A profession poised for AI transformation demands upskilling and leadership

A landmark report from Chartered Accountants Worldwide (CAW), with research carried out by Ipsos in the UK, reveals that:

• 79% of Chartered Accountants surveyed agree their role as ‘Data Guardians’ will grow in importance with increased AI integration
• Younger professionals are already leading the way in adoption with 91% of 18–25-year-olds surveyed being very or fairly willing to use AI 
• They are already leveraging AI to enhance general productivity, data entry, client services, and risk management

However, CAW suggests the research also highlights a critical need for upskilling and leadership to ensure the profession fully capitalises on AI's transformative potential.

Find out more in the full report.

Technical note

Fieldwork Dates: 03/09/2024 – 06/12/2024. These dates indicate the total length of time interviews took place across all participating institutes. Institutes launched and closed surveys with memberships across this time window.

Methodology:

• 20-minute online survey
• Aimed to understand views, experience and expectations regarding AI technologies in the Chartered Accountancy role
• Invitations to complete the survey were sent to members of participating institutes via email, social media, and institute leadership advocacy. For the purposes of analysis members who are retired and not professionally active have been excluded from results.
• As an open link, participants had the flexibility of skipping questions so base sizes vary throughout the results. Quotas were not applied. The results are not intended to be representative of the accountancy profession as a whole – percentages in the report are indicative of respondents to the survey rather than all Chartered Accountants.

Following the online quantitative part of this study, Ipsos in the UK contacted individuals who had self-reported in the survey they were both willing to be contacted and had played a key role in implementing AI within their organisation, resulting in six 30-minute qualitative interviews exploring how the implementation had been conducted.