AI IS COMING . LOOK BUSY too time and labour intensive .

“ We ’ ve built an AI engine that can go through an entire loan book , not only bringing cost benefits but also quality in terms of making our audits much more thorough . We can look at the paperwork which came with the loan and do other things automatically , like revalue assets loans are borrowed against .”

Exceptions , triggered by mismatching data or anomalies spotted by AI , can be sent out to human colleagues , naturally leading to a demand for higher-skilled employees who only deal with complex scenarios .

But can we trust the robot to get it right every time ? For Rae this is the wrong question to ask , not least because 100 percent accuracy 100 percent of time is an unrealistic expectation , even for a maverick lunatic . “ If you start analysing the quality of work humans do then it is obvious that they are not 100 percent either ,” he adds . “ We want AI to be superhuman , and if somebody asks ‘ how do you know it will be more accurate ’, we need to have the data to back it up .”

Graduate uptake at the big four UK accountancy firms will be reduced as a direct result of technology transforming the ways companies are audited . EY has already said that its intake could drop by as much as 50 percent by 2020 .

( World Economic Forum )

Rae explains : “ We and many companies across many sectors have hundreds of finance graduates coming in and doing the really taskorientated work to develop their capabilities . In the next three to five years this will be automated away . This means we have to find another way of taking in and bringing up graduates to make sure they are capable to do the higher-skilled work .

Though the likes of KPMG will continue to be vital feeders of financial talent to businesses in all industries , Rae believes that a significant proportion of any graduate intake

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