Back to the future

Isabelle Allen considers how technology might affect professional services

Although certainly not advertised as such, attending Davos is a bit like taking a rollercoaster ride! One minute you’re on a complete high from a session with Young Global Leaders, full of optimism for the future and fuelled by their passion and new ways of thinking. The next minute, you come right back down to the ground, discussing the challenges of the growing inequality gap or new forms of cybercrime – leaving you deeply cynical and thinking things will never change for the better.

I must say I feel much the same about the impact of what I saw and heard at Davos regarding our own profession. On the one hand, industry boundaries are blurring as newcomers enter our markets, while the pace of technology overall poses a serious threat to our traditional business model. Google is entering the banking sector and technology threatens to compete with – or even replace – a number of the core services we provide, either by automation or complete substitution. These discussions had me coming away from a number of sessions wondering whether or not we are at risk of becoming an endangered species!

Yet, at the other extreme, I came away from another session on disruptive technology (in which the panel talked about the emergence of self-drive trucks), struck by a question from the audience.

“How do we control the use of this technology?” they asked. “Who will provide the safeguards to ensure that the software programmers code the trucks to respond in the right way should a child run across its path, that is, avoiding the child, over and above minimizing damage to the truck?”

If we go back to our roots, the accounting profession was borne out of the need for independent, objective third parties who could provide assurance that a company’s behaviors adhered to certain rules or standards. And over time, this has developed further to us bringing an external perspective or judgment on their core business to help them to grow and operate more efficiently.

If anything, in this increasingly complex and fast paced world, this need is not going away. The capital markets, our clients and society in general are likely to want and need more than ever in the future the basic tenets of trust, expertise and impartiality on which our profession was founded.

So rather than being uncertain about what the future holds, I suggest we embrace it and use it as a reaffirmation of our raison d'etre. Back to the future, then....

Contact Isabelle Allen or join the conversation in the GLP Group on the Hub.