating some of the manual drudgery from accounting—but are they taking work away from entry-level staff? Not at RSM, the fifth-largest accounting firm in the US. The firm hires some 3,000 to 4,000 new grads each year, RSM US enterprise digital leader Sergio de la Fe told CFO Brew, and their AI-readiness makes them valuable employees.

Those new grads are entering a shifting profession. AI tools are changing the way accountants work by speeding up slow manual processes and allowing them to sift through vast datasets with ease. But some fundamentals, such as professional judgment, remain constant. And people, de la Fe said, remain at the center of AI transformation.

Amplifying research: RSM’s investments in AI have yielded new tools for accountants. For instance, RSM Atlas maps clients’ processes and controls to regulations, and identifies whether they’re in compliance or need to make adjustments. Such mapping “used to take weeks and months to do” manually, de la Fe said. Another AI tool assesses clients’ R&D expenditures and investments and “automate[s] the production of the tax positions” around R&D credits. That’s also something that was once done manually, de la Fe said. (Many of RSM’s clients are middle-market businesses, and the firm serves various industries, including healthcare, construction, manufacturing, and technology.)

A third tool the firm uses, Blue J, lets staff quickly sort through tax law and cases. If a client has a tax question, such as wanting to know whether they’re eligible for Qualified Small Business Stock, an RSM staffer can use Blue J to pull up a list of relevant regulations and references. The tool can even find tax information staff might not have known where to look for, de la Fe said.

Tools like these, de la Fe argues, allow accountants to spend less time on manual tasks and more on higher-value activities. “What AI does is it augments our professionals to help them get to judgments and to analysis faster,” he said.

Keep reading.—CV

The impact of Jaguar Land Rover’s crippling cyberattack went far beyond the carmaker’s own walls. Parts suppliers, “many of them small and financially fragile,” felt the sting when JLR had to temporarily halt operations in September, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Cyber Monitoring Centre, a UK-based nonprofit, estimated the incident ultimately impacted more than 5,000 companies to the tune of £1.9 billion.

It was the latest high-profile reminder that third-party cyber risk is real, and it can be disruptive and costly, as CFO Brew previously reported. We recently spoke with Mario Paez, national cyber risk leader at insurance broker Marsh McLennan Agency, about third-party risks, and what finance leaders can do to manage them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What went through your mind when you heard about the JLR incident?

There are a lot of similar types of incidents where we see an outage caused by a security event or a system failure event, such as an unintentional or unplanned outage, and the ripple effect that it has across clients, vendors, partners, [and] supply chains. Those ecosystems are very interconnected, and when there is an outage, a stoppage, that ripple effect can be quite significant.

Keep reading.—AZ

AI has generated a lot of hype, but the excitement may be creating a financial bubble—and a lot of tech debt as companies try to integrate AI into their IT infrastructure.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a timing issue. Vineet Jain, the CEO and co-founder of AI-powered cloud content management and data security platform Egnyte, said that while companies are investing heavily in AI, they’re unsure of when demand for those AI-powered services will actually appear.

“While the hype cycle on AI is probably at its zenith, we are still in a huge state of flux where, from a consumer or the customer perspective, there’s a lot of clamoring and excitement about AI—particularly generative AI,” Jain said. “You’re seeing that now there is a surge of…public or private debt that these companies are wading into to continue fueling their investments, and that is causing a lot of concerns.”

Companies of all sizes. Blake Crawford, the founding partner and chief technology officer for Fusion Collective, said that many mid-size clients are racking up technical debt as part of their AI implementation.

“[Mid-size companies] have enough capital to have rapidly developed some very interesting AI pilots and unfortunately done so in very questionable and inefficient ways,” Crawford said. “But it’s not necessarily the fault of the organization, it’s more the way the AI industry has established itself and the speed with which it’s been moving.”

Keep reading on IT Brew.—CN

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Outsourced CFO at Wipfli LLP
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• Director, Finance at NetApp
• Financial Analyst at Virgin Galactic
• Plant Controller at Refresco