Insights, guides, and updates
This week the IRS and Intuit both made a move on the same thing — the savings AI is creating inside your firm — and pulled in opposite directions. Plus Claude goes multiplayer in Slack, AI-faked receipts force a hard question about whose job it is to verify, and Washington quietly starts gating which models you can use.
An AI bookkeeping startup just raised $10 million to close the books for $49 a month — and it's run by the founder whose last cheap-bookkeeping venture went bankrupt. A room of small-firm owners landed on an uncomfortable truth: fee pressure on the monthly close now comes from four directions at once.
In my peer group last week, an owner froze on the eve of her firm's 20th-anniversary meeting — how do you tell your team AI is coming without either lying to them or terrifying them? The first move isn't a training plan; it's a conversation most owners are avoiding. Here's what to actually say.
This week in AI didn't bring a new model — it brought plumbing. Agentic tools that do the work (Suralink, Melio) and the governance layer that decides who connects them (Anthropic's managed MCP auth) all shipped, but none of them solved the problem that matters most to a multi-client firm: keeping one client's data out of another client's answer. The real divide forming in AI tools isn't who has the most connectors — it's who scopes them.
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.
Jason Staats listed the six reasons firms get stuck on AI — every one written for the partner who signs the cheque. But if you're the one who got told to "figure out AI," the blockers look completely different. Here's what you can do without anyone's permission, and the short list to ask your firm for.
