Professor Alnoor Bhimani delivered keynote talk titled ‘Is Accounting trailing Artificial Intelligence?” on 19 September 2025 at the conference. He opened the talk with a brief history of cost management practices and innovations over the 1960-2025 period. He discussed the stage of AI evolution we presently find ourselves in.
Professor Bhimani explained we have now passed the phase of ‘chatbot’ innovations and are seeing the fast development of ‘reasoners’ including LLMs. Organisations are at the edge of advancing the ‘agentic’ economy with assistant agents acting on behalf of consumers and service platforms enabling enterprises to interact programmatically to facilitate transactions.
Here, organisational environments are starting to see value being created, distributed and scaled through agentic AI. This will culminate in the rise of AI ‘innovators’ and ultimately AI-managed organisations by 2030.
Much of cost management and decision control approaches used in organisations at present however remain tied to mechanisms appropriate for 20th century industries and management precepts developed for that era.
Professor Bhimani noted that we while we are seeing a new wave of evolved digital transformation and AI technologies beginning to offer enterprises novel avenues of value creation which rest on fundamentally different principles, accounting has not shifted to address this new environment.
He highlighted several dimensions of development essential for the continued evolution of accounting practices if the field is to retain its relevance. The time for the profession to move forward is now.