It has been almost two months since I launched my blog. To mark this small milestone, I decided to write about why I paused my Certified Public Accountant career and chose to dedicate myself to being an “AI Watcher.”

Before anything else, I want to express my gratitude to the friends who volunteered to review my drafts before launch. Thank you so much.

As some people already know, I am qualified as a CPA in Japan. However, I officially withdrew my registration from the Japanese Institute of Certified Public Accountants this February, so I am currently “on leave” as a CPA. This means I can no longer use the CPA title.

The reason I decided to take a break was simple: I was fortunate enough to be in a position where it was economically possible, and I wanted to spend time observing and studying AI.

OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, and by 2023 the word “AI” had flooded Japanese society almost overnight.

For me, it was a deeply emotional year. About twenty years ago, I watched a pitch from an AI startup in the United States. I had expected the AI boom to arrive much earlier, but it finally came.

As a person who worked both as a CPA and a Fintech consultant, I began thinking seriously about the future impact of AI on the industries I belonged to.

Many people already discuss the impact on Fintech, so I will skip that here.

But the impact on the accounting and auditing industries will be enormous.

If AI could instantly filter the massive volume of accounting standards—like the “Audit Six Codes,” which can be as thick as 15 centimeters—the time required for audit work would be drastically reduced.

And when it comes to the most important mission of auditors—expressing an audit opinion on the financial information disclosed by public companies—I see two major impacts.

One is the improvement in detecting inconsistencies within accumulated information.
The other is the enhancement of the intuition that only excellent auditors possess.
The ability to sense “something feels wrong” has always been the most important talent in auditing.

Do you remember the shocking collapse of WorldCom due to accounting fraud?

The fraud was uncovered by WorldCom’s internal audit team.
My memory had become vague, so I asked Copilot’s “Kopidora-chan” to help me make clear the timeline:

■ May 2002
An article in the local Texas paper Fort Worth Weekly caught the eye of an internal audit manager. It mentioned “abnormally increasing capital expenditures,” which triggered a sense of discomfort.

■ Late May 2002
Cynthia Cooper, VP of Internal Audit, began the audit ahead of schedule.

■ June 2002
The team discovered irregular accounting treatments such as “prepaid capacity,” and uncovered improper capitalization of line costs.

■ June 25, 2002
WorldCom disclosed the fraud to the SEC (Form 8-K). The initial amount was $3.8 billion, later exceeding $11 billion.

■ July 21, 2002
WorldCom filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy—the largest in U.S. history at the time.

The internal audit team reportedly worked secretly at night to avoid detection by management members.

I had the opportunity to study this case in the U.S., and what shocked me most was that the trigger was a single sentence in a local newspaper that “felt off,” leading the team to quietly start the audit early.

In other words, the trigger was not a mainstream audit procedure.
This taught me that an auditor’s intuition—“something is wrong”—is an absolutely essential skill, no matter how advanced IT becomes.

If audit data and even non-financial information of companies were integrated into a single database, and auditors could analyze everything through an AI filter…

Now, in 2024, as new AI tools beyond ChatGPT continue to be released, I remembered the shock I felt during the WorldCom case study back in 2005.

Recently, I had dinner with a VC founder I’m close to. He said:
“AI is advancing much faster than the dot-com boom or the Fintech boom. Right now, people can enjoy early-stage benefits for around 3,000 yen a month using tools like ChatGPT, but this era won’t last long.”

I completely agreed.

When AI becomes a new societal infrastructure, business professionals will need to use AI naturally and fluently. That means we must take full advantage of this early-stage period now.

After thinking deeply, I arrived at one answer: writing stories.

You cannot truly deepen your understanding by using Copilot or ChatGPT vaguely.

By interacting daily with Chappie, Kopidora-chan(Copilot), and Gemini’s Army, I can see improvements almost weekly. Their ability to maintain coherent conversations is far better than it was six months ago.

I currently use 365 Copilot Pro, which gives me access to Copilot’s agent features. I want to start using them soon, but I’m still exploring how best to integrate them.