Because neuroplasticity tells us something quite encouraging. Our brains continue to adapt. And in an AI-enabled profession, we have some influence over what we are training them to become better at.

AI is helping accountants and bookkeepers work faster, automate repetitive tasks and reduce cognitive load. But as AI moves beyond calculation and automation into writing, analysing, explaining, brainstorming and reasoning, an interesting question emerges: what happens to the thinking skills we developed by doing those things ourselves?

In this episode of the Accounting Apps Podcast, I explore how AI may be changing the way accountants and bookkeepers think. I look at neuroplasticity, the “useful struggle” involved in developing expertise, and why professional judgement becomes even more important when AI can produce a polished answer in seconds.

Technology has always allowed accountants to shift attention away from repetitive activities. Spreadsheets removed much of our manual arithmetic. Accounting software automated processes that once took hours. AI is another step along that path, but there is an important distinction between using technology to remove cognitive clutter and allowing it to do the valuable thinking for us.

Key Takeaways

• 🧠 Neuroplasticity and accounting expertise: Repeatedly completing tasks such as bank reconciliations builds pattern recognition and experience. When we stop practising particular cognitive skills, the way we use and develop those skills can change.
• 🤖 AI can remove cognitive clutter: Summarising information, drafting routine correspondence, extracting information and preparing meeting notes are examples of where AI can reduce workload and create more space for professional thinking.
• 🔍 Don’t outsource the useful struggle: Investigating something that doesn’t look right, testing ideas and forming hypotheses are part of developing accounting expertise. Rather than immediately asking AI for an answer, spend time developing your own view first.
• 💡 Use AI to challenge your reasoning: There is an important difference between asking AI, “Tell me what’s wrong,” and asking it to test a hypothesis you have already developed. AI can act as a second set of eyes while you remain actively involved in the thinking.
• 🎯 Professional judgement becomes more valuable: Materiality, professional scepticism, ethics, context, relationships and knowing when something simply doesn’t smell right become increasingly important as AI produces more of the first draft.

What Does AI Mean for the Accountant of the Future?

Perhaps expertise itself is changing. Historically, expertise often meant knowing the answer. Increasingly, it may mean knowing whether an answer is credible.

That still requires knowledge. We cannot critically evaluate an AI-generated answer if we don’t understand the underlying subject ourselves.

The opportunity for accountants and bookkeepers is not to compete with AI on how quickly information can be produced. AI is extraordinarily good at that. Instead, we can become better at asking questions, interpreting information, applying professional judgement and communicating what matters.

AI itself may not be the problem. Passive use of AI could be.

If we routinely accept answers without thinking, investigating or questioning them, some of our skills may become rusty. Used deliberately, however, AI can remove enormous amounts of low-value mental workload and give us something incredibly valuable: time and mental capacity.

Perhaps the challenge is to embrace AI, automation and technology while deliberately slowing down when it matters. Set aside thinking time for the difficult problems, unfamiliar situations and questions where professional judgement really counts.

Don’t outsource the cognitive reps that make you good at your job. Outsource the ones that stop you from doing it.

Episode resources and links:

• Debunking Brain Myths: What’s Really Holding You Back from Change with Sarah McKay: https://podcasts.apple.com/bm/podcast/debunking-brain-myths-whats-really-holding-you-back/id792555885?i=1000700760179
• Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392560878_Your_Brain_on_ChatGPT_Accumulation_of_Cognitive_Debt_when_Using_an_AI_Assistant_for_Essay_Writing_Task
• Exam Study Expert: https://examstudyexpert.com/dr-sarah-mckay/
• Dr Sarah McKay home page: https://drsarahmckay.com/ (Neuroscience for real life, with a focus on women’s brain health. For women, professionals and organisations.)

Heather Smith:

Welcome to the Accounting Apps Podcast. I’m your host Heather Smith.

On this podcast I talk a lot about automation, AI and technology. I thought there’s merit in discussing how technology is impacting our brain, what that means for accountants and bookkeepers, and what we can do about it.

Lets initially talk about Neuroplasticity or muscle memory.

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change and adapt in response to what we repeatedly do, think, learn and practise. It is the skills we do without thinking. You don’t usually remember how to tie your shoelaces or how to type on a computer. You might remember learning that, but you’re not having to consciously access that memory. It’s more of an implicit storage

Our brains are constantly building and strengthening pathways. When we repeat a task often enough, those pathways become more efficient. The task starts to feel easier, faster and more automatic.

I will drop a link in the show notes of a podcast interview with Dr Sarah McKay talking about Brain Myths

https://podcasts.apple.com/bm/podcast/debunking-brain-myths-whats-really-holding-you-back/id792555885?i=1000700760179 

Before I deep dive into what this means for accountants and bookkeepers let me tell you about something that happened on the weekend: Minjerribah

Now let’s think about something very familiar to accountants and bookkeepers, like doing a bank reconciliation.

When you first learned how to do one, you probably had to consciously think through every step. What am I looking for? Why doesn’t this balance? Where might the difference be? What should I check next?

After doing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of reconciliations, something changes. You start recognising patterns almost instantly. You develop an instinct for where to look. You notice something that feels wrong before you can necessarily explain why.

That is experience, but it is also neuroplasticity.

Your brain has become more efficient at performing that task because you have repeatedly exercised those particular mental pathways.

And this is where AI becomes interesting.

If we start handing certain tasks over to AI, we may stop practising some of the cognitive skills we previously relied on.

That does not necessarily mean our brains are becoming weaker. It means the skills we exercise are changing.

We have already done this many times with technology.

Most of us no longer remember dozens of phone numbers because our phones remember them for us. We rarely navigate using a paper map because Google Maps handles that cognitive task. Accountants do far less manual arithmetic than they did decades ago because spreadsheets and accounting software calculate things for us.

We did not suddenly lose the ability to think. We shifted where we applied our thinking.

AI may represent another shift.

Perhaps we spend less mental energy formatting reports, searching through documents or drafting routine emails. That could free up cognitive capacity for interpreting information, exercising professional judgement, solving unusual problems and having better conversations with clients.

But there is a potential trap.

If AI starts doing the analysis, questioning and reasoning for us, those are precisely the skills we may want to keep exercising.

It is a little like physical fitness. Using a lift is incredibly useful. But if you use the lift everywhere and never climb a staircase, you probably should not be surprised if climbing stairs eventually feels harder.

The same principle can apply to cognitive skills.

So perhaps the question for accountants is not, “Is AI making us stupid?”

That is far too simplistic.

A better question is: “Which parts of my thinking am I happy to outsource, and which parts do I deliberately want to keep practising?”

Because neuroplasticity tells us something quite encouraging.

Our brains continue to adapt.

And in an AI-enabled profession, we have some influence over what we are training them to become better at.

Think about what you might already hand over to AI.

Writing an email.

Summarising a meeting.

Explaining a variance.

Researching legislation.

Reviewing a spreadsheet.

Drafting a management report.

Perhaps even deciding what questions you should ask a client.

All perfectly reasonable uses of AI.

But if we outsource more and more of these activities, what happens to the skills we developed by doing them ourselves?

And should accountants and bookkeepers actually be worried about this?

I think the answer is: a little bit, but probably for a different reason than you might expect.

We have been outsourcing thinking for years

Accountants have always used technology to reduce mental effort.

Technology has always allowed us to shift our attention away from repetitive activities towards work requiring more judgement.

AI is another step along that path.

The difference is that AI can now take over tasks that previously felt distinctly human.

Writing.

Analysing.

Explaining.

Brainstorming.

Reasoning.

And that’s where things become interesting.

Consider the junior accountant

Imagine a graduate accountant preparing their first management report.

Historically, they might look at the profit and loss statement.

Revenue is down 12%.

Gross margin has fallen.

Wages are up.

They start asking questions.

Why?

They investigate.

They make a few incorrect assumptions.

Someone more experienced challenges them.

They go back and investigate again.

Eventually they understand what happened.

That process might take an hour.

Now imagine the same accountant uploading the figures to an AI tool and asking:

“Explain the significant movements and give me five insights for management.”

Thirty seconds later, there they are.

The report might even be excellent.

But here’s the question.

What happened to the hour of thinking?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Researchers split people into three groups to write essays: one used ChatGPT, one used a search engine, and one used their own brain. They measured brain activity throughout. Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; search engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work.

I will drop a source to that research in the show notes : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392560878_Your_Brain_on_ChatGPT_Accumulation_of_Cognitive_Debt_when_Using_an_AI_Assistant_for_Essay_Writing_Task 

In the research MIT gives an explicit warning against describing the findings as brain damage or proof that AI makes people “dumber.” 

“AI rots your brain” is a myth. “AI changes how hard your brain works” is a fair reading.

That hour wasn’t necessarily wasted time.

It was part of becoming an accountant.

The accountant was learning what normal looks like.

They were developing pattern recognition.

They were learning which questions to ask.

They were building professional judgement.

If AI always does that first stage of analysis, there is a risk that someone becomes extremely efficient at producing answers without developing the experience required to know whether those answers make sense.

There is another side to this

Now consider an experienced bookkeeper managing twenty clients.

Monday morning arrives and their inbox contains 70 emails.

Three clients have payroll questions.

Someone has sent a photograph of a receipt that appears to have been taken from the other side of the room.

There are meeting notes to summarise.

Five clients need reminders.

And somewhere amongst all that administrative noise is an unusual transaction that genuinely requires their professional attention.

AI can summarise the inbox.

Draft the routine responses.

Extract information from documents.

Prepare meeting notes.

Categorise requests.

Suddenly the bookkeeper has thirty minutes available to investigate the unusual transaction properly.

That seems like a very good use of AI.

AI hasn’t replaced their thinking.

It has created space for thinking.

And I think that’s an important distinction.

Cognitive load is valuable 

We only have so much attention available during the working day.

Accountants are constantly switching between clients, systems, spreadsheets, emails, meetings, compliance obligations and notifications.

By three o’clock in the afternoon, sometimes the most sophisticated decision you can manage is deciding whether another cup of coffee constitutes a business strategy.

AI can reduce some of that load. AI can clear the clutter off the desk, and free you up for thinking.

These things can free our attention for work requiring judgement, curiosity and conversation.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

Should accountants use AI?

The better question is:

Which thinking should we outsource?

Don’t outsource the useful struggle

There’s something I call the useful struggle.

It’s that slightly frustrating period when you don’t immediately know the answer.

You stare at the numbers.

Something doesn’t look right.

You test an idea.

That doesn’t work.

You try something else.

Then suddenly you understand what’s happening.

Those moments build expertise.

And AI makes it incredibly tempting to skip them.

Consider a reconciliation that doesn’t balance.

You could immediately paste the information into AI and ask it to find the discrepancy.

Or you could spend five minutes investigating first.

Look for patterns.

Form a hypothesis.

Then use AI as your second set of eyes.

There is a significant difference between:

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

and:

“I think the problem is caused by duplicate transactions in March. Test my reasoning and tell me what else I should investigate.”

In the second example, you’re still doing the thinking.

AI is challenging and extending it.

Don’t outsource the cognitive reps that make you good at your job. Outsource the ones that stop you doing it.

Here are habits to protect your accounting brain

Analyse before asking.

Spend a few minutes forming your own view before asking AI for its interpretation.

Challenge the answer.

Ask AI what it may have missed, what assumptions it has made and what evidence would change the conclusion.

Explain things yourself.

If AI teaches you something useful, close the window and see whether you can explain it to a colleague or client in plain English.

Keep practising core skills.

You don’t need to manually calculate everything. But you should retain enough understanding to recognise when an answer looks ridiculous.

Use AI for cognitive clutter.

Formatting reports, summarising information, drafting routine correspondence and extracting information are wonderful candidates for automation.

Keep the basics. Dr Sarah McKay’s list of brain health foundations covers food, movement, sleep, light, phones, socialising and attention. Shownotes examstudyexpert

Use your brain for judgement.

Materiality.

Professional scepticism.

Ethics.

Context.

Relationships.

Knowing when something simply doesn’t smell right.

Those skills become increasingly valuable as AI produces more of the first draft.

Perhaps expertise changes

There’s also a bigger question for the profession.

For decades, expertise often meant knowing the answer.

Increasingly, expertise may mean knowing whether an answer is credible.

That requires knowledge.

You cannot critically evaluate something you don’t understand.

The accountant of the future therefore shouldn’t compete with AI on how quickly they can produce information.

AI will win that race.

Our opportunity is to become better at asking questions, interpreting information and applying professional judgement.

Finally, is AI making accountants less intelligent?

I don’t think AI itself is the problem.

Passive use of AI could be.

If we routinely accept answers without thinking, investigating or questioning them, some skills may become rusty.

But used deliberately, AI can remove enormous amounts of low-value mental workload.

And that gives us something incredibly useful.

Time and mental capacity.

The challenge is deciding what we do with it.

I actually think the challenge will be for accountants to embrace AI, Automation & Technology, and to slow down a bit and set aside thinking time. Thinking time for the difficult or unfamiliar problems. 

Thanks for listening to the Accounting Apps Podcast. I’m your host Heather Smith. I encourage you to hit subscribe to this episode, so you don’t miss any more, I also encourage you to subscribe to the Accounting Apps newsletter at Accounting Apps dot io. You can find and connect with me on most social media channels. And please Let me know what your thoughts are on this topic? Are we becoming less intelligent, should we be worried?