This article by Michael Berrington, Director at IFRS SYSTEM and Financial Reporting Specialists, Barriers to automating financial reporting, hits the nail squarely on the head:
“In most cases the barriers to financial reporting automation are really all in the mind.”
You can read the article yourself to get the details.
Here is everything you need to know to have an intelligent conversation about digital financial reporting. Recognize that expert systems for creating financial reports will be created. Artificial intelligence will be assisting auditors (AI assisted audits). Accounting bots will be a reality. The Finance Factory will be created. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a real thing.
And so HOW will all this come to be? Brick-by-brick, that is how it will be created. Lots of tasks could be candidates for automation:
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Brick-by-brick, much like building a house, business domain experts and software engineers can create tools that automate certain types of tasks in some process. Humans encode information, represent knowledge, and share meaning using machine-readable terms, relations, assertions, patterns, languages, and logic (i.e. ontology-like things). That will be the way an increasing number of work tasks will be performed to complete accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis tasks in a digital environment. Lean six sigma techniques and philosophies will help keep process quality high. The result will be more efficient and more effective processes.
If you want to make sure you get your foundation right and want to understand the moving pieces of the puzzle, I would suggest that you have a look at Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering Basics in a Nutshell.
This is another good article.