Beginning with an orientation for nearly 500 first-time attendees at this year's Scaling New Heights this conference designed for QuickBooks ProAdvisors is underway with the largest total number of participants in the ten-year history of the conference. The conference is being held at the Georgia World Congress Center, one of the nation’s premier meeting venues, located in the heart of Atlanta.
During the opening Main Stage event Joe Woodard introduced this year's theme, “Tame the Machines” which is designed to address the imminent and unprecedented technology shift impacting accounting professionals. Topics discussed included new and enhanced technologies like data automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence which are reshaping the way professionals perform services and are creating a powerful opportunity for accountants to reduce manual processes by as much as 80%.
Woodard's rationale in taking on this theme is to enhance the advisors attending the conference to fully leverage those technologies that will increase their profits, position their firms to scale, and generate a competitive advantage within the accounting profession.
Darren Root, of Rootworks spoke on the importance of providing a convenient customer experience, offering a digital culture that support the accounting workplace, and to creating a mindset that offers vision and clarity that will benefit advisors as they undertake transcend the machines by doing what the machines cannot do.
Shafat Qazi of BQE Software spoke on the present state off Artificial Intelligence including how his company's newest product called CORE is making use of AI to provide better data that enables advisors to fully automate mundane tasks thus giving them the opportunity to focus on interpreting the information so as to make the right decisions for their clients.
Featured speaker, Daniel Susskind, the co-author of the best-selling book, The Future of the Professions, and a Fellow in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford University, told the audience “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that there will be less for people to do. If machines and systems take on more and more tasks, as we see them doing, then it begs the question: What will be left for professionals?”
Susskind's studies have identified two futures. One in which machines (technology) will make professionals more efficient, and one in which machines (technology) will displace many professionals. While he sees these two futures initially paralleling each other, he believes the second future will ultimately become the dominant one.
Stay tuned for more 'daily capsules' from the conference. Insightful Accountant will also be publishing some 'conclusive' summaries based upon the collective reporting of all of us present at the conference.