Episode 43: Connecting people, and why AI is an opportunity not a threat

Connecting people, and why AI is an opportunity not a threat

In the Season 4 finale of Difference Makers Discuss, Aster Thackery joins host Sinead Donovan to explore what it means when connecting people is your greatest professional skill. Her story spans trade promotion, the Italian Trade Agency, and building a 2,000-strong community in southeast London from scratch.

We also dig into a new position paper from Chartered Accountants Ireland on AI and the profession. The argument is clear: as AI takes on routine tasks, the demand for trusted, qualified professionals only grows — and the skills that matter most, critical thinking, judgement, and the ability to keep learning, are the ones AI cannot replicate.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to the Chartered Accountants Global Update. This is episode 43, and I'm glad you're with us. We have two things to get into today. First, we're looking at the season four finale of Difference Makers Discuss, featuring Kingsley Aikins, which tackles a question that sounds simple but cuts right to the heart of how careers actually work. Does good work really speak for itself? And then we turn to a new position paper from Chartered Accountants Ireland on AI and the future of accountancy. It's a piece of work with a clear, grounded argument, and one that I think will resonate with a lot of people in the profession right now. Let's get into it. Season four of Difference Makers Discuss has wrapped up, and it closed out with a conversation that's already generating a lot of discussion. We sat down with Kingsley Akins, author of Networking Matters, published by Chartered Accountants Ireland, founder of the Lansdowne Club in Sydney, and the man who spent 21 years building one of the great philanthropic networks for Ireland through the Ireland Funds. The title of the session is Good Work Doesn't Speak for Itself, but you can. And the premise, right from the start, is a challenge to some very familiar professional advice. We've all heard it. Keep your head down, work hard, let your good work speak for itself. It sounds sensible. It sounds like integrity even. But Kingsley Akins argues it's actually among the worst career guidance you can receive. His point is straightforward but worth sitting with. Good work doesn't speak. People speak. If the people around you, your colleagues, your clients, your broader network, don't know what you're contributing, they simply move on to someone they do know. That's not cynicism, it's just how organizations and careers function in practice. The conversation draws on his own story, which is genuinely worth hearing. He arrived in Sydney knowing no one, played rugby for Lynster, started a dinner for twelve people that eventually grew into the largest Irish business network of any city in the world. He wrote a cold letter to Tony O'Reilly, one of the most powerful business figures in Ireland at the time, and was invited to lunch. That lunch became a twenty one-year career, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for projects across Ireland. That's what putting yourself out there, even imperfectly, can do. There are a number of takeaways from the session that are particularly worth highlighting. One is the idea that the two most important words in your career are other people. You won't get a job unless other people agree to it, you won't win a client unless other people agree to it. Careers are relationship businesses, and yet we're almost never formally taught how to invest in those relationships. Another is the approach to networking itself. Kingsley is firm on this. If you come to it asking what can I get, people sense it immediately and it's off-putting. The more effective and frankly more honest approach is simply how can I help? That shifts the dynamic entirely. He also makes an interesting argument that introverts can be better networkers than extroverts. The reason being that introverts tend to ask better questions, listen more genuinely, and engage with more care. It's a point that surprises a lot of people, but the logic holds. And there's a line near the end of the conversation that I think will stay with a lot of people. Hard skills get you on the ladder, soft skills get you up it. Technical competence is the entry requirement. But listening, curiosity, communication, resilience, these are what actually drive careers forward, and they're almost never formally taught. The full session is available now on the Chartered Accountants Worldwide website. If you work with people who are early in their careers, or if you've been doing this work for years and want a genuinely fresh perspective on professional relationships, it's a very good watch. Our second topic is a position paper from Chartered Accountants Ireland, which has just been published on the Chartered Accountants Worldwide Knowledge Hub. The title is An Empowered Profession AI and the Future of Accountancy, and it does something that a lot of commentary on this topic doesn't. It makes a clear, considered argument rather than just raising questions. The argument, in short, is this AI has changed the nature of work. That is not in dispute. But the prediction that AI represents the end of the accountancy profession is, the paper argues, simply wrong. For accountants who engage with it seriously, AI represents an enormous opportunity. The reasoning comes back to something foundational. Our economy is built on trust. It always has been, and that isn't changing. AI will increasingly handle the routine and the rules based, the processing, the pattern recognition, the compliance tasks that currently absorb a significant amount of professional time. But who provides the trust? Who sits between the technology and the people who need to rely on it? The paper's answer is that chartered accountants are well placed to fill exactly that role. The phrase used is trusted interlocutor between the technology and the end user in an AI economy. That's a useful frame. Chartered Accountants Ireland also makes clear that this is not a theoretical position. They've substantially changed how they train accountants. The syllabus has been overhauled. AI, data analytics, blockchain, and other digital technologies are now integrated into the program. And they're careful to point out that this isn't a sudden reaction to recent events, it's a deliberate evolution that began ten years ago and will continue to develop as the technology does. There's also something worth noting about which skills the paper identifies as most valuable going forward. Technical knowledge remains essential, of course. But the skills that will differentiate people, the ones that AI is least able to replicate, are distinctly human. The ability to keep learning, systems thinking, critical thinking, problem solving. These are harder to quantify. They're harder to teach. But they're increasingly the ones that matter most. The full paper is available to download through Chartered Accountantsworldwide.com, and I genuinely recommend it as a read. Whether you're thinking about your own development or advising clients on how to position their finance functions, it's a clear-eyed and constructive take on where things are heading. That's episode 43 of the Chartered Accountants Global Update. Two quite different conversations today, but there's a thread that runs through both of them. In Kingsley Akins's session, the argument that it's the human skills, the ability to build relationships, to communicate, to show up for people, that ultimately drive careers forward. And in the AI paper, a similar conclusion from a different direction that trust, judgment, and the distinctly human qualities of the profession are precisely what will matter most as technology takes on more of the technical load. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with more very soon.