AI could replace CFOs, but at what cost to workload?

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding! Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] A North Carolina woman, she lost 600,000 in a romance scam. The IRS then sent her a bill for $225,000 in taxes and penalties. Why did that happen? Because the money she sent, the scammer came out of her retirement account, so it counted as taxable income. David Leary: [00:00:23] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio. Blake Oliver: [00:00:29] Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the accounting profession. I'm Blake Oliver. David Leary: [00:00:36] I'm David Leary, and I'm beat Blake. I got the shingles vaccine this week and it's hitting me. So I'm gonna push through though for the show for the listeners. We got to push through here. Blake Oliver: [00:00:46] The show must go on. Today we're talking about whether or not AI could replace CFOs and other top executives, some new survey data on what U.S. adults think about that. And an EY time tracked 188 IRS calls and reported the results, and we've got them for you. All that and more in this episode of the Accounting Podcast. But first, David, let's thank our sponsors. David Leary: [00:01:10] Our sponsors. This week, we have on pay numeral savant labs and cloud account and staffing. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of your client experience that you want to deliver manual workflows, creating bottlenecks, compliance, nightmares, and endless support calls that go nowhere? There's a better way for your team and your clients on pay is the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love. Why? Because it's easy to use, packed with value, and backed by support that actually supports you. 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Please do use those links that lets them know that you found them through the podcast. They appreciate knowing where you came from and it helps us get more sponsors. All right, David, let's talk about whether or not AI can replace CFOs and other top executives. This is something I've wondered about myself, because I'm automating more and more of my job as a CEO, as a founder, uh, and like a lot of it, just following up on stuff, pushing stuff forward. A lot of it is automatable and you've you've seen that you've been getting these emails from me and comments and, and all this stuff. And this is a. David Leary: [00:03:05] Smart org where you're directly all the reports kind of roll back into you. Right? So I think there's more testing. But if you think about it, like at a bigger corporation, the CEO has this team of people that are just building slide decks for them. So I don't know if, if the CEO could be replaced by AI, but their direct is that that next layer of direct staff under the CEO? Yes. Blake Oliver: [00:03:31] Maybe people who are mostly just doing project management, executing that CEO's vision, perhaps. Let's see what the survey data says about how Americans feel about this. Watch. Chest surveyed over 2000 U.S. adults and asked them whether AI should replace CEOs, CFOs, and other senior executives. And a lot of Americans are in favor of this. There's a steep gender divide though, so get this it's 45% of men who favor replacement. 45% of men say, I would be happy if they replaced these executives with AI. David Leary: [00:04:09] Men hate their bosses, okay. Blake Oliver: [00:04:11] But only 25% of women said that. I mean, that's a 20 percentage point difference, right? Quarter of women, almost half of men. The survey gatherer watches this company that did the survey, they suggested that women may be more reluctant to remove remove human judgment from decisions involving jobs, ethics, culture, employee well-being, privacy and accountability. Support also changed depending on how much money you make. So people earning 150,000 to $200,000 a year supported this the most. The upper middle income spectrum, upper middle class, and that peaked at 55%. So over half of those earning 150 to 200 K a year supported replacing executives with AI. David Leary: [00:05:00] I could have a theory on that. Blake Oliver: [00:05:02] Tell me why. David Leary: [00:05:03] The average bottom of the rung employees, and possibly most of middle America, has never talked to the CEO, has never met the CEO, and definitely has never worked with the CEO or been in a meeting with the CEO. But people that are high income probably have higher level management positions, and they either think the CEO is an idiot. They don't trust the CEO. They're like, our team does all the work for the CEO. So I the income is probably just based on people's experience with CEOs. Blake Oliver: [00:05:30] And maybe at that income level, you're sort of in the middle of the corporate hierarchy. Yeah. Where you're getting all these ridiculous demands from on top, and you are supposed to somehow execute these crazy visions. You know, I mean, there's. David Leary: [00:05:43] The shade of yellow in a slide deck. Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:05:44] Yeah. There's bad executives, right. And you are at the mercy of them. And then you have to implement that and, you know, tell that to all the people that work for you. I mean, you know, if you if you think that management at your company is dysfunctional, which it can often be at a big company, then yeah. I mean, you would support it, right? Uh, so I was thinking about this, right? Like, let's think about this from the CFO perspective. We are seeing AI absorbing a lot of the work that finance teams do. It's taken over with forecasting, monitoring, month end, close workflows, strategy support, M&A type analysis, all of that. I mean, AI is everybody is using it. If you are in a role where you have to do complicated spreadsheet analysis and you're not using like cloud cowork by now, I mean, you're, you're a dinosaur at this point, if your company allows it and so many people are using it, even if their company doesn't allow it. I think we talked about on the show a week or two ago. David Leary: [00:06:45] Shadow AI use, what's that called? Blake Oliver: [00:06:47] Shadow AI use is like a third of employees. Uh, and so, you know, I mean, but but let's let's tackle the question of whether or not AI could actually replace these leaders. And my, my take is definitely, no, not at this point. Because the thing you have to do to make it work right now is you have to really monitor it and you have to correct it. You have to read all this analysis that it gives you, and then you have to tell it where to go. And if you just let it operate autonomously, you get terrible results at this point. So I am spending a ton of my time now just getting through a bunch of simultaneous chats that I'm going, I might have 20 going at a time and reading what it gave me and then telling it what to do next, which actually is, is hard. It's exhausting. David Leary: [00:07:40] Oh yeah. I'm saying, but I have a couple AI agents doing different things. And yeah, you're constantly looking back where you're at reviewing. It's a lot of context switching, switching more than ever. Like the, again, we talked about this months ago, that cognitive load, even though more is getting done and you feel more productive, it's it's not, it's still a lot of work. Like you're not actually doing less work, you're actually working your ass off, but it's just going so much faster. And that's why it's exhausting. Blake Oliver: [00:08:06] You're working your brain instead of sitting in meetings and then delegating and meetings all day long, which if I have to choose, I'm absolutely going to choose the current system of AI doing this project management for me and me directing it, it's, it's so much better. I don't have to sit around and wait, but I have to have so many chats going because I can't just sit there and wait for it to chug away. I mean, I like I get bored instantly. I'm just sitting there while, you know, it goes and it takes a while to get back to you sometimes, right? Minutes and I just. So then I have too many going. And then like you said, I'm context switching and it gets mentally tiring, mentally exhausting. That's one of the reasons why I think we're going to end up working a lot. Well, you know, whether we work fewer hours is debatable, but I don't think it's possible to be, like, doing what I'm doing and work more than six solid hours a day. Like I can't do it. I am exhausted at the end from the mental load. David Leary: [00:09:05] The hours work that we may do is going to still feel like 40, but we might only be working 18. It's just going to feel like 40. Blake Oliver: [00:09:12] Because you're doing heavier reps with your brain, right? Instead of just sitting in meetings all day, which is a different kind of endurance exhaustion. Yeah, yeah. So that's my take. Uh, I should say I spotted this thanks to cfo.com. Uh, they covered this in, uh, on their site. Um, oh, I should also add, the regions mattered. This is interesting. The West Coast supported this the