The fundamental schism in the accounting profession reflects the fundamental schism of the human mind. On the one hand, there are the accountants, punctilious to a man, who spend their time obsessing over the minutiae of the so-called reportable past. On the other, are the accountants who do nothing but gaze into a future they claim some sort of pseudoscientific ability to prognosticate with an unerring exactitude that is matched only by its failure to come to pass. In other words, the accounting profession, just like the human mind, has forgotten that the past and future are merely figments of the eternal present.
The textbook education of an accountant is a full-length, plain-coloured garment that covers the flesh from view. Like all such garments, it invites the imagination to speculate with lascivious abandon. Only when you sleep with an accountant will you know the actual, sordid truth.
The substitution of accountants by AI agents is a rare example of eye-for-an-eye justice manifesting at the societal level. Those who have spent their lives aiding and abetting the ruthless culling of workforces are now to be culled themselves. That this justice has been wrought by an artificial intelligence reared on human loquaciousness makes the schadenfreude even sweeter.
The ostrich-like refusal to see an infraction for what it is, is the defining feature of a certain swashbuckling type1 of so-called c-suite executive. They will pretend otherwise, of course, will tick any and every governance box going. Just as they will gladly terminate an indeterminate number of employees if it helps them to hit their bonus target. They will even raze an organisation to the ground if needs be, just as long as they have cashed their share options in first. And the saddest thing of all is that these people are only doing what anyone else would do in their position. Let that sink in, as a certain notorious trillionaire once famously said to the employees of a company he had recently acquired, just before sacking most of them.