Hoisted by their own spreadsheet.
What will happen when the corporate gatekeepers get gated?
And the two professions that won the corporate ascendancy, accounting and law, won it through one move, repeated relentlessly: complexity inflation.
Somewhere in the last thirty or forty years every serious decision in corporate Australia (and the world to some degree) stopped being made by the people who knew the business, and started being made by the people who could veto it.
The CEO still presents. The board still nods. The strategy deck still gets the schmick fonts and a hero shot of someone in a hard hat looking at the horizon. But the actual decision, the moment of “we are doing this thing” passes through two filters: the CFO and the General Counsel. AKA, finance and legal. Most of the time they aren’t even referred to by any on persons name. Has finance signed off. Has legal cleared it.
Everything else got demoted long ago. Marketing became “supporting function”. Strategy became “advisory”. Creative became “agency cost”. Operations became “the people who do the thing once we’ve decided whether to do it.” Even sales, that all-important part of a business that touches actual customers, got reframed as a ‘downstream’.
And the two professions that won the corporate ascendancy, accounting and law, won it through one move, repeated relentlessly: complexity inflation.
Longer regulations, thicker standards, more granular disclosures. more elaborate indemnities, more recursive audits. Each turn of the screw making the work more specialised, the specialists more indispensable, and the people who used to make decisions more dependent. By 2015 it was unremarkable for a Big Four partner to be the most listened-to person in a room full of people who’d run the company for twenty years. By 2020 it was unremarkable for a corporate lawyer to redraft a strategic decision into nullity and have nobody push back, because nobody else in the room had the standing to.
And then.
Quietly, almost politely, the very thing that made those professions powerful turned out to be the very thing that makes them entirely automatable. If you’ve spent four decades making your work codifiable enough that only credentialed specialists can do it, you’ve also made it codifiable enough for a model trained on a few million documents to do it. Possibly faster. Definitely cheaper. And (no doubt in another frontier model or two) probably with fewer hallucinations than a human version ever could, because the human version was always quietly hallucinating too, just with letterhead.
The accountants and lawyers built castles out of complexity, and AI feeds off the stones those castle are made of.
I find this mildly amusing. That cosmic kind of humour where a thing that was true for so long suddenly stops being true, and the people most surprised are the people who relied on it being true forever.
But my point/question here is what fills the vacuum.
I’d hazard a guess that theres probably the optimistic and pessimistic view of the post-legal/finance-boffin view of the world.
Optimistically, when the two professions that turned everything into a compliance exercise get automated out of their gatekeeper position, the people who truly understand the business get their decision-making back. The strategist who has the wider view of the product and customer. The operator who’s spent fifteen years in the supply chain. The creative director who can sense a brand drift before the data shows it. The country manager who knows that what plays in Sydney does not play in Perth. The room becomes about judgement again, not procedure. The accountants and lawyers don’t disappear, they’ll just become advisors the way they were forty years ago, before they became the throne.
The possibly darker view is that nothing fills the vacuum. The boffins get replaced with one mega-filter, which would likely be an AI model. A model is faster, cheaper, and seems to be competent… but it’s also consensus-shaped, (because that’s how language models work). So decisions don’t pass through two risk mitigation humans anymore; they pass through one statistically average machine that has read every annual report ever written and arrived at the median answer to everything. Which is to say, you’ve replaced two professions whose job was to say “no, that’s risky” with one technology whose job is to say “the average company in this situation does X.” Different shape of caution. Same loss of nerve.
Either way the same people who don’t know what to do are same ones that got us to the legal/finance substitute in the first place. CEOs who doesn’t have a view of their own. Boards that asks legal what the strategy should be. Marketing directors who run every campaign past finance for permission. Those people are about to be in a very strange world, where their outsourced judgement is now to a SaaS subscription.
If you’ve spent the last decade practising judgement, you’ll be fine. Possibly more than fine. The room got noisier, the gatekeepers got cheaper, and your skill of actually having the capacity and ability to make a decision in conditions of incomplete information, just went up in relative value.
If you’ve spent the last decade practising compliance, guess what, that moat is disappearing fast. And in fairness, it was never really yours.
Accountants and lawyers are not the villains here, by the way. Most of them are decent, smart, hard-working people who built careers inside a system that rewarded a specific shape of work. They didn’t ask to be the de facto decision-makers of late capitalism. They got promoted into the role because everyone else abdicated.
The question isn’t whether they survive, most of them will, the good ones especially. The question is whether the rest of us know what to do with the room once we get it back.
I’m honestly not sure we do. We’ve been out of practice for a long time.
Damian is a director at General Strategic. He doesn’t have an accounting degree or a law degree. He has, on occasion, been the only person in the meeting willing to say the thing out loud. He suspects this is about to become a more crowded job.