I’ve recently attended several presentations and engaged in several conversations that leave me panning the horizon of the Accounting world asking, “Where are all the computer and data scientists?”

Seriously! Where are you?

Yes, the big four Accounting firms are hiring some of you. But the need is greater. It does not seem unreasonable that much of the revolutionary changes in the field will occur more organically, from smaller start-ups. Last November, I attended a presentation by MindBridge. With artificial intelligence, they have enhanced and automated a large section of auditing. Their vision is to restore the public’s trust in financial data with the power of artificial intelligence. They are the first serious player in continuous auditing that I’ve seen. Botkeeper has automated over a million hours of bookkeeping for 1,000 clients. What exactly is automated? Automated information extraction from receipt and other source documents. Automated reconciliation of accounts, report generation, bill paying, and invoice processing. But, perhaps, most interesting, Botkeeper is a Google-funded start-up.

All this automation requires artificial intelligence, deep learning, programming, and data knowledge and skills. Accountants are not trained with these skills like computer and data scientists.

Open door! Open opportunity! Calling all computer and data scientists to work on challenging accounting problems.