9 articles
I have had the conversion moment twice. In 2024 I saw exactly what AI was going to do to this profession, spent six months learning it, and trained my team. Busy season came and everything went back to how it was. In early 2026 I did it again, with the same result. Here is what those two failures taught me about the only test of transformation that cannot be gamed.
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.
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.
75% of CPAs are nearing retirement. AI capability compression is bifurcating firm valuations into a K-shaped market — encoded knowledge and advisory capacity drive premiums, while compliance-heavy practices with knowledge locked in people's heads face a buyer pool that can now build from scratch for less.
Every major accounting platform now has an AI partner — or two. Anthropic had its roughest week yet. Google gave away a frontier-class model for free. And one person built a $1.8 billion business with $20,000 and a laptop.
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.
AI compressed the cost of solo founding a CAS practice to near zero. Your best people know this. The question isn't how to prevent departures — it's whether your firm offers something a solo practitioner can't replicate. Four things make the difference, and all of them are buildable.
Your review queue doesn't distinguish between files that need your judgment and files that are clean. So you review everything — and become the bottleneck. The fix isn't better delegation. It's building systems that tell you where your attention actually matters, so you can stop being the dragnet and start being the editor.
A Harvard study found individuals with AI were 3x more likely to produce top-10% ideas — not because of tool skills, but because AI gave them the confidence to act on their instincts. Your team has the same instincts. The question is whether your firm builds the conditions where confidence follows — or watches your best people build it somewhere else.
