The first step in implementing AI in the finance office is to build a task-level inventory of the work in your finance office — sorting tasks into three categories: mechanical and rules-based, judgment-based but pattern-driven, and judgment-based and context-dependent.
Once you have that inventory with hours attached, the next question is what to do with it.
Start with category one. If invoice keying takes approximately 6 hours a week, and an AI agent can do that with staff reviewing the output (be it part of your ERP or an add-on to your system), you've freed 6 hours. It's 6 hours that can be used for other some other activity.
Where those hours go is the actual redesign work.
Move the freed hours into category two and three tasks. The team member who used to spend Tuesday mornings keying invoices now spends that time reviewing the AI agent's variance explanations against what's actually happening at the utility — checking whether the drafted narrative matches a known outage, a rate change, a weather pattern. That's a different skill than keying invoices, and it's a better use of a trained accountant's time.
This is where you need to make sure the automation conversation doesn’t stall. Leadership assumes that if a task is automated, the position shrinks. Sometimes that's true. More often, the position's content shifts — from producing first drafts to verifying them, from data entry to exception handling, from running the reconciliation to explaining why the reconciling item exists.
The job description has to catch up to that shift. "Prepares monthly journal entries" becomes "reviews AI-drafted journal entries against source documentation and posts exceptions." That's not a euphemism — it's a materially different job, and it should be evaluated, trained for, and compensated differently over time.
Training is where the investment needs to made and training does take time. Staff who spent years learning how to do category one tasks correctly now need to learn how to evaluate whether an AI agent did them correctly. Those are not the same skill. Someone who's never built the variance schedule by hand may not catch it when the AI's version pulls the wrong consumption period or misattributes a cost driver. The staff accountant needs enough foundational knowledge of category one to know when category two output is wrong.
That argues for a specific training sequence: don't let new staff skip category one work entirely just because AI can do it. Have them do it manually first, long enough to build the judgment that lets them catch errors later. Then move them into review and exception-handling roles as their experience grows.
Category three doesn't change much in this redesign. The board narrative, the FERC or RUS interpretation, the capital project case — those stay with experienced staff regardless of what AI can draft. What changes is how much of the office's total hours can now be dedicated to that kind of work, because the mechanical hours are no longer competing for the same people.
The inventory from two weeks ago tells you where the hours are today. This redesign tells you where they should be in twelve months. The gap between those two is your implementation roadmap — not a single tool purchase, but a sequence of role and training changes tied to specific tasks and specific hours.
About the Author
Russ Hissom, CPA is a principal of UtilityEducation.com, a firm that provides power and utilities rate and expert witness services, and on-demand professional education classes in co-op and utility accounting, finance, ratemaking, artificial intelligence, and management.
Russ was a partner in a national accounting and consulting firm for 20 years. He works with electric investor-owned and public power utilities, electric cooperatives, and gas, water, and wastewater utilities. His goal is to share industry best practices to help your business perform effectively and efficiently and meet the challenges of the changing power and utilities industry.
Contact Russ at [email protected]
The material in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as legal or accounting advice provided by Utility Accounting & Rates Specialists, LLC or UtilityEducation.com. You should seek formal advice on this topic from your accounting or legal advisor.