Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emergent weapon or ally of business leaders in developing new products and services to respond seamlessly to the needs of their customers. If harnessed effectively, it transforms business processes, structures, and activities driving a high level of efficiency and innovativeness that delight and retain customer loyalties.
As good as it does for business, so it should too for effective and innovative delivery of quality education and student learning that solidifies massive development of human capital for the national interest. Particularly so in the field of finance and accounting, businesses need managerial, operational, and statutory reporting information rendered by highly innovative and trained professionals for their decision making.
AI technologies are capable of processing and analyzing vast amounts of real-time data involving finance, accounting, markets, operations, and human resources that enable nuanced data-driven decision-making. They enable predictive and financial analytics sifting through historical accounting data to identify potential problems and opportunities, predict potential outcomes, and adapt insights to enhance a forward-approach to get ahead of the curve in a turbulent environment.
The availability of ubiquitous Chatbots enables effective machine learning through real-time mutual interactions and feedback between and among teachers and students. With AI algorithms, student data and performance can be analyzed to create personal experiences for the teacher to adapt or customize teaching approaches catering to the different learning styles of students that enhance practical and transformative learning effectiveness.
Teachers are also benefited by AI in easing their workloads of calculating and grading outputs and automating their course designs. It is time-saving while keeping them abreast of useful technologies in innovative delivery and updated student performance records.
However, like any new phenomenon whose efficacy still has to be vastly demonstrated in terms of effective results, some are wary of AI technologies as an existential threat that might replace human beings. To allay such fears, AI is a “neutral” tool whose use is dependent upon the one who uses it.” It is not AI that replaces human beings but the one who uses it.” It is the “programmer” of the “program” that exercises judgment. Admittedly, there are concerning gray areas such as the insidious rise of deception and other manipulative tools of mass disinformation, which must be addressed considerably.
The risks and reward of AI integration in finance and accounting education should be a critical choice to make. Students should not be deprived, restrained or faulted easily when they use AI. The ChatGPT for example, can actually enhance learning experiences. It is precipitate and unfair to brand the students’ use of AI in accomplishing their assignments as blatant cheating. As everybody recognizes, the current breed of students are “digital natives” and their resort to AI may stem more from their initiative to learn more and produce better outputs than intentional cheating.
To obviate these doubts, educators must establish boundaries and guardrails anchored on ethical values when integrating AI in classroom transactions to achieve learning quality and integrity. School officials should lay down ground rules explicitly written on the syllabi or through academic integrity pronouncements to guide teachers and students.
More significantly, the teacher must demonstrate acuity and subject matter expertise to be able to spot formulaic and copy-pasted AI generated outputs in order to coax the students to conduct additional research using traditional sources of information to validate and strengthen their work.
Despite all the pros and cons of AI, there should be no substitute to critical thinking in learning and studying. What ChatGPT will never possess is the “quality of mind” that every human being is uniquely gifted with even if sometimes due to the forced compliance for teachers to cover in granular fashion all topics contained in the syllabus based on such nebulous learning ideas as officially directed OBE, the training for “quality of mind” is unwittingly suppressed. The result is disastrous turning students as outstanding “technicians” or “number-crunchers” honed in linear thinking but incapable of performing the higher level skills of creative thinking and problem solving.
To transform and nurture in every student higher skills to grasp concepts, sort out their meanings and implications, apply and illuminate their minds on the realities of life and how they should live them is the pinnacle of effective and heuristic learning. It is bringing the student to the higher levels of learning behavior from mere knowledge to comprehension, analysis, application, evaluation and synthesis. Encouraging and allowing students to think outside the box or even without the box and not just constantly drilling them on rote processes of debits and credits, application of principles, and number-crunching exercises, while important, must occupy a material time and space in their learning journey.
The choice is not Human or AI. It is Human and AI both that brings about a highly relevant, useful, practical, transformative and need-based quality learning that changes the individual and the world.
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Dr. Cesar Azurin Mansibang is President and Chairman of the Board of a large corporation, a management consultant, a CPA and long-time professor in graduate business schools in prominent universities in the Philippines.
The views and opinions of the author do not reflect those of the Philippine Institute of Certified Public Accountants.