Founder of Fuel Accountants and The AI Accountant. With over 15 years in practice management and technology consulting for accounting firms, Peter is passionate about helping accountants embrace AI to transform their businesses.
114 articles
Thomson Reuters surveyed 1,816 professionals and found 78% of corporate clients now call AI-enabled quality improvements essential — while just 6% say their providers deliver them. With 32% of clients reconsidering provider relationships within 12 months, the deadline for your firm's AI strategy is no longer yours to set.
Xero built AI document capture directly into the platform — and said nothing about HubDoc. A Top-30 firm handed its CAS delivery to AI agents most practices can't buy. And the most powerful model on the market came back from a 19-day ban with a meter on it. One question runs through all of it: how much of your stack do you actually control?
Every technology shift before AI asked the same question — who does the work? AI is retiring it. As the books, reconciliations, and first draft of the return increasingly do themselves, the only question left is who's accountable for the work being right.
At its June 23 Connect ON event, Intuit told accountants it will stop marketing bookkeeping to their clients — "full stop" — while quietly raising prices "to reflect the value" of AI and sunsetting QuickBooks Online Accountant by the end of 2026. The retreat is real, but it's the tell: Intuit makes more money owning the platform than competing with you on the books. Here's what the warm language is actually buying — and the one thing you shouldn't hand the platform.
This week the IRS and Intuit both made a move on the same thing — the savings AI is creating inside your firm — and pulled in opposite directions. Plus Claude goes multiplayer in Slack, AI-faked receipts force a hard question about whose job it is to verify, and Washington quietly starts gating which models you can use.
An AI bookkeeping startup just raised $10 million to close the books for $49 a month — and it's run by the founder whose last cheap-bookkeeping venture went bankrupt. A room of small-firm owners landed on an uncomfortable truth: fee pressure on the monthly close now comes from four directions at once.
In my peer group last week, an owner froze on the eve of her firm's 20th-anniversary meeting — how do you tell your team AI is coming without either lying to them or terrifying them? The first move isn't a training plan; it's a conversation most owners are avoiding. Here's what to actually say.
This week in AI didn't bring a new model — it brought plumbing. Agentic tools that do the work (Suralink, Melio) and the governance layer that decides who connects them (Anthropic's managed MCP auth) all shipped, but none of them solved the problem that matters most to a multi-client firm: keeping one client's data out of another client's answer. The real divide forming in AI tools isn't who has the most connectors — it's who scopes them.
Daniel Susskind told Scaling New Heights this is mass redeployment, not mass unemployment — your people doing different work, not losing their jobs. After four days in Orlando, the profession agrees its staff need to move up two levels. Almost no one onstage explained how — and the how is the part you can't buy in the vendor hall.
Jason Staats listed the six reasons firms get stuck on AI — every one written for the partner who signs the cheque. But if you're the one who got told to "figure out AI," the blockers look completely different. Here's what you can do without anyone's permission, and the short list to ask your firm for.
On Tuesday, Anthropic released the most capable AI model ever made public. By Friday, the US government had switched it off worldwide. Add OpenAI retiring models on its own schedule, Google force-defaulting Gemini, and QuickBooks killing classic reports — and the week's lesson is hard to miss: you don't own your AI supply chain. Here's how to build for it.
AICPA leadership opened Engage 2026 by naming AI the top issue for CPA firms of every size. After four days on the floor — AI-native ledgers, closed walls, and a profession aiming at 2030 — here's why the real deadline is 2028.