AI in Accounting: How to Become an Advanced User
AI is already in your accounting stack. What separates the winners now is how deeply you actually use it.
For years, AI felt like a distant promise across accounting, spanning both financial accounting and FP&A (management accounting).
Now there's hard data showing exactly how AI is reshaping day-to-day accounting work.
Karbon's "The State of AI in Accounting Report 2025" lays out
how finance and accounting teams are putting AI to work, and how performance diverges depending on how sophisticated that usage is.
The Way You Use AI Is What Sets You Apart
In Karbon's survey of 1,000 US accountants, firm partners, and managers, 79% of respondents said they're already using AI in some form.
But as with any technology, there's a clear gap between someone who can use it and someone who uses it well.
In this piece, we'll look at how that gap plays out in productivity, and what it takes to grow into an Advanced AI User across finance, FP&A included.
① The Productivity Gap by AI Maturity, per Karbon's Report
Karbon's report makes one thing clear: what drives the productivity gap isn't whether you've adopted AI, but how deeply you've operationalized it.
Among accounting teams using AI, Advanced AI Users saved 71% more time per day than Basic Users.
In raw numbers, that's 79 minutes saved per day for advanced users versus 49 minutes for basic users.
So where does that 30-minute daily gap come from? The table below breaks it down.
How AI Maturity Shapes the Outcome
Dimension | Basic AI User | Advanced AI User |
|---|---|---|
What they use AI for | Automating simple, repetitive tasks like data entry and report summaries | Report generation, data validation, and streamlining communication |
How they work | Piecemeal use at the level of individual tasks | Automation and validation woven into the process itself |
Impact | More convenient workflows | Real productivity gains (71% more time saved) |
How they see AI | As a "tool" | As a "work partner" |
*Source: The State of AI in Accounting Report 2025
Basic users focused on shaving time off individual tasks. Advanced users built AI into the workflow itself.
② Three Stages to Becoming an Advanced User in FP&A
Karbon's report skews toward financial accounting,
but financial accounting and FP&A share the same DNA: both run on numbers, and in both, accuracy and efficiency decide the outcome.
Because of that overlap, the report's insights translate cleanly to FP&A.
That said, FP&A is about designing the future, building budgets, analyzing profitability, modeling scenarios, so there are more variables to weigh and the approach is inherently more layered.
So how do you extend the efficiency and accuracy AI delivers in financial accounting into FP&A?
The table below maps out three stages of AI maturity in FP&A (management accounting).
Three Stages of AI Maturity in FP&A
Stage | What it covers | Example | Key metric | Expected impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Stage 1 — Automation | Automating routine work like recurring reports and ledger data integrity checks | Auto-generating financial reports from ERP data | Time saved, reporting cycle compression | Higher efficiency, fewer errors |
Stage 2 — Insight | Correlation analysis, LLM-driven insight summaries, root-cause analysis of budget variances | KPI analysis powered by AI commentary | Data accuracy gains, shorter analysis lead time | Sharper insights, higher reporting quality |
Stage 3 — Co-decision | Comparing forecast scenarios, resetting KPI targets, supporting decisions | Automated projected P&L by scenario and KPI variance analysis | Speed of decision adoption, frequency of AI collaboration | Stronger strategic responsiveness, greater organizational agility |
As in financial accounting, AI maturity in FP&A isn't measured by what you've automated, but
by how well AI is embedded in the workflow itself.
The more AI evolves from a tool that processes data into a partner that helps make the call, the deeper FP&A's strategic reach becomes.
Using AI Well Is Becoming a Core Competency for FP&A Teams and Professionals
The pace of AI adoption in accounting, and the productivity gap the report reveals, point to one thing: the ability to work fluently with AI and AI-native third-party applications will be a defining competency going forward.
In other words, how well you use AI is becoming the benchmark for the competitiveness of teams and individuals alike.
AI now needs to move beyond efficiency and become part of how FP&A makes decisions.
Numen is the industry's only management-accounting solution built on AI and ERP data.
From report automation to AI-driven insight analysis to scenario-based financial forecasting, it helps FP&A teams grow from "a team adopting AI" into "a team working alongside AI."Design the next stage of your FP&A function with Numen.
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