For a long time, financial robots have won the headlines of various news media with various arguments to replace human beings, and it is obvious at a glance that it is another marketing campaign to borrow new technologies. At present, the four financial robots that are publicized to the outside world are RPA, and the machine process automation. This product has always existed, but in recent years, with the hot artificial intelligence, it has been rebranded and embedded with machine learning ability, so there is the current "financial robot" and the "whether the financial robot will replace the financial person". The essence of this question is actually "will the company reduce the number of financial accountants because of the growth of automation?" And the extended "Will financial accountants engage in more valuable activities?" After all, companies are profit-seeking and always seize any opportunity to reduce costs.

The Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF) and the Human Resources Company (Robert Half) conducted a survey on this dispute. The survey was attended by 1,73 financial executives, 96% of whom were from the United States and Canada. However, only 3% of American financial executives and 6% of Canadian financial executives said that they hoped to reduce their financial and accounting teams through digital transformation. More than half (59%) of the respondents indicated that they would maintain the existing staff level. Surprisingly, 17% of American executives and 22% of Canadian executives said that they expected to actually expand their teams of finance and accounting personnel due to the technology explosion.

The conclusion is that "automation has not reduced the financial and accounting teams", which is completely different from the logic of "reducing the number of financial personnel through automation, and then saving costs for enterprises" advocated by the media. In this sentence, a FERF interviewed some CFOs, and their answer was: "With the digital transformation of the company, new automation is playing a role, and more people are needed to supervise the process of automation tasks". An image statement is that more understanding is needed now. With the emergence of new technologies, new job requirements have also been driven, so these CFOs are also very worried that "university finance and accounting courses have not helped students develop these skills, but continue to teach them what they have been teaching for many years". At the beginning of the year, PricewaterhouseCoopers' report on the global CEO survey in China showed the same concern, with 88% of China corporate executives expressing concern about the supply of talents with digital skills in the senior management team, while the proportion of global corporate executives was 69%. At first glance, executives are so worried about digital skills, so instead of paying attention to whether they will be replaced, they should pay more attention to how to learn these new skills and adapt to the continuous improvement of personal ability requirements under the surge of new technologies.

On the other hand, if financial robots have not replaced traditional financial accounting teams, why do profit-seeking entrepreneurs purchase this technology? First of all, the introduction of RPA's high rate of return is mostly from the publicity reports of consulting companies such as Capgemini, Accenture and Ernst & Young. It is difficult to have a fair evaluation of the specific high rate of return. On the other hand, from the point of view that 7%-8% of the customers currently implemented are very large groups, the process is optimized and transparent, and then simple structured data is copied and migrated. RPA's role update is the executor of process consulting services and a tool to improve enterprise process norms. Of course, Gartner's research shows that the purchase of RPA is more from the business department that pays attention to manual input, not just the IT department, so RPA replaces the manual input business of the business department.

cars replace carriages, and grooms can learn skills to be drivers. Some people say that, but what about horses? Not to mention horses, even people will be eliminated if they don't learn new technologies to adapt to the pace of the times. Different times have different tools for human domestication. The past is an abacus, the present is a computer, and the future can be expected.