Insights, guides, and updates
A single founder just built a $1.8 billion company with 11 employees. These AI-enabled hypergrowth clients need more advisory support than traditional clients, not less. The question is whether your practice is structured to serve them — or whether you'll watch them leave for a firm that is.
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.
A staff member built a brilliant practice management dashboard with AI. One problem — the data that would make it work lives in three systems that don't talk to each other. That gap between vision and architecture is the same gap every CAS practice is hitting. The fix isn't more training. It's building artifacts that prove your team can do the work.
Most of the tools CAS practices pay for aren't doing anything AI can't do — they're formatting engines that take data you already have and present it the way someone expects it. Two real engagements proved the point: a QBO year-end that normally required a ledger in Xero, and a working trial balance request that normally required Caseware. Both replaced in an afternoon with purpose-built agents.
During a webinar on AI-powered client coaching, a colleague shared a 25-question diagnostic survey in Excel. It was ugly, had scoring errors, and looked like what it was — a spreadsheet pretending to be a tool. Thirty seconds of prompting later, it was a polished interactive HTML page that captured, scored, and analysed responses. The quality ceiling on what you hand your clients just disappeared.
