For Executive Coach Oliver Deacon FCA, it is vital for accountants to hardwire agility into their skills development choices this year. This means letting go of the profession’s traditional image.

“In 10 years, accountants will be spending about 80% of their time either managing artificial intelligence at scale, or deeply involved with some form of business partnering,” he says.

“On the latter point, in industry, that will mean working much more closely with other people around the business and, in the professional services sector, with clients. However, AI and partnering are currently things that accountants could be a lot better at.”

At this point in time, it’s really difficult to get AI to execute powerful finance tasks reliably, Deacon explains. “Meanwhile, we tend to spend so long getting the numbers right that we squeeze out the time needed to develop the soft skills for building relationships. Indeed, we seem to prefer having our noses in our spreadsheets to going around making friends.”

With those issues in mind, Deacon urges accountants to focus on three critical skills areas:

1. Using AI as an adviser

“In 2026, AI will not be ready for us to delegate finance tasks to it at scale,” he stresses. “In finance, our bar for quality is not 98% or 99% accuracy. If you need to finalise a spreadsheet, it’s 99.9% – and, at present, AI can’t get there. So, trying to farm your work out to it directly will mostly be a waste of time.”

Instead, Deacon encourages accountants to use AI as an ‘auxiliary brain’, an on-tap source of task-related advice.

“Right now, the world’s leading expert in SAP, Oracle and pretty much any type of tax software is ChatGPT,” he says. “So, whether you’re processing invoices, creating tax returns or working on a corporate reporting project, ask your AI platforms to advise you on how best to complete those key tasks more efficiently. Use AI to make your own work habits smarter.”

2. Soft skills for improved business partnering

“In an article for Insights last year, I talked about the importance of influence and trust,” Deacon says. “Assuming practitioners have made some progress on that front, the next part of the journey is learning how to be great at selling people your ideas. It’s no longer enough to turn up with data and logic, because that’s not why people buy into things. What really grabs them is emotion.”

Deacon, who is one of the trainers on ICAEW's Mastering Business Partnering course, points out that the traditional role of the finance function has been to exert a calm force of authority, ensuring that other parts of the business maintain regulatory compliance or keep within budgetary constraints.

However, that will soon be AI’s responsibility. As such, accountants will need to have a firmer grasp of the art of persuasion: harnessing the insights that AI has generated to define the company’s future direction.

“If you can’t sell your ideas you won’t be able to do that," says Deacon. "So, you must significantly build up your people skills.”

3. Coaching skills

Deacon laments that people frequently mix up coaching and mentoring. “If I were to tell you how to do a client’s tax return step by step,” he says, “that would be mentoring. For me, a type of micromanagement.”

By contrast, coaching assumes that the other person either already has the answers within them, or has the path towards the answers. In that context, the job of the coach is to help the other person unearth those solutions.

He adds: “As accountants, we love to tell people what the answer is and what to do. In coaching, those two things are discouraged. You want people to act on their initiative, so you use lots of open questions – typically beginning with ‘how,’ or ‘what’.

“In the future, we will need better managers of AI and of people. By asking the right questions instead of demanding X, Y and Z, you will get more out of both.”