A Finance Management Expert, Mr Nick Agule, has said accountants must not be taken unawares as they must foresee the future, upgrade their competencies and techniques and move with the times to be able to respond to the changing environment.
He gave the advice while presenting a paper on Financial Management Innovations and Sustainable Growth at the 25th Annual Conference of the Association of National Accountants of Nigeria (ANAN) in Abuja.
According to him, Financial Management is one of the most important aspects in business and refers to the strategic planning, organising, directing, and controlling of financial undertakings in an organisation or an institute which also includes applying management principles to the financial assets of an organisation, while also playing an important part in fiscal management.
“The gold standard in Financial Management is more revenue, less costs, more investments
“Under these prevailing global economic conditions, the Accountant has no choice than to be innovative, and technology is a Siamese twin with innovation.
“The place of the accountant must be at the forefront and should even be the one initiating the disruptive technologies and not just being hit by them,’’ Agule said.
Similarly, another expert, Mr Egbita Bamidele, noted that the growing hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancement in recent years had led to several observers making damning claims about how AI would soon take over multitudes of jobs, rendering a big percentage of the current workforce jobless.
Bamidele made this known while presenting a paper on “Application of Artificial Intelligence in Reporting’’ at the conference.
According to him, while AI has not yet reached the level of replacing human intelligence completely, this could still be a possibility in the future as the capabilities of AI are being improved upon.
“Going deeper with AI and Machine Learning (ML) has also brought forth more sophisticated techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP) which combines learning with linguistics, allowing for intelligent analysis of written languages.
“Advanced AI and ML systems have also allowed machines to produce more accurate results than humans, particularly for areas which involve repetitive work,’’ he said.
He said investors are already using AI to enhance effectiveness of investment analysis by extracting meaning and value, not only from company reporting but also from various sources of alternative data.
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