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Will being a video gamer make you a better CA? In an accounting world where AI, coding and automation skills are rapidly becoming must-haves, Shannon Smit FCA thinks so.

“I spent so many years telling my two sons, who are now both studying accounting, to get off their games,” she reveals. “Now I’m like ‘keep doing it boys, keep doing it’.”

Why the change of heart? A couple of years ago, Smit embarked on building AI bots to automate processes within her accounting and advisory firm, Smart Business Solutions.

Which staffers took to the new tasks and technologies like ducks to water? The gamers. Where some people struggled, the gamers thrived, and found building bots and creating automations was second nature, she says.

Smit emphasised to her team that AI wasn’t going to take their job but, in a now well-worn trope, she advised that someone using it will. Introducing AI into the business wasn’t so much a technological shift as a cultural one and the change in culture needed to play to each team member’s strengths.

Which is where the gamers came in. Staff who weren’t as technologically savvy would ask the gamers for help, explaining the process needing automation or the bot needing to be built, and the gamers would go away and do it for the rest of the team.

A cultural challenge

Smit’s organisation has 21 employees, with its team evolving slightly as AI has been introduced into the business. Two long-standing team members chose to move on during this transition, deciding the change wasn’t a good fit for them. Rather than redundancies, this change reflects a natural alignment of skills and interests as the business embraces innovation.

Both individuals had made meaningful contributions over many years in administrative roles, with one serving the business in-house for a decade and the other close to nine years offshore.

“The in-house team member had built strong relationships with clients and was a valued part of the business,” Smit says. “There would always have been a place for her here. As the business began evolving, she made the decision that the shift towards new technologies and ways of working was not the right fit for her, and chose to step into a different path.”

The upshot? Thanks to the automation of many previously manual admin tasks, three people’s roles have been replaced with two, at different wage levels. Tasks no-one really wanted to do are now handled by bots. And, the business bottom line benefited from a 23.6% reduction in wages.

“Some things can be a blessing in disguise,” Smit says. “When she left, it didn’t seem like a blessing at the time because she was such a great person but our junior admin has upskilled herself, she’s moved into a more senior role and she has really embraced the technology.”

Bots benefit the bottom line

The raw figures around the revenue uplift Smart Business Solutions has experienced will open the eyes of any practice principal. For the fiscal year ending 30 June 2025, Smit’s business, along with the 23.6% reduction in admin wages, also recorded a 14% hike in gross revenue and an 11.9% reduction in professional wages.

But AI didn’t come first. Before AI made its presence felt there was an aborted – and potentially expensive – attempt at robot process automation (RPA) using an external contractor.

The idea for RPA emerged for Smit about a decade ago, when she began outsourcing several tasks offshore to the Philippines. “That experience highlighted how process driven some of the work had become,” she says. “It prompted me to think about how technology could enhance efficiency and consistency even further through automation.”

At that time, tech wasn’t really Smit’s forte – she says she’s still not a hardcore techie even today but has learned her way around things – so she engaged a third-party contractor to build the RPA tools for her. The idea was to automate business activity statements (BAS) and workpapers, so a human’s role would be review, rather than creation, of those documents.

The third-party supplier quoted A$3200 per automated process, along with A$5000 per month for each robot. Smit set aside A$50,000, figuring she’d have a relatively short return on investment once the bots were up and running and the humans she employed were doing higher-level, rather than rote, mundane tasks.

“So, I set aside A$50,000 and asked the contractor to build out as many processes as possible, recognising the opportunity for automation to deliver consistent, round-the-clock efficiency,” she says.

Eight months later, the BAS robot was finally delivered. Smit affectionately named the bot ‘Betty’ – a small but telling reflection of how quickly the technology became part of the team. Then, as often happens, a moment of discovery came through social media; not on Facebook or Instagram but on LinkedIn, where a post caught her attention.

From RPA to AI

“You know how you sometimes come across people on LinkedIn who really stand out? That’s what happened here. I started following Daryl Aw, an accountant based in Singapore,” Smit says.

Aw, founder of Skybots Singapore, had built his practice around robotics and automation. Through his LinkedIn posts, he shared how he was rethinking traditional accounting workflows using technology, offering a compelling glimpse into what the future of the profession could look like.

This, Smit thought, was interesting. Here was someone who’d done what she was trying to do via a contractor. He’d done it himself and he hadn’t needed to spend A$50,000, nor wait eight long months for the deliverables.

She reached out to him, told him she was getting frustrated with the external contractor developers she’d signed and what he told her blew her mind. “He said, ‘Look, you can create these bots yourself. I run workshops in Singapore teaching people like yourself how to do it’,” Smit says.

Being a savvy accountant, Smit figured it probably wasn’t a good use of budget sending her team to Singapore to go to a workshop, so she made Aw a counteroffer: would he be willing to come to Australia and do a workshop Down Under?

It was an offer he was happy to accept and, in November 2024, Aw presented a two-day workshop for Smit and her team.

“When Aw got up to present, he told my team that at the end of the two days, they’d be building their own robots.

“And you know what?”, she says. “He was right. Before we went out for Christmas that year, one of my team had created a bot to complete a BAS. With that result, I do not know why it took the external developers so long to deliver.”

Willing to play

Smit says the team had been spending close to 1000 hours each year on BAS compliance. By embracing automation and employee training, Smart Business Solutions transformed the process, reducing a task that once took around 40 minutes for a skilled team member to just seven minutes.

“We fired our external developers and started doing everything internally, and we started teaching ourselves how to build bots and automations.”

What is critical for CAs to understand, Smit says, is you don’t need to be a coder to build bots or automations. Yes, her gamers showed aptitude, but not everyone in her organisation who has the skills to develop a bot is necessarily an avid gamer.

The key, she says, is a willingness to experiment and engage directly with the technology. Rather than looking for a perfect approach, it comes down to staying open to new ideas, challenging existing ways of working and exploring innovations that have the potential to reshape how a practice operates.

The BAS robot consists of 937 separate steps which sounds daunting, but what most CAs don’t realise is they already have the tools – Microsoft Power Automate and ChatGPT – at their fingertips.

Power Automate is included as part of Microsoft Windows. Microsoft just does a bad job of telling people about the tool and what it can do. The only area where CAs need to be careful is in the AI tools they use. Kayur Patel FCA, director, Gen AI and emerging tech at PwC New Zealand, counsels accounting professionals that they should never use the free, public version of an AI tool, but instead pay for the business or enterprise version.

Why? The public tools use everything entered into them to further train their models. This could compromise any sensitive information a CA puts into the chat bot. The paid enterprise or business editions don’t use private information to train the AI model and are therefore more secure. But no AI tool is perfectly secure, so caveat emptor (Latin for ‘let the buyer beware’).

“The role of the accountant will continue to evolve beyond compliance towards genuine business advisory.”

AI agents and advisers

Smit and her team rely heavily on Microsoft Copilot to build their AI agents and it’s these agents that are primed to take her business automation to the next level.

“We’ve built a review agent and a business planning agent and, because we’re on a practice-wide Microsoft platform which most firms would be on, once you build and publish your agent, it’s available to everyone in the business.”

Agentic AI is more capable than simple bots because it is designed to be adaptive, Smit says. If a platform like Xero makes changes to its software, a traditional bot can struggle to keep up. An AI agent, by contrast, can respond to instructions, adjust to the change and still find a way to complete the task.

“In the next five years, we will see a significant acceleration in automation,” Smit predicts. “As a result, the role of the accountant will continue to evolve beyond compliance towards genuine business advisory. This shift will require firms to actively support their teams in embracing change, building confidence with new technologies, and contributing to how both the business and the profession move forward.”

Will being a gamer make you a better CA? Maybe, maybe not. But for Shannon Smit, she was pleasantly surprised that the gamers in her organisation have the edge. Maybe a little Red Dead Redemption on the PlayStation won’t hurt after all.