Summary

Rather than being replaced by AI, professionals are adapting to AI. Our research, published in the Journal of Management Studies, shows how accountants and lawyers are adapting through boundary work. This allows professionals to use AI to augment their work, with tasks lost to AI being replaced by new tasks that allow new types of client service and a new role for professionals.

Should professionals fear artificial intelligence?

After many years of debate about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its effect on the future of jobs and work, 2023 was the year when the potential for real impact captured the public’s imagination. The ability of OpenAI’s Chat GPT system to generate meaningfully (if not always accurate!) responses to any question the user might wish to ask made everyone aware of the potential for AI to provide insight, advice, documentation and problem-solving that we previously thought only well-trained and experienced humans could offer.

Developments such as Chat GPT are especially significant for the professions, such as the accountants and lawyers we studied in our research. Although some have been predicting the demise of these professions for decades, many have been more circumspect about the potential of AI to replace the expertise and wisdom that we seek from professionals. The abilities of Chat GPT shows why such assumptions need to be interrogated.

Professionals are already using AI

Professionals have been using AI for some time. We have studied how accountants and lawyers have been using AI since the late 2010s. Our research was completed before Chat GPT burst onto the scene, and we found that accountants and lawyers had found a range of ways to adapt to the impacts of AI on their work. So how are they adapting?

In our paper we talk about the ‘boundary work’ that professionals have engaged in as part of their efforts to adapt to AI. Boundary work is an academic concept that describes how professionals define and protect activities and work as ‘belonging’ to professionals, and only to be completed by professionals. We found that adapting to AI involved four different types of boundary work.

How are professionals adapting through boundary work?

First, and most instinctively, professionals defended boundaries. This meant finding ways to stop AI being used to change aspects of their work. Typical examples would include preventing the use of AI when the risk and ethical issues associated with using the technology were deemed too great, or when the technology was not able to provide the kind of contextualised advice the client needed.

The second approach was, however, quite different. Professionals actively used AI to allow them to provide new services to clients and to create new boundaries that defined the new services as something that should be provided by professional using AI. This approach meant using AI to analyse data and detect patterns to allow new kinds of preventive advice to be provided to clients. So accountants and lawyers changed from problem solvers to problem anticipators and preventers.

The third form of boundary work was collaborative. Professionals started to work with experts who could design and use AI systems, to allow them to provide the new services associated with creating new boundaries. The collaboration meant accounting and law firms employed data scientists and a new generation of AI-savvy workers who could help accountants and lawyers get the most out of AI systems.

Finally, fourth, professionals engaged in configurational boundary work. This involved changing the configuration of accounting and law firms so that their systems of management, governance and operations enabled the use of AI.

What is the future for professionals alongside AI?

We found, then, that professionals are already adapting to AI. They are learning to work with AI and to reinvent their role to ensure a new place for the human professionals alongside AI. Of course, each new iteration of AI development poses new opportunities and challenges, as the capabilities of Chat GPT show. And so, professionals will need to continue to engage in boundary work and their role will evolve.

Will evolution eventually mean extinction? That is too difficult to predict. As the blog ‘What AI Can’t Know? Thinking Through the Future of Professions’ argues, the role of professionals is complex and so simple predictions about their future risk missing subtle interactions between the different aspects of a professional’s role and future directions for their work.

What is certain, though, is that the role in 2030 of professionals such as accountants and lawyers will be quite different to their role today, and that boundary work by professionals themselves, and not just the development of the capabilities of AI systems, will direct what that change looks like.

Acknowledgements

This research was part of the “Innovating Next Generation Services through Collaborative Design” project, funded by UK Research and Innovation (grant number ES/S010475/1).