This is the archive of CPA Now blogs posted on the PICPA website through April 30, 2025. Want more recent blogs?

Read current blogs

By William J. Hayes, managing editor, Pennsylvania CPA Journal

Accounting automation is a topic that will have to be reckoned with in the not-so-distant future. I recently sat down with Kirke Everson, managing director, government intelligent automation, for KPMG US, to discuss intelligent automation. Kirke's colleagues, Chris Gauthier, PMP and Joseph E. Seibert, CPA, CGFM will present a course on this at the July 9-10 PICPA Government Accounting Conference. 

PICPA: What is intelligent automation, and what do you believe it means for the future of CPAs in general and government accounting in particular?

Intelligent automation (IA) is a spectrum of capabilities designed to transform and accelerate an organization’s productivity and effectiveness. IA capabilities span three general classes. Class I are rules-based, transactional automations, also known as robotic process automation. These are best used in the collection, movement, sorting, and sharing of information. Class II are learning automations, such as next-generation chatbots. These employ natural language processing, data analytics, and limited machine learning to elucidate patterns and respond appropriately. Finally, Class III automations are the closest to what people generally consider artificial intelligence. This class can employ robust neural nets, machine learning, and predictive analytics to mimic human reasoning.

The most expedient IA solutions, Class I, will transfer mundane, repetitive data collection, sorting, and dissemination to automations, freeing CPAs to focus more time on understanding and decision making. Classes II and III will support and enable CPAs in trend and fraud analysis, opportunity identification, and quickly understanding large amounts of data. Class III automations, in particular, can help a CPA rapidly reach across large swathes of data to present new insights and understanding for adjudication.

Government accounting will be transformed, not just at an individual task level, but at an organizational level. Where today data is culled and mined from unstructured sources, governments will quickly realize the benefit of plying IA capabilities. In the very near future whole processes and actions will be designed/redesigned to more easily flow data to IA tools. With more, better-organized data, a government will be able to spend less time collecting and organizing and more time understanding and drawing new insights. This will transform the level of service constituents and citizens will expect and receive from government accounting.

What is the No. 1 area where you think the proper use of intelligent automation could help make government CPAs’ jobs easier?

IA is a spectrum of capabilities that can be customized and applied to many different areas. That said, the most immediate impact will be the automation of rules-based, transactional work – Class I. Shifting time-consuming tasks that absorb human time, but don’t require human cognition, will have two immediate impacts. The first, noted above, will be unleashing CPAs to do more thinking and reasoning. The second is the direct benefit of Class I automation: increased speed and accuracy. Transactional tasks will be processed three to 10 times faster and more accurately.

While many organizations are beginning their intelligent automation journey with Class 1 automation, the government and the CPA community will be best served by quickly evolving their thinking beyond Class I and understanding how Class II and III automations can be leveraged to take an even greater step forward.

Where does a government CPA get started with intelligent automation, and is it easier for larger governments to work with it than smaller governments?

The most straightforward answer here is to start any IA journey with a partner who knows what they are doing. Just as a growing company would turn to a CPA to understand how to grow its accounting capacity, a government should start with people who have experience. Further, there is more to an IA journey than building bots or training a chatbot. Again, this is like accounting: there is more to it than adding and subtracting. Experienced IA practitioners can help an organization customize the broad capabilities of IA to the CPA and government accounting environment. Additionally, there needs to be solid governance, strategy, management, and change management. Just as the calculator and later Microsoft Excel changed how CPAs do their daily tasks, so too will IA. Both CPAs and governments will require a strong partner to help them translate these changes into actionable plans for workforce training and recruitment.

How quickly is the use of intelligent automation being adopted by state and local governments? For those governments and government CPAs that are behind, how urgent is it that they catch up?

State and local governments have adopted IA using a deliberate timeline. Over the past six to eight months, with many state and local governments getting through exploratory phases, IA implementations have increased rapidly. Unlike private industry, a state or city will not “go out of business” if it does not deliver high quality services to its citizens, but service delivery is the reason for urgency amongst state and local government. IA tools are no longer the stuff of science fiction and computer science labs. They are real and are being delivered in the marketplace today. They streamline processes, increase accuracy, and decrease wait times. Moreover, they do all of this with decreased cost to the taxpayers. Those state and local governments that continue to delay adoption will soon be held to account for those delays by the taxpayers. The solution that would benefit both the governments and the people they serve is to adopt IA solutions as soon as practicable.

For more information, check out the intelligent automation presentation at the July 9-10 PICPA Government Accounting Conference. The full agenda, details, and registration information can be found on www.picpa.org.