20 articles
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.
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.
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.
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.
AICPA leadership opened Engage 2026 by naming AI the top issue for CPA firms of every size. After four days on the floor — AI-native ledgers, closed walls, and a profession aiming at 2030 — here's why the real deadline is 2028.
In the last few months, agents running on Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 changed what AI can do — but the training most firms will buy to keep up is still a 2024 prompt-engineering course. The skills that actually build an AI-native team are learned through reps in your own work, and the most valuable may not even count as CPD. Here are the six questions to grade any AI training before you book it.
YC's AI stack works because they gave the agent direct access to their data. Most CAS firms have done the opposite — locked AI out of everything and then wondered why it isn't very smart. The real question for your firm isn't whether to give AI access. It's how much, of what, with what controls.
OpenAI and Thrive just shipped a self-improving tax agent at 97% draft accuracy — built by six months of OpenAI's forward-deployed engineers and researchers embedded across a 30-firm network. It isn't a service OpenAI sells; it's what happens inside a company OpenAI owns equity in. But the loop the agent runs on sits one layer down the stack, fits in your sprint, and is the only version that doesn't turn your firm into someone else's training data.
Three accounting professors at UT Austin spent eight months watching 2,500 KPMG employees use AI. Only 5% reached sophisticated use — and the four behaviors that separate them aren't a new skill. They're professional skepticism with new vocabulary, and small CAS practices have structural advantages over the Big Four to deploy them.
Accenture just cut 11,000 and trained 70,000 in AI — what CEO Julie Sweet called "exiting people where reskilling isn't viable." McKinsey's data says only 14% of firms have leaders like that. If your practice's AI investment isn't producing results, the bottleneck isn't your tools or your team. It's you.
