AI for Accountants Conference

A panellist at the Malaysian Institute of Accountants' annual conference for accountants, on the leadership panel under the conference theme Driving A Sustainable Nation: How AI Empowers Accountants to Lead.

• The accountant's role is not a choice between compliance gatekeeper and genuine partner in AI adoption. The assurance role is what makes the partner role possible.
• The profession's advisory remit has always covered return on investment, revenue and cost drivers. AI's effect on those drivers now sits inside that same remit, together with a risk-management view of the systems producing it.
• Someone in every organisation has to know what is actually running and whether a sign-off process exists. That is usually nobody's assigned job, and it is where assurance gaps begin.
• The national plan is structured as 28 initiatives: 14 foundation enablers that are horizontal, and 14 impact engines that are sectoral. The point for the profession is that neither runs without someone able to interrogate it.
• He closed on a quiet discipline rather than a call to action: three questions, asked every day starting Monday.