33 articles
Thomson Reuters spent $40 million putting its archive inside its own AI model, and the final training run cost under $450,000 because it built on a model anyone can download. Part 5 of Buy vs. build closes the series with what that means for a 12-person practice: the knowledge Thomson Reuters put inside a model, your firm puts on top of one, in a page of written-down rules. Two moves, one engagement, this month.
A Xero-affiliated Instagram ad told 77,000 followers that Claude had replaced an £800-a-month accountant, and the profession decided Xero was going the way of Intuit. The vendors going direct is arithmetic, and the profession has been outraged about that arithmetic since QuickBooks Live in 2019. Seven years later, the invoice still describes the work as a report.
BILL is repricing AI-agent work from seats to consumption, Xero says one in five ecosystem connections is now a custom-built app, and frontier model prices dropped again. Part 4 of Buy vs. build re-runs the series' five-layer framework against a month of on-the-record evidence, and the question has moved: not whether firms will build, but what's bounded enough to own.
Whether your firm should build or buy was never about the app. It's about whether you can supply the harness and the janitor yourselves. Part 3 of Buy vs. build closes the series with the build-readiness test, the packaging premium, and one question per layer to ask before any renewal.
In the late 1990s I helped build a global audit platform for a Big Six firm. The capability let us do some old things faster, and start doing things we should always have been doing and never could. Quality went up. The clock never moved. Leadership was watching the clock, saw nothing, and cut the budget. If you are measuring AI in hours saved, you are about to read the same zero.
Per-client and per-user app fees levy a decision tax accountants have paid since QuickBooks Desktop gave way to subscriptions. Part 2 of Buy vs. build reads the pricing wrapper the way an accountant should, as a risk contract: who carries the token volatility, who holds the repricing option, and what to watch as usage-based pricing arrives.
Xero has had a request open since 2017 to let you export bank rules, with 540 votes and still nothing shipped. QuickBooks Online has done it for years. As your firm starts encoding real judgment into AI agents and skills inside vendor platforms, that gap stops being a nuisance and becomes the question that decides whether your build compounds for your firm or evaporates.
June's conferences said buy and build in the same breath, and agreed most accounting apps are LLM wrappers. But the intelligence was never the whole product: every app subscription bundles five layers, and the wrapper critique prices only one. Part 1 of Buy vs. build unbundles what an app actually sells you.
A returning client chose our cheaper self-service tier, left the integrations broken, and handed us a year-end file so damaged we spent more hours than the full-service fee would have covered — then balked at the bill, took the discount, and left anyway. Every firm runs some version of that inversion: the cleanup, the harder job, is the one we discount. As "my AI does the books" spreads, here's the pricing mechanism that stops it.
Last week the joke was that your client's agent could talk to your firm's agent and clear the busywork overnight. That's right — for the friction. But today your advisory relationship is largely a byproduct of all that transactional contact, and automating it blindly severs the thing advisory grows from. Here's how to tell the contact you should automate from the contact that is the whole business.
In one 48-hour stretch this month, AI's price sheet fell again — Meta, GPT-5.6, and Grok all repricing the intelligence behind the $49 close. But the vendors selling that close won't quote a flat price for it, because the thing that varies was never the intelligence — it's the system underneath. Run-time is commoditized; designing that system and standing behind it isn't, and that's where the fee now lives.
Every system in your client's business is becoming something their AI can reach and act on — their bank, their payroll, their card processor. Every one except the firm that's supposed to be the most intelligent of the lot. Here's what it looks like when an accounting firm designs for the agent, not just the person — and why you start with the contact nobody enjoyed anyway.
