This Is One Job Accountants Would Love for AI to Take Over --- Auditors are still sent on messy trips to count chickens, rocks, corn and frozen fish

 

“Matt Gardiner recently climbed a series of 90-foot grain bins to measure millions of bushels of corn.

 

He and his team got so covered in thick dust that they had to be sprayed down with air hoses before returning to their cars. It's one of the hazards of the job, along with fertilizer-soaked boots, ripped pants from ladder cages, and encounters with pigeons, mice and sleeping bats.

 

Gardiner isn't a farmer. He's an accountant.

 

The third-generation Iowa-based auditor has to review and verify the financials compiled by his clients, largely agricultural businesses. He uses a laser to measure grain, but there's no tool inside the bins that can save him from having to climb.

 

"There's so much dust in the process of getting grain into a bin that it would have to have a little windshield wiper on the sensors to constantly clear it," Gardiner said. "I think that'd be great."

 

Accounting firms and their clients are increasingly using artificial intelligence and drones to do work long handled by humans. But so far, there's been no technological solution to what is often the dirtiest part of an audit: counting inventory. That means the messy, bizarre field trips remain a rite of passage for young professionals in an otherwise deskbound field.

 

It also means April actually isn't the worst time of the year for some accountants.

 

Auditors are often tasked with traveling to the middle of nowhere and tallying up a large amount of unusual things, from chickens and pigs to quarry rocks, corn, traffic lights and telephone poles. They complain about ending up covered in manure or dust, or shivering in a freezer.

 

The large accounting firms typically rely on junior auditors to do much of the dirty work. The trips provide an opportunity to learn more about clients. But in the moment, they stink. Gen Z auditors share horror stories on social media. "I just counted thousands and thousands of nuts and bolts. What did you do today??" one posted on TikTok. A Reddit user said they were sent to count rocks in below-freezing weather, including a pile in a snake-infested quarry.

 

Deborah Oyaleke was sent into a large freezer room to verify cartons of frozen fish. "I'm talking about the kind of cold that makes you rethink all your life choices," she wrote on LinkedIn.

 

And auditors aren't exactly getting a welcome embrace from clients.

 

"Imagine being a middle-aged person who knows your job inside out and once a year, some kid barely out of school who has no idea what you even do, let alone how to do it, gets sent it to check that you counted things right," a Reddit user wrote in January. "Absolutely the worst part of any audit."

 

Given the pace of development in AI, there's hope that help may be on the way. "AI can count something faster than a human can, so you can see it coming," said Christian Peo, KPMG's U.S. assurance leader.

 

Counting inventory has changed a lot: The clipboard is gone. For certain aerial inventory counts, expert-operated drones have replaced the need to commission helicopters or jets.

 

One problem for reluctant inventory counters is that regulation hasn't kept pace with technology.

 

U.S. auditing rules -- which require that a person physically verify inventory -- contain scant mentions of AI and still referenced fax machines until recently. Another barrier to full automation is the cost of advanced technology.

 

Modern audit technology and related tools have limitations. Drones struggle to count items that are covered or hiding, such as cattle in mountainous terrains, and are largely ineffective indoors. Using technology to evaluate trees across vast timberlands remains hard.

 

Sometimes, the tools break down. Navneet Sharma, a partner at KNAV in Atlanta, had to postpone Thanksgiving dinner to count frozen vegetables and premade food in a subzero cold storage facility. Sharma expected the count to take an hour using bar code scanners, but they malfunctioned in the cold, forcing his team to pull an all-nighter and count manually.

 

Sharma's family wasn't thankful. "There's no fun in doing Thanksgiving the day after," he said.

 

Shawn Richardson, an audit partner at Oklahoma-based HoganTaylor, doesn't miss smelling like a pig farm after inventory counts.

 

"It doesn't matter how many times you wash your hair," Richardson said. "When you get on a plane, you know you're that guy that everybody is dreading sitting next to."” [1]

 

1. This Is One Job Accountants Would Love for AI to Take Over --- Auditors are still sent on messy trips to count chickens, rocks, corn and frozen fish. Maurer, Mark.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Apr 2026: A1.