Is your accountant ready for AI? Ask them these five questions.

For business owners

Is your accountant ready for AI? Ask them these five questions.

AI is rewriting the economics of every service business — including yours. Your accountant should be one of the first people helping you see it coming. Most aren't. Here's how to find out, in about 10 minutes.

A good accountant can answer all five of the questions below before you've finished asking. If yours can't, that's worth knowing now — because the person handling your numbers should be helping you read what AI is doing to your pricing, your margins, and your business model.

This isn't about whether they've adopted AI yet. Plenty of good accountants are still weighing it carefully. It's about whether they're engaged. The tell is attention, not adoption.

From Peter I'm Peter McCarroll — I run an accounting firm and I write publicly about AI in our profession. I built these five questions to give you a quick way to find out whether your accountant is paying attention. I'm not hiding the commercial angle — there's a link to my firm at the bottom — but the questions stand on their own.

1

When you use AI tools on my accounts, where does my data go — and how do you know it isn't being used to train someone's model?

What a good answer sounds like

They can name the tools they've vetted, what stays in-house, and what their engagement terms say about your data. A blank look may mean your financials are already being pasted into consumer AI tools.

2

AI can now do a lot of the compliance grunt-work. So what am I actually paying you for?

What a good answer sounds like

Immediate and confident — judgment, advice, and someone accountable who stands behind the numbers. Defensiveness, or "we file your taxes," means they're still selling the part AI is busy commoditising.

3

If you're using AI to prepare my numbers, who checks it — and what happens when it's confidently wrong?

What a good answer sounds like

A clear human-in-the-loop process where AI drafts and a person owns the result. "We don't touch AI" (asleep) and "the AI handles it" (reckless) are both red flags. AI's failure mode is being plausibly, expensively wrong.

4

Are you using AI in your own practice — and if so, am I seeing any of the benefit, in lower fees, faster turnaround, or sharper insight?

What a good answer sounds like

They're reinvesting the time AI frees up into advising you better. If they've automated half their work and your fee and service haven't moved, you're funding their margin, not your outcomes.

5

AI is going to change the economics of my industry. Are you watching my numbers for those signals — or just reporting last year's history?

What a good answer sounds like

They talk forward — pricing pressure, margin shifts, what your data is starting to show. A compliance-only accountant only ever talks backward.

How to read the answers

Attention beats adoption.

The accountant who says "I've been watching this carefully — here's where I'm leaning in, here's what I'm still cautious about" passes. The accountant who's never thought about it doesn't. You're testing whether they're paying attention to the shift happening underneath your business — not whether they've already bought every AI tool on the market.

What to do next

Two paths from here.

Send these questions to your accountant Speak to an accountant who gets it

Fuel Accountants is Peter's firm.

If your accountant nails all five, hold onto them. If they freeze on most, you've learned something important on a quiet afternoon — before the next quarter forces the conversation.