How Generative AI Is Changing Accounting and Finance

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is transforming the job of accounting and finance professionals in today’s current digitized economy that moves at a fast pace. The financial processes that were once limited to spreadsheets, time-consuming reconciliations, and endless report-generating processes, are now transforming into a new world of intelligent automation, predictive insights, and AI-generated narratives.

OTC Training Centre Sdn Bhd is offering a “Harness the Power of Generative AI for Accounting and Finance,” course that teaches participants how they can apply these new developments in real-life situations and understand these changes. Let’s explore the impact of GenAI on the finance and accounting sector and its implications on your career in the future.

What is Generative AI and its Significance for Finance

Generative AI is described as a complex model that creates new information with massive amounts of data. It varies from reports and analysis to entire workflows. This shift in AI is more evident in applications like Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and ChatGPT.

GenAI does not only read between the lines and implied words, but it can also provide insights, and create narratives in easily comprehensible language. This is a much better alternative, compared to the previous type of automation that carried out a set of pre-coded functions.

For finance teams, this entails:

• Streamlining the time-consuming processes such as data entry and reconciliations.
• Generating insights and reports more quickly.
• Increasing the quality of decision-making through advanced data analysis and projections.
• Enabling professionals to focus on high value activities, strategy, and consultative work.

Real-World Applications: How GenAI Is Changing Finance Processes

1. Automating Everyday Accounting Activities – Generative AI can complete most of the financial tasks that require a lot of time to be completed with accuracy:
   • Sort transactions automatically and make journal entries.
   • Prepare invoices, balance the bank accounts, and create financial reports.
   • Prepare literary comments on monthly or quarterly reports.
2. Making Financial Analysis Smarter – AI can rapidly discover insights that would previously to take a long period to find out:
   • Perform a trend and a variance analysis.
   • Make financial forecasts and “what-if” analyses.
   • Create DCF, ROI or profitability models automatically with prompts.
3. Making Audit and Compliance Smarter – GenAI can be used to improve supervision and management:
   • Detect inconsistencies and possible fraud.
   • Produce audit and compliance reports.
   • Monitor internal controls through AI-based dashboards.
4. Faster Decision Making – GenAI can enable finance leaders to transform complex data into brief data dashboards or executive summaries to enable organizations to make more fast and data-driven decisions.

Advantages: The Strategic Importance of GenAI in Finance

Difficulties and Factors to Keep in Mind

Although these advantages are significant, accurate implementation is crucial. Finance teams need to stay mindful of:

• Data Protection and Confidentiality: Data exposure is one of the biggest risks in using any AI tools. In order to use these AI tools, the finance staff may input sensitive information such as payroll details, budgets of client financial data. These AI platforms that are public, may store or use these confidential data by the AI developer for model training. Despite paying for the premium versions that claim stronger privacy safeguards, it is still often unsure whether the information is truly being protected completely and isolated from external access.
• Data Quality: AI is based on structured, clean data. Inaccurate data can cause misleading outputs or analytical errors.
• Clarification: AI results are reproducible and clear. Hence, finance professionals should be able to understand how these results were generated, especially for audits or compliance checks.
• Regulatory Compliance: Keep updated with any new AI regulation framework and budget reporting regulation in Malaysia to ensure that it aligns with data privacy laws and professional standards.
• Human Oversight: AI-generated reports should always be checked and verified for correctness by qualified staff before using it in decision making as AI cannot replace professional judgement.
• Skill Gaps: Necessary to improve skills in timely engineering and AI knowledge to ensure that the finance teams remain competent and confident in the usage of AI tools.

The Evolution of Accounting: From Data Analysis to Strategic Perspective

Generative AI is not made to replace finance analysts and accountants, instead it’s complementing them. It is a shift from doing the work to reviewing and advising the work. The next generation of financial innovations, knowledge, and counseling will be AI-skilled finance professionals.

Courses such as “Harness the Power of Generative AI for Accounting and Finance” offered by OTC is one of the courses to connect practice to theory, providing finance teams with the awareness, tools, and confidence to implement AI responsibly.