TOM O’BRIEN

‘New AI-related laws are significant and far-reaching’

ACTIVITY Last year was another year of double-digit growth for the firm both from a revenue and people perspective. All service lines continue to experience strong demand, with our assurance and consulting teams being particularly busy. We have invested heavily in our financial services and regulatory consulting business and this is an area that we are very excited about. Despite the various headwinds that the domestic economy faced over the past year, merger and acquisition activity held firm, with our deals advisory and tax teams enjoying another busy year.

OPERATIONS Running a large business with almost 800 staff across three offices inevitably presents a wide range of operational matters to be managed. Our executive team spend a lot of time on strategy and driving the business and I work closely with our People, Finance, IT, Risk and Marketing teams to monitor progress against plans and deal with ad-hoc issues as they arise. Being a people business, attracting and retaining talent is a key priority and our leadership team spends a significant amount of time on our people strategy to ensure that we are best positioned to retain our people and attract the new talent that our teams need to grow and service client demand.

Being part of a large international group, I spend a lot of time meeting with colleagues across the Mazars group. The recent announcement of the formation of the Forvis Mazars network has brought another dimension to my role, and the firm is looking forward to the opportunities that will arise from having a significant presence in the US.

AI Mazars has a large AI team in Paris that has developed our own proprietary algorithmic system – AKD. We see AI as not only an internal enabler for enhancing service delivery to clients but also as an important new regulatory requirement that our clients have, as technology and in particular AI becomes increasingly regulated. New AI-related laws are very significant and far-reaching and create major obligations for many of our clients. They all require AI auditing, and we have invested heavily in our AI audit team in Ireland over the last number of years.

PROFESSION Accountants and auditors will always need to understand the fundamentals of both accounting and how to audit. The principles of audit are the same regardless of what you are auditing and whether you are using technology or not. Our auditors already use technology in their everyday work and we incorporate IT audit into our audits, through the use of data analytics tools. I don’t think this will change, more we will continue to employ IT tools to support our audit processes, to allow auditors more time to focus on judgement-based work rather than routine testing, some of which has already been automated.

OUTLOOK Business confidence is generally strong with many businesses continuing to recruit. Whilst the outlook for interest rates generally is positive and this impacts positively on business and consumer confidence, hospitality and high street retail continues to face challenges. M&A activity is always a good barometer for outlook, and we would expect FY24 deal activity in the Irish market to be up on 2023 levels.