I spent Sunday through Wednesday at Scaling New Heights 2026 in Orlando, the Woodard Group’s annual convention for accountants and bookkeepers. This year’s theme was “Strange New World,” and from the opening remarks AI was the whole story — it ran through nearly every session, even the ones that weren’t about technology. It was my first time there as an attendee. The strangest thing wasn’t the AI; it was the gap between how ready the room sounded and how ready it actually was.
The clearest voice on that gap came from the main stage. Daniel Susskind — the economist behind “A World Without Work” — gave the first-day keynote, and one line has stuck with me since: “The challenge that we face in the professions is not the challenge of mass unemployment — it’s the challenge of mass redeployment.” Not your people losing their jobs. Your people doing different work.
A phrase I heard echo through the hallways all week put it more bluntly: all our staff need to move up two levels. Everyone agreed. Almost no one explained how.
What are you training your people to do?
Susskind framed redeployment as a training problem with three questions, and the first is the sharpest: what do you train people for? His answer — train them to do what machines can’t, or train them to deploy machines well — came with a pointed observation. Most firms are still training people to do the routine work that machines already do well.
I watched that play out for four days. Many of the practitioners I spoke with were still dabbling — running the odd prompt, curious, and genuinely unsure how to take the next step. Even the AI-focused tracks often scratched the surface and left the room wanting more, and in a few sessions you could feel AI being squeezed into a talk that was really about something else. The sessions that landed were the ones led by practitioners who’d already crossed over — people a year or more into using this in their own firms, showing what actually happened.
My standout was Jan Haugo. Her session, “Scaling Without Headcount: Designing the AI-first Firm of 2026,” didn’t sell anyone a vision — it handed the room real prompts and a way to think through where agents fit in a practice. That’s what training your people to deploy machines looks like in the room, and it was the exception, not the rule.
Buying a tool isn’t redeploying a person
The vendor hall made the other half of the gap obvious. Over 200 vendors, most with AI somewhere in the pitch, and a real wave of new automation tools for the ledger and month-end close — many of them built to work around the limits of Xero and QuickBooks. QuickBooks itself was absent, apart from a few Intuit staff who’d made their own way to the event; Sage had a booth, though it was rather overshadowed by Digits next door. I wrote about the tools side of this from AICPA Engage last week, so I’ll keep it short here.
The point for this piece is simpler. A tool automates a task. It doesn’t redeploy a person. You can fill your stack with the best AI products in that hall and change nothing about what your people are capable of — you’ll have automated a few tasks and trained no one. The firms that pull ahead aren’t the ones who bought the most in Orlando — they’re the ones whose people learned to build and direct the tools, not just run them.
How you train — and why it can’t be a one-off
Susskind’s second question was how you train, and his answer pointed at two things the profession barely does: personalized learning, with AI acting as a tutor, and simulated learning — junior staff working through AI-generated client scenarios and problems before they meet them for real. He thinks professional services is well behind fields like engineering here, and after four days in that hall, I believe him. The most effective learning I saw all week wasn’t a vendor demo or a certificate. It was a practitioner standing up and showing the room what they’d actually built, and what broke along the way.
His third question was when, and his answer was lifelong, not front-loaded. Given how little anyone can say for certain about which skills will matter in three years, continuous reskilling beats any one credential. That’s the part the “move up two levels” crowd kept skipping.
Moving your people up isn’t a course you send them on once. It’s a loop you run inside the firm — give them real work with the tools, capture what they learn, and feed it back in. I made the fuller case for what that training actually looks like recently: the skills that build an AI-native team come from reps on your own client work, not a course you can claim as CPD. If you’re weighing a course anyway, the six-question scorecard from that piece grades it before you book. The tools change monthly; the training can’t be annual.
The work the conference left for you
So here’s my read after four days. The profession has agreed on the destination — staff moved up, redeployed onto judgment, advisory, and the direction of the machines. What almost no one onstage owned was the how, and the how is the hard part. Redeployment is something you do to your people, deliberately and continuously. The vendor hall will happily sell you tools while you put it off.
If you want help building that loop rather than just buying more tools, that’s exactly what our AI Practice Transformation program is built for — the next cohort starts June 26, and you can book a call with me at theaiaccountant.ai/transformation.