#259 Why AI Won't Replace You (But Will Replace Some Of Your Clients' Reasons To Pay You)

So today I thought I'd talk about something that's been quite topical in the last week or so.

You might have been fed up of hearing about it.

You may not have come across it, but I think you have.

My LinkedIn feed has been full of it in the past week with the zero debacle where they paid an influencer or rather it was it was they had paid an influencer to say.

to do a sponsored ad for them and whether it was directed by Xero or whether the influencer came up with themselves.

But they said that they have paid an accountant £120,000 over the last five, 10 years, whatever it was, and £800 a month, which now they have connected their Claude to Xero so they don't need to pay them anymore.

Essentially saying, we don't need accountants anymore because now I've connected my Claude to Xero and, whoosh, I've got my own management accounts that I used to pay my accountant £800 a month for.

no doubt this is you can imagine the furor that the profession has been in or any accountant that has seen us flabbergasted throwing their um you know uh you know their the toys out the pram and everything that you do when seeing something as ridiculous as that But there's two sides to this.

I wrote an article on it on LinkedIn last Friday.

Welcome to go and have a read of that if you haven't come across it already.

I take all of these things with a pinch of salt.

I think there's no point being angry or annoyed about things like this.

It's about introspecting and having a look at, OK, well, where am I? What am I doing? How am I embracing AI? This technology is here to stay.

And I don't believe there's any real worry in this thing.

I don't think there's any real anxiety, apart from the fact that anyone who thought that Zero was their best friend and is in the Zero fan club, maybe thinking twice now, As to, you know, you get those people who are all in on certain pieces of software, but let it be known that, yep, even though the software houses may say that we love accountants and we are working for you, that's never the case.

They are working for themselves.

They're working for their shareholders.

So it's unlikely that, you know, they will stay true to their promise they used to make in the early days of, you know, being accountant first.

Clearly they're not.

They are profit first.

They are shareholder first, which is what most companies are.

So anyhow, my take on this is as follows.

The whole AI debate, is AI going to kill accountants? The media love to talk about accounting in particular.

Any analysts that you see, any reports that you see always say that industries like accounting and bookkeeping are the first to fall.

But actually, in reality, I don't think that's going to be the case.