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At a glance
Increasingly focused on enabling faster, sharper decisions based on real evidence rather than experience or instinct, management accounting is going through a period of momentous change.
The profession and its leaders will be shaped by how well accountants adopt new management accounting tools, build new capabilities and position themselves as organisational informers.
What forces are shaping the future of management accounting? Mark Holton OAM FCPA, director at Smithink, and Dale Dixon, general manager of practice and partner advisory at MYOB, share their insights.
1. A permanent shift from compliance to capability
The clearest trend for 2026 and beyond, Holton says, is the fast-accelerating move away from traditional compliance work toward capability building and problem-solving.
While compliance will never disappear altogether, Holton says, its “value perception” is steadily eroding. Automation, outsourcing and artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to streamline compliance tasks, and because clients know this, they are less willing to pay top dollar for it.
For young management accountants looking to stand out in the market, this highlights the importance of building skills that create strategic value.
“Firms relying on compliance are going to feel the squeeze on fees, talent and relevance,” Holton says.
Management accountants must embrace advisory work, focusing on interpreting data, actively seeking and facilitating client conversations, and helping to shape decisions that drive business performance, he says.
This shift will be key to career success and professional growth.
2. AI as a general-purpose tool
AI is no longer new. It transformed accounting workflows long ago. Its next evolution, Dixon says, will be even more profound.
“We are at a cusp of another disruption that presents a bunch of opportunities,” he says.
“The last big disruption was cloud accounting, and that changed the way accountants, bookkeepers and small businesses worked, interacted and collaborated. But AI is going to open up numerous avenues for practices that perhaps they haven’t even imagined.”
Over the past several years, Dixon says, management accountants have relied on software providers to integrate AI into products. Now, AI is becoming a general-purpose technology.
“It is similar to Excel,” he says.
“As an accountant will use Excel to build work papers, management reports and their own intellectual property, general purpose AI is going to provide them with tools to innovate and unlock things no one has even thought of yet.”
The key challenge is adoption. Dixon says management accountants must focus on “mindset, skillset and toolset”, building a culture that empowers and encourages people to explore AI safely.
3. The rise of integrated platforms
Firms increasingly require the seamless workflows that come from fully integrated platforms, Dixon says. Data must move between systems without any friction — not just saving time and effort, but also opening opportunities for entirely new data analytics capabilities.
Integration is not new. But over the next few years it will move to a deeper, cleaner and more intuitive level of system connectivity. Without it, firms risk what Dixon calls the “bad digitisation” that comes from choosing tools without understanding how they should work together.
For management accountants who want to build value in their careers and firms looking for a competitive edge, deeply integrated systems and optimised workflows will be powerful capabilities.
4. Talent and skills evolution
Holton and Dixon both see major change on the near horizon in terms of skills demanded in the profession.
As transactional and compliance work is increasingly automated, firms will instead need their people to have the ability to interpret data, communicate insights clearly and have the right types of conversations to guide decision-making.
Dixon says accounting graduates will require far more than “core debits and credits” from a university degree. They need experience working with clients, understanding real-world problems and developing strategic options.
The next few years will reveal the importance of what we once knew as soft skills, Holton says.
The ability to ask clear and relevant questions, listen carefully to answers to understand exactly where a client would like to take their business, and to transform “numbers into knowledge”, are no longer nice-to-haves.
5. Predictive analytics to see into the future
While compliance work typically looks backwards, management accounting faces into the future. Forward-looking insights are vital to best practice and good decisions.
MYOB’s latest client accounting platform incorporates AI and an insights module that analyses trends and gives accountants insights that can spark advisory conversations with clients, Dixon says.
Accountants and accounting businesses will need to quickly become better at analysing and reading forward-facing, predictive numbers, instead of analysing numbers from the past.
6. Cybersecurity and safe adoption of AI
Another factor that is far from new, cybersecurity will rise in importance over the next few years as firms race into the data-hungry AI arena, typically in a cloud-based environment.
Dixon says firms require stronger governance frameworks and more bulletproof security measures because accounting, in particular, deals with highly sensitive information.
What does a higher level of cybersecurity look like? It is about training staff to recognise ever-evolving risks, establishing clear policies and choosing safe, well-governed AI tools, Dixon says.
In 2026, cybersecurity will be a foundational capability, he says, rather than an important background concern.
The redesign of management accounting
Rapid reinvention will occur in management accounting as automation increases and firms embed AI in a more deliberate manner, Holton says. Business models will be revisited, pricing reset and roles redesigned.
For those accountants and firms willing to embrace change, this represents a period of enormous opportunity.
For early career accountants in particular, there is a clear message around the vital importance of cultivating curiosity, focusing on soft skills, and deepening technological understanding and confidence to align competencies with what will be required in the very near future of management accounting.
