Blog | The AI Accountant

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: What I saw at Xerocon Denver

I spent last week on the floor at Xerocon Denver, and I watched two movements happen at once: the platforms assembling and repricing the whole stack from above, and the firms quietly building their own software from below. Add BILL's pivot from seats to consumption pricing and OpenAI's answer to the client-data question, and the week's message is clear: the gap between falling AI prices and rising platform prices is where your next margin decision lives.

Peter McCarrollAugust 24, 2026

Leading AI Adoption

Your AI disclosure position just got decided for you

In four weeks, AI disclosure went from ethics debate to infrastructure: Substack scans it, LinkedIn flags it, the EU legislates it, and Anthropic watermarks everything Claude writes. Your firm almost certainly faces no legal risk, but your work product now carries flags you can't remove. The only question left is whether the story that arrives with the flag is one you wrote.

Peter McCarrollAugust 21, 2026

What's Getting Automated

AI transaction categorization reads everything except your instructions

Xero's AI has coded 100 million transactions, and practitioners trust exactly one of its four methods: the one built from written rules. Every coding engine on the market infers your client's intent from history. Not one of them will read it, even though you could write it down today.

Peter McCarrollAugust 19, 2026

Weekly AI Roundup

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: Intuit just put a bookkeeper in your client's file

Intuit is bundling its own human bookkeepers into QBO Advanced, one toggle away in your client's settings. The same week, a CPA-graded benchmark scored AI models higher for disclosing uncertainty than for being right, and the EU wrote human editorial responsibility into law. Disclosure just became the product, and the record of who stood behind the number is what's left to charge for.

Peter McCarrollAugust 17, 2026

Leading AI Adoption

If it doesn't show up in busy season, did anything change?

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.

Peter McCarrollAugust 14, 2026

The Advisory Edge

Buy vs. build, part 3: The thing no vendor can sell you

Whether your firm should build or buy was never about the app. It's about whether you can supply the harness and the janitor yourselves. Part 3 of Buy vs. build closes the series with the build-readiness test, the packaging premium, and one question per layer to ask before any renewal.

Peter McCarrollAugust 12, 2026