Innovations in automation may bring advancement to an industry, but it also brings anxiety to its workers, who are justifiably worried about the future of their jobs. The fear materializes from the historical pattern of industrialization, where a machine replaces the need for manual laborers. Now, advancements in machine learning, or the booming development of computerization, threaten to replace the need for information workers.  And according to Bloomberg Magazine, accountants are particularly at risk of losing employment to automation.

CPA’s must embrace this new technology or be left behind, advised Erik Asgeirsson, CEO and president of CPA.com. “You can’t fear the technology and circle the wagons — you need to see it as an opportunity,” said Asgeirsson during his keynote address at the 2017 Digital CPA conference, because the firms that are “leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence are going to win in the end.”

Hitendra Patil, author of Accountaneur: The Entrepreneurial Accountant, shared the optimistic sentiment towards emerging technologies, saying, “Accountants have a new opportunity at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds” in an article for CPA Trendlines.

Both Asgeirsson and Patil point to block chains as one modernization looking to revolutionize the auditing industry.  Blockchains, which Asgeirsson touted as “a new, very sophisticated database” are digital ledgers distributed across peer-to-peer networks. Blockchains present incorruptible records listing economic transactions. Besides expediting transactions, Blockchains offer a trusted transfer of value and ownership, without intermediaries, like banks.

Blockchains depend on securing information that is unalterable and thoroughly validated. As Asgeirsson explains “Blockchain is about validated information, and when you look at it that way, it’s easy to see why accountants are interested.” With private Blockchains “there are going to be assurance needs”, it is this area of assurance, and regulation that experts project CPAs can find a new niche.

For example, makers of crypto currency and the father of Blockchain modality, Bitcoin, requires impartial assessments to assure and authenticate the value they transfer. Another opportunity for auditing within Blockchains is “tokenization,” the transferring of physical goods into digital value or turning “the record of ownership and transferability of ownership of physical goods from tangible into fungible.” And its tokenization that allows Blockchain networking to ” transfer ownership and value much faster, irreversibly and – most importantly – without the need for intermediaries such as stock exchanges, banks, etc.,” says Patil.

To function properly, tokenization requires the digitized value to correspond to the underlying physical good. This calls for someone to “to ensure that the value tokenized indeed exists, in the form, shape, size and several other properties associated with those physical goods.”  There needs to be a trusted authenticator of value transfer, even a certified agent that validates the tokenization process and according to Patil “Accountants – armed with intense knowledge and experience of numbers, processes, integrity, compliance expertise and the sheer magnitude of technology they use on a daily basis – are ideally poised…” to fill this position.

Who knows, perhaps audits of the future will involve issuing Blockchain-based, verifiable certificates of authentication – giving rise to a new qualification: Certified Blockchain Accountant, or CBA” Patil predicts.