INTHEBLACK February 2024 - Magazine - Page 24
F E AT U R E
“If someone who’s performing an audit has ethical concerns around the information that AI is
giving them, whether that’s around bias or accuracy or whatever it may be, they have a
responsibility to raise their concerns.”
ANJU DE ALWIS FCPA, ULTIMATE ACCESS EDUCATION INSTITUTE
Above: A protestor
holds up a banner
during Sam Altman’s
visit to The Cambridge
Union to receive the
Professor Hawking
Fellowship on behalf
of OpenAI,
Cambridge, England,
November 2023.
LISTEN
to an INTHEBLACK
podcast on what
accountants need to
know about
generative AI
24 INTHEBLACK February 2024
Kuperholz says companies should ensure
that AI systems have an appropriate level of
explainability, transparency and replicability.
“Will these models break when they’re
presented with new data that they haven’t
seen before? Are they secure? Is there the
ability for a nefarious actor to capture
sensitive intellectual or, even worse, customer
information?” Kuperholz asks.
“There’s another set of performance
monitoring around safety and control,” he
adds. “These are challenging things to monitor,
but not at all impossible.”
De Alwis adds that accountants should
consider the broader technology ecosystem
while using AI tools.
“Who is feeding the data into these systems,
and can we trust the data?” she asks.
“Management accounting is all about
insights for the future, and that’s where AI
will get really interesting, but we need to
constantly think of the veracity of the data –
that’s where professional scepticism comes in.
We need to question the insights that we are
getting from technology.”
As generative AI tools evolve, Kuperholz
says we can expect a greater focus on
responsible AI in general, and international
standards are already being written.
“I think we’ll move towards an adoption of
certain standards for explainability, for ethics,
for bias, security and replicability,” he says. “All
of these areas will hopefully move towards
realistic and attainable standards, and tools
that organisations can use.”
In the meantime, De Alwis says accountants
must apply their professional scepticism to the
use of AI in the workplace.
“Accountants are required to serve the
public, and that underpins so much of our
ethical considerations,” she says.
“When it comes to making decisions
about the use of technologies, accounting
professionals have a seat at the table to ask the
right questions, but in order to ask the right
questions, we need to know what to ask.
“We need to gain knowledge about
technologies,” De Alwis says. “We can’t
assume that it’s not part of our job to
understand how technologies like AI work.”
