From Automation To Autonomy: How Agentic AI Is Transforming Accounting

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Uli Erxleben , Founder and CEO, Hypatos.ai. Our vision is to enable AI to run business operations, while humans make decisions.

I recently attended the EU Accounting Summit in Düsseldorf where the key topic was the role of AI in the future of accounting. The buzz was around agentic AI, and I was asked to define it numerous times.

I think of agentic AI as a supercharged assistant that has all the knowledge in the world at its fingertips. It has been trained on all publicly available, along with plenty of privately owned, data. You can feed it thousands of pages of instructions, millions of datasets of history, in any language, and it will understand all of it instantly.

The big difference with agentic AI, as opposed to generative AI, for example, is that it can act independently to do something with all that information.

For example, to get results, you just need to provide an intent, and the agentic AI can plan how to do the task. It can examine all the facts, access necessary data from your ERP system and then take action. It has the tools to do the tasks and can autonomously perform what you ask it to do.

One thing that struck me at the conference is that people's perception of what is possible in the future is still based on their current experience. People believe future tools will just be more efficient to drive more productivity. They are not imagining completely new scenarios that may be possible thanks to agentic AI.

There is already a lot of excitement about automation in accounting. Advanced technology can optimize invoice processing and improve overall data quality. It can process and analyze huge datasets and identify patterns and trends. It can also detect discrepancies and prevent illegal financial transactions. With all these advancements already in place, I believe it's time to examine AI's ability to handle complex tasks such as tax assessments and apply it to completely new realms.

Agentic AI does not follow predefined rules or focus on creating new content. It emphasizes goal-oriented behavior and adaptive decision making, using advanced algorithms and sensory inputs to execute actions in real time. It's always learning and optimizing its performance through continuous feedback.