14 articles
2026 is the year of the agent — and you're five minutes away from building one you could reuse every day. An agent isn't a new technology. It's the same AI you're already using with a better job description. The gap between a prompt, a workflow, and an agent is smaller than most CAS practitioners think.
The KPIs that built successful accounting firms — utilization, AHR, profit per partner — were designed for a world where humans do all the work. When AI becomes a production participant, those metrics aren't wrong. They're just no longer enough. Here are three metrics I think matter now — and I want you to challenge me on every one of them.
Anthropic surveyed 80,508 AI users. The number one fear isn't job loss — it's unreliability. AI fails the same way your staff does. The difference: corrections become permanent rules.
Intuit and Anthropic announced a multi-year partnership putting QuickBooks inside Claude. The MCP server is already public on GitHub — a developer expanded it to 143 tools. But the depth question that's limited every platform integration still applies, and the Enterprise Suite demo isn't what your QBO clients will get.
Marketing teams are seeing 90% cost reductions. Customer success teams are doubling productivity. And Anthropic's own data shows financial roles have an 85% theoretical AI capability with only 20% actual adoption. The gap between other industries and CAS practices isn't closing. It's widening — and it's measurable.
Anthropic measured what AI actually does across 800 occupations — not what it could theoretically do. Financial roles show 85% theoretical capability but only 20% actual adoption. That gap isn't reassurance. It's a closing window, and the firms moving now are the ones who'll own the other side of it.
Sequoia Capital named accounting a $50–80B disruption target. Their framework shows where CAS practices are exposed — and what's still defensible.
AI said it couldn't replace QuickBooks. Then I proved it wrong — in under an hour. Three scenarios, from a shoebox of receipts to a working ledger system, where AI already does the job. No software subscription required.
Perplexity launched a $200/month AI agent that operates your existing software autonomously. The cost of a digital employee just collapsed — and your staffing math just changed with it.
Waymo runs 3,000 autonomous vehicles with 70 human overseers — a 1:43 ratio. Your practice still runs at 1:8. The firms that redesign around a fundamentally different human-to-client ratio will set the economics everyone else has to match.
Google Cloud launched an AI agent framework that mirrors the exact playbook forward-thinking CAS firms are already building — context engineering, multi-agent orchestration, and human-in-the-loop oversight. The enterprise validation is here.
A tech CEO's viral post — 80 million views — described the moment AI did his job better than he could. That same week, five companies launched autonomous bookkeeping products. The shift from 'helpful tool' to 'does the work' happened faster than anyone expected.
