What Harvey did was create and develop “multiple attorneys” who can produce quality work. They did not build a bigger chatbot. Instead, they developed with leading, existing AI models, and put them through an apprenticeship.

They fed the models real-life work assignments. They ran experiments to train it. For example, they fed it a pile of real matter files with irrelevant documents mixed in, because real work means finding the right information, not being handed it. They gave it tools and a rubric, written by experienced lawyers, describing exactly what finished work looks like.

They made the models do the work thousands of times, grading them each time against that rubric, and the grades changed the model so the judgment was baked in.

They trained it the way we train entry-level and staff accountants. Real-life repetition with real files and a senior reviewer who knows what the finished product should look like before going to delivery. This is the process Harvey went through.

The results should help accountants see how companies like Basis will shape the way accounting work gets done. Market acceptance will occur because of the trust earned through the way the models have been trained.

I think it’s helpful to provide an understanding of the new way accounting intelligence will be stacked in layers.

Layer one is foundation intelligence where the models live. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, the open models. They continue to get better every quarter, and the leader seems to be interchangeable. As one gets better, the others also find ways to improve. This race belongs to the labs.

Layer two is profession-based intelligence. You train and teach AI the work; for example, what reconciliation is, what a close requires, or what a workpaper looks like when it is right. In law, one of the leaders is Harvey. In accounting, this is what companies like Basis are building right now. Layer two is going to be industry-specific and will be bought.

Layer three is firm and client intelligence. This is where the institutional nuances will be captured. How your firm closes the books the way a client’s CFO cares about, which classifications recur, what the lender covenants say, and when something should be escalated. Layer three is your intelligence, your domain knowledge.

Why does this matter?

The labor shortage in accounting is real and is not going away anytime soon. The attrition, retirement, and transient nature in accounting have created a problem because we have historically stored much of our institutional knowledge in people. This is the model that has been in place and is failing us:

• Each hire adds more than capacity: they learn why an accrual was handled a certain way, which exceptions recur, what a reviewer expects, and what the auditors asked about last year.

• When those seats stay open or experienced people leave, the firm loses both capacity and access to that context.

You may think, “Well, wait. We have an ERP that captures all of this, right?” The ERP solves an important but different problem. It holds the official record: the journal entries, balances, and final outcomes. But the evidence, standards, assumptions, and judgment that make the record trustworthy often live around it. The information contained within requires someone to put context around it. It’s static information that is available to the user, but it’s not intuitive.

An ERP is Frankenstein’s monster before capturing the lightning. Every part is in place, near perfectly assembled, lying still on the table. It has a spine, a skeleton, even a heart! Except, it needs something else to bring it to life. Accountants have been waiting for the day to say, “It’s Alive!” Perhaps the intelligence layer is the lightning we’ve been waiting for.

The intelligence layer works across the whole organization and brings data to life.

• As people work in intelligence layers, like Basis, you can set preferences, client-specific rules, and best practices that can be shared across clients, teams, service lines, and offices.

• The goal is to standardize what should be common while preserving the unique parts of each engagement.

One of the main benefits of the intelligence layers is the multiplicative nature. As the intelligence layer is used more frequently, the value compounds. The more a firm’s context becomes available to agents, their work becomes more tailored to that firm. Additionally, as AI models improve, those agents can use the same foundation to take on more work and increasingly complex tasks.

In accounting especially, trust is important at every step of the process. Agents should work as though they are being audited along the way: their sources, assumptions, decisions, and workflow should be available for review. It’s important to note that the firm still owns the judgment. Agents execute more of the work; accountants direct, review, and decide.

We have long undervalued institutional knowledge and intelligence. We’ve left ourselves vulnerable over and over again. Think about the way work has been prepared and reviewed. This is the knowledge of how quality work has been done. We’ve put in place review procedures to ensure quality yet allowed the knowledge to evaporate.

Here’s the way it’s been done. A senior looks at a staff accountant’s work. They catch the misclassification. They know this client always books that rebate wrong in the fourth quarter. They know the partner will bounce the memo if the variance explanation leads with the excuse instead of the number. They fix it, explain why over a cubicle wall, and the work is delivered. Two weeks later, they give notice and all the knowledge goes out the door.

We call that quality control. The last step before the deliverable ships. It works, except, most of the time, nobody wrote down why certain things happen on a client. The poor next person up to fill those shoes must dig through piles of prior year workpapers searching for “why.”

This is the training data. The type of data that Harvey used to develop its models. It’s the most valuable kind. Every override, every caught exception, every “the partner will want to see this differently” is professional intelligence being created that will now be captured and multiplied. Review was never just review. It was teaching so knowledge can be transferred and multiplied across the organization. The problem has always been that it walks in and out every day.

Finally, finally, one more time… finally the knowledge stays. It’s ALIVE!

Instead of talking about the macro aspects of the road ahead, I want to hone in on the journey that the current accountant is on. Keep in mind, I am encouraging all of us to emulate the attitude of a person in their 20s… well maybe not for all things.

On one end of the spectrum, I am surprised by how many companies and firms have still not adopted AI in accounting in any meaningful way, if at all! On the other end of the spectrum, where AI is being piloted, tested, and used in accounting, the accountants are often working additional hours and feel as if another shift has been added to their workload. The truth is that to bring in AI properly, you must do your job the old way while simultaneously being asked to learn the new way. I think it’s important to recognize that the AI transition is not less work. It ends up requiring more hours because you must rethink and redesign processes. The extra work is real, and it may be that way for a while.

The starting point for most is a touch above archaic. I realize I’m exaggerating, but the point is we have a long way to go before accountants feel in control. As Matt Barbieri and I said on our podcast back in April, despite the billions of dollars the accounting industry has spent on software, many accountants referred to this most recent busy season as harder than the last one. We must be realistic that this is our starting point and it will undoubtably take a lot of effort and time.

From an emotional standpoint, I understand why many accountants are fearful and threatened by AI, especially for those who have been mastering their craft over several years. At this point in time, we are way beyond questioning if AI will change the way accounting gets done. It will and it’s already begun, and as AI redefines accounting, it is natural to have a feeling of grief. To a certain extent, a great deal of what took years to master will become less valuable, specifically as it relates to the comprehension of systems that took a decade to learn or the checklists and organization required to get through hundreds of brutal month-end closes. There is a great deal of pride in perfecting your craft.

Even though there will be happiness due to newfound freedom from drudgery, there will also be a sense of identity loss from destroying what took so long to build. We need to give ourselves permission to grieve during the transition.

I promise though… it will get better…

Earlier this summer, I wrote a piece called Words With Air where I spoke about promises made and not kept. For years, we have heard how this or that software/ERP was going to make life easier. The crazy paradox in accounting is that as the technology seemed to advance, control was lost. There are a lot of accountants who feel they had more control with handwritten ledgers than with the systems that were built (supposedly) to serve them. Every wave of technology that was alleged to help accountants perform their work faster and smarter never lived up to the promise.

I understand when some accountants hear “AI will amplify you, not replace you,” and even when the data supports it, they still don’t believe it because of the cynicism built from years of unkept promises. There is an ongoing trust debt that has accumulated over decades from accountants being told one thing in words, yet feeling let down from the action.

Still, I am confident and have written about it in this series that the actual accountant is heading into the best decade this profession has ever offered. Here is the catch though, you are dependent on your organization and their willingness to embark on the AI journey. In this transition, company and firm choice matters. There is so much experiential learning to be gained with the AI journey that part-time personal effort will not be enough. You don’t want to “outsource” your AI journey to someone who doesn’t see the value in the journey. This is a hands-on learning experience with a lot of iteration.

The golden age hope is real. The amount of dollars funding engineers and developers is staggering. The competition is fierce and this will force real innovation. The tools will be better. Think about the lack of competitors who have existed in the accounting technology market pre-AI. The systems built over the years made accountants serve the machine. We learned about its screens, fields, reports, etc. We lived by its calendar of releases. We became, as I wrote in Part Two, experts in the software instead of the craft. This time around, the technology being built is on the accountant’s side. Whether it’s the intelligence layer, the AI-native ERP that shows its work, or the memory that stores what we teach it, the machine will work our way and adapt to how the work actually gets done. It serves the accountant.

The gap will grow between those using AI in their work and those who do not. It is a real threat, probably the largest, so it’s the one that you want agency over. These are not static tools or systems we’ve been using that have fixed screens and buttons. The AI movement is a compounding transition. Gaining access to AI tools early helps you accumulate the reps that compound. Unfortunately, if you are not getting access, the waiting will compound too. That’s the biggest risk here.

The best thing we can all do right now is experiment and use the tools as much as we can. It will lead to enriching our future. We have long deserved and earned a moment in the sun and a time to participate in a golden age. Your life will be better. You will be more valued as a reviewer and a storyteller as understanding becomes a larger part of our craft. The trajectory of our roles is switching to knowing why, not just what and how. You will become the master of capturing data intelligence. You will teach the machines so it has a layer of intelligence that codifies your knowledge. This does not make you replaceable; it makes you the standard setter.

Four weeks ago, I started with a chatbot that could not count but served as the catalyst for building a new way in accounting. Even though accounting is the way we understand economic life, somewhere along the way it got buried under the mechanics of creating records. In turn, the world misrepresented us for years. We have become known as “back office.” How gross! Thankfully, the machines will take the crap work out of our hands. What remains will be our minds, our judgment, and our ability to build trust.

We have reached that fork in the road. It’s here. Let’s take the road we have never been on. The one where we aren’t sure where it leads to exactly. The one you would take for fun in your 20s. You wouldn’t mind getting a bit lost on the way. In fact, that was part of the fun. Let’s put some adventure into accounting. Clark Griswold would say, “Go for it!” For some of us that reference rings true to when we were in our 20s.

A closing note for those who followed all four parts, thank you! I’m happy to be on this ride with you! The journey to all this started way back, five hundred years ago, to a Franciscan friar in Venice who published the method that the modern economy still runs on. In September, I’ll tell that story. The prologue to everything you just read. Subscribe and it will find you.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve written about how a chatbot finally woke up an entire ecosystem of builders and investors, and how it’s leading to the development of real tools in the plumbing of business, where the data lives. As I’ve been writing since the inception of The Intelligent Ledger, hope is arriving for us. We are finally on our way to move above the machine, where we have always belonged in the first place.

This week, I am writing to you about intelligence and the machine, and how your mind becomes an extension of the way you will interact with data. I want you to think about unlocking your intelligence. That’s where we are heading. The obstacles that have been in the way that have limited the power of your intelligence are being removed with the new models and how we interact with them.

It will help to see where we’ve been to provide a way to convey what I’m saying. If you had been an early adopter of Copilot, you experienced an improvement in Excel through a chatbot “standing” next to your spreadsheet, rather than acting as a colleague working inside it. It could suggest a formula and even summarize a table for you. But, if you wanted to ask it to understand the workbook that was built back in 2019 and the logic buried in column AK that only your previous supervisor remembers, it quickly hit its ceiling. We had to start somewhere, right. And, Microsoft’s Copilot is improving because they have continued to invest big dollars to enhance it.

For AI in accounting, a defining moment was the release of Claude. Claude is built by Anthropic, an AI lab founded by researchers who left OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT), in part because they believed this technology was important enough that it needed to be built more carefully. A model built by people obsessed with “not being confidently wrong” is what accountants need to be working with. I touched on this in Part 1, where we cannot retain trust with a confident guess. We need it to be right.

Claude demonstrated it could read a two-hundred-page credit agreement and remember the details. It could look at a client’s messy, specific, exception-riddled situation and reason about it, not perfectly, not autonomously, but usefully.

The Claude-Excel plug in was a huge unlock! We accountants love Excel! We have spent most of our career there. Excel to an accountant is a scalpel to a surgeon. It is where we perform our craft. It is where every schedule, every reconciliation, every workpaper was built. For years, vendors have been promising that their software will make Excel obsolete. Never happened. I’m hoping the Minnesota Vikings win a Super Bowl before accountants stop using Excel.

Claude in Excel is built to move in with accountants. You could see the spreadsheet, the formulas, the structure, the logic of the model, and work on it like a colleague. I used a sentence from Part 1 that is helpful to see now in AI’s evolution in accounting: “The investors observing that AI was not yet as proficient with numbers as with text.” This was the yet, arriving to accountants.

Claude’s Excel integration is a great way to understand AI agents and why it’s so valuable to accountants. It moves beyond returning a static text chat response to provide understanding. It helps you perceive the spreadsheet, plan logical workflows, and autonomously execute real-time formulas and data updates within the environment.

This is a good way to bridge the meaning of the intelligence layer and how it’s going to play a massive part in the reinventing of accounting. In Basis’ recent video release, “An Ode to Accounting,” it helps define accounting itself as the original intelligence layer. It is the system humans invented to bring organization to the mess that economic activity creates with millions of transactions, obligations, payments, transfers, etc. and compresses it into something people can understand and act on. As their short film puts it:

Five hundred years ago, accountants helped build the intelligence layer for the economy. Today, the technology industry is building an intelligence layer for the profession. The layer is returning home.

So, what does this intelligence layer do? It’s important first to understand the distinction between the record and the work as different things. The ledger holds the official record, which I’ve referred to last week as the filing cabinet (ERP), and it is genuinely good at that one job. But, the actual work of accounting that is done through gathering evidence, investigating exceptions, applying standards, documenting assumptions, making judgment calls, etc. has never lived in the ledger. It has lived around the ledger in email threads, Excel workbooks, checklists, and above all, people’s heads. When an accountant retires, the record stays; however, the work, the knowing walks out the door. That knowledge transfer has bled out for years. Think about this: we pay for insurance to protect us against unforeseen risk; yet, have we paid to protect against financial processes and knowhow walking out the door?

The intelligence layer is where that surrounding work finally gets captured and made operational. The word that separates a real intelligence layer from a pile of AI tools is its memory. An isolated AI tool completes a task and forgets. The issue with that is when you ask for it again next month, it starts from zero. An intelligence layer remembers the firm’s standards, the engagement’s context, the prior period’s decisions, the reviewer’s corrections. Every time an accountant corrects the machine’s work or teaches it a client-specific rule, that knowledge stays, which makes the information and the system better the next time around. This is the “business DNA” I described last week, moving out of someone’s head and into an asset the company owns. Without memory, it’s as if you are running pilots forever. With memory, the learning compounds.

In perfect timing for this Part 3 release, Andreessen Horowitz just published a deep dive on agents, which I like to define as I stated above as extensions of intelligence. Their research studied whether AI agents can be trusted to perform the mechanics of everyday back-office work. On the standard benchmark for this, the best model a year ago completed 42% of tasks. Today’s best completes 85%. When compared to a person on the same tasks, the score was 72.

This is another inflection point for AI and accounting. With the threshold crosses, the question will change from “Should we allow this?” to “How fast can we build with this?” Pilots will become real world production.

One more piece to mention that is filling in gaps is MCP, or Model Context Protocol. MCP is a standard that allows AI agents to plug into and communicate with other software. Before it, connecting an AI to your ledger, bank feed, software was custom work every time. MCP allows the connections to snap together and enables our minds to take control of the systems of record.

We are starting to see the labeling of AI in production throughout the accounting industry with examples like the announcement of the work Basis has done with Brain Trust and the information contained in the Andreessen Horowitz piece. The AI model is not the differentiator, but the context is, especially the hard-earned understanding of how work gets done inside one specific organization. Context leads to earning trust from the ability to rely on the process and how we got there, not just the answer itself. In accounting, a correct number reached through weak evidence or the wrong method is not good accounting, that’s luck. One of Basis’ founders, Mitch, has passionately spoken about this recently:

Furthermore, the a16z piece offers a story to make this real. Imagine an agent extracting payment terms from contracts into an ERP. It reads ‘net 60’ as ‘net 30.’ The record it creates looks perfectly plausible. It passes every visual check, so nobody catches it until an invoice goes out wrong. A smarter model does not fix that, but a great process does as it documents its sources, assumptions, and a work trail a reviewer or auditor can inspect. The same standards we have been living with are the same standards that the right intelligent layer will deploy. When your machine posts an entry, you can ask it the same question you’d ask a first-year staff, “Show me how you got there.” If it can’t, it doesn’t matter if the answer looks right.

The coding world has learned this lesson already and is ahead of the learnings with the use of AI in accounting. The scarce resource is no longer writing the code; it is vouching for it. If you substitute the word ‘entries’ for ‘code,’ it is similar to what will happen in accounting. The judgment stays with the accountant. The intelligent layer allows a company to create standard operational and repeatable processes on top of the data and opens up the ability for the accountant to unlock potential. The accountant will no longer be limited by disconnected, unintelligible, and trapped data. The accountant, finally, is on top and in control.

The Ledger and the Machine concludes next week with Part Four: The Fork in the Road.

For this week, while you are hopefully somewhere with sand between your toes, I want to speak with you about what I mean by building further down into the “plumbing” of a business.

Every business we interact with, whether that’s a restaurant, grocery store, dentist, or the company you work for, runs on a piece of software. It is often referred to as a system of record or more frequently, a three-letter acronym, ERP, which stands for enterprise resource planning. It came into existence to connect the different functions into one system. In a way, it is the filing cabinet where the official version of everything inside a business lives. Every sale, every invoice, every paycheck, every dollar in and out is captured in the ERP.

For thirty years, owning the system of record has been an incredibly “sticky” business in software. Companies like SAP, Oracle, and NetSuite are some of the bigger brand names, but there are many others that serve as the backbone of a business. The reason I refer to it as “sticky” is because in a way, it’s an electronic version of a safe, your entire financial history lives in this “filing cabinet.”

There are very interesting research results on surveys done to ascertain ERP satisfaction. The stats come back paradoxically. Market data regularly shows that 30 to 35% of companies are actively planning to transition away from or replace their current ERP/legacy solution, yet when surveys are sent to ask about ERP satisfaction, nearly 80% of businesses report satisfaction. That math makes no sense.

Moving on from an ERP is extremely difficult. One venture investor described replacing an ERP as ‘open-heart surgery while the patient is running a marathon.’ Companies would rather live with software they do not love rather than deal with the pain of starting over.

Another interesting take on the ERP is that it’s often looked upon as the Accountant’s Ledger, as if it’s this beautiful piece of software that is written specifically to make accounting easy. Jeopardy buzzer sounds. Sorry, the answer “What is an ERP” is not the answer to name a popular accounting ledger.

For many accountants, working inside of the ERP is nearly impossible to perform all of the accounting procedures necessary to produce the reporting that management wants to see. An example of this is the accounting ritual we refer to as the close. Every month-end, accountants are tasked with ensuring the books agree with reality by reconciling every account and chasing down every mismatch. It is slow, it is manual, and it has been a part of the “slow” rhythm of the profession for a century. The ERP holds the record, but the accountant is the one who makes the record trustworthy.

The question being asked today now that AI is upon us is: what happens to the ERP? A few months ago, Salesforce sent a strong signal to the market when it announced it was going ‘headless.’ They conceded that, in the future, we are not going to click around the way we have been inside software. Instead, we are entering into a new world where we will be interacting with machines that aren’t static. AI agents will read and write the data directly. The software that forced you into using the software in certain ways with their screens, their dashboards, their buttons, referred to as the ‘head’, will not matter anymore. The data underneath all of this is what matters and the ways we interact with this data are changing.

For years, accountants have had to be trained in software to perform its craft. Please understand this. In many industries, tools were developed and innovated to make craft easier, for the finished product to be more reliable. This has not been the case in accounting. In fact, many people would argue that they had more control and visibility with handwritten ledgers than dealing with the difficulties and complexities navigating ERPs. Entire careers have been built on mastering the clicks of one system or another, or being an expert in the software, not even the craft itself!

Seema Amble, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote an essay shortly after the Salesforce release that it was going headless. She posed a question in her essay: if you strip away the screens, what is actually left? In other words, what makes the filing cabinet valuable once nobody is opening its drawers by hand? Her answer:

This is what is wonderful about that answer. The actual craft, the intelligence of an accountant, takes over again. Our accountants’ minds are back in control. Can I hear a Hallelujah?

The machines can take over the clicking, but they will not take over the knowing (at least not for now). The knowledge of how a specific business actually runs becomes more valuable in the world of AI, not less. The machines need to function safely and reliably, and it needs people to direct and oversee them.

The most valuable asset in the age of AI is the thing accountants have been accumulating and rarely ever recognized and celebrated for: context and knowledge.

This is where things have been moving in accounting.

Here are some examples for you: Rillet is rebuilding the accounting ledger from scratch with their AI-native focus, so that transactions file themselves. Basis is building AI agents for accountants that are verifiable and traceable. Pylon is building intelligence for customer support. One interesting finding is that startups are discovering in their own data that AI working alone produced measurably worse outcomes than AI working with humans.

The future is not a chatbot, but instead, a new layer of intelligence that will sit on top of the old filing cabinets/ERP where it will read, reason, and act, with accountants holding the judgment.

So, wait, what do we do with our ERP?

There are options. The right one depends less on the software than on what you see for your business and how you want to design it for the future.

To frame this, I want to reference a recent piece from Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View. Here, he illustrated a study that modeled three kinds of companies adopting AI to show that short term financial results are misleading. In the model, the three companies share the same economics and the same hit rate on projects but different learning habits. Two years in, all three are losing similar money. Five years in, the eventual loser looks best. It takes roughly eight years to tell from the outside who made the right call. I feel this is important context because it helps explain the moment we are living through. At this point in the curve, success and failure look identical. The winners are not the companies with the best first project. The winners are the ones which the model calls system builders, where the learning from every experiment carries into the next one. The losers stop experimenting after their first success or run pilot after pilot with no memory and iteration, each new project starting with the same odds as the last.

Option one: wait. Keep your current ERP and let the AI come to you. They are working hard to catch up. At its Sapphire conference this year, SAP announced what it calls the autonomous enterprise with more than two hundred agents. NetSuite announced NetSuite Next, a rebuilt platform with an assistant you can question in plain English, available in preview within the next twelve months.

I get it waiting feels responsible, or prudent, even. I want to at least caution you that simply waiting may limit your ability to adapt within the AI movement. Just know that waiting is outsourcing your learning to a vendor’s release schedule. There are many pieces in your business, which are unique to all, that you will still have to learn how AI changes. Your close, your controls, your team. You don’t want to start learning it years later, while your competitors are compounding experience when they choose to start now.

Option two: replace. Move to an ERP that is AI-native and has a better brain. With an AI-native system, transactions are designed to file themselves where the books are maintained on a more current basis making the close easier and timelier. Of the options, there is a higher ceiling with this one because it comes with a built-in brain in the core. But, you may want to be at a natural breaking point to move in this direction. Perhaps you have outgrown your system, you are hiring a new accounting leader, or you are fundraising and require reporting that your older system can’t produce. You want to think of it from the standpoint of replacing it in a natural rhythm of your business’s life cycle, not in a panic.

Option three: layer. Keep your ERP but put a brain on top of it. This is the system-of-intelligence architecture I noted earlier. The intelligence layer is where the agents will read, reconcile, chase, and draft, while the old ERP keeps doing the one thing it is genuinely great at: maintaining the record. You want to make sure that the intelligence layer that you run tracks every action so you have a trail an accountant can verify. For most companies in the middle market, this option allows the AI and the learning that goes with it to start now. Starting with the intelligence layer allows you to capture context now. Your business “DNA” begins to be tracked and verified. Every rule you teach an agent is a piece of your business’s “DNA” moving out of someone’s head and into an asset the company owns. The layer is how you stop storing it in people’s heads and start storing it in something that compounds.

There is a danger with this option too. Exponential View calls it the project accumulator: the company that keeps launching pilots but never learns, so nothing carries forward. You don’t want to run twelve AI pilots and not capture the memory. With the intelligence layer, you want to think about linear growth in the beginning. Adopt one rule, make it work by enforcing it, and allow it to be captured effectively. Let the process be mapped.

The accountant is moving to the top of the machine, where we have always belonged in the first place.

Join me next week in Part Three, where I’ll talk about the machine that could finally do the work, and the day it moved into Excel.

For the past few weeks I have been writing about soccer and the lessons learned from the World Cup. Sports have always provided me with ways to connect with people and to share life lessons. They offer us these micro moments under stressful conditions to help us bring awareness on how we can improve leadership and teamwork. We saw moments of brilliance with leaders who maximized their team’s potential and moments of disappointment from others who abandoned their strengths in the biggest moments. Most importantly, the World Cup was a great reminder to us of the importance and joy of connecting with one another and relishing each other’s uniqueness.

Thankfully, we still have many memories to create over these next weeks of summer. I thought it provides a good time to “chat” with you about where we stand with AI in accounting, how we got here and where do we go from here.

So, as we take in those rays over the next four weeks, let’s add in a little added AI color.

This is Part One. It starts with a chatbot that could not count.

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In November of 2022, a research lab in San Francisco released a website that allowed you to type a question into a box, and something on the other end typed back an answer. It could write a poem about your dog. It could draft a wedding toast. It could explain the infield fly rule, more or less. It was called ChatGPT, and within two months, a hundred million people were using it. Usage exploded! It was the fastest adoption of any technology ever!

I remember the first time I used it and was blown away by it. It left me with the feeling that I was connecting with someone “human” on the other end. At first, I used it more as a google enhancement and a letter generator.

I remember the first work question I asked ChatGPT, “what was the most beneficial way to value an asset for estate planning”. It came back to me quickly. Confidently, in a well-organized paragraph. I copied the answer and sent it to one of our tax experts. Unfortunately, it was wrong. Not wildly wrong. But, that’s the issue. The fact that the answer wasn’t wildly wrong, potentially deludes you from thinking you have what you need because it was wrong in a way that sounded exactly right. Thankfully, we have experts who could spot the error immediately. However, the people who may not know the nuances involved to determine the accuracy of the response may wrongly act on it. For our profession whose entire product is earning trust from delivering accuracy, this was disqualifying. You cannot bill someone for a confident guess.

But, November 2022, for many of us, was a glimpse into the future of a profession that will be disrupted. It’s like the moment Steve Jobs visited Xerox’s Palo Alto research lab in 1979 when he was shown a computer with windows you can open and a pointer you could slide across the screen. Granted the technology wasn’t where it needed to be to execute well, but it was a glimpse into the future. Jobs saw the future. It was obvious to him that this was the way every computer would someday work. ChatGPT was accounting’s Xerox PARC moment.

AI in November 2022 was a fluent talker that although it may not reliably do accounting “yet”, it could read, reason, and respond. It could take in a messy paragraph of human language, understand the intent behind it, and produce something responsive. It was the beginning of how the work of a knowledge profession is changing. Ours included.

ChatGPT as a standalone was never going to cut it in a profession like ours and that was precisely the opportunity. A general-purpose chatbot with no access to the client’s books, no memory of the client’s history, no audit trail, and no way to verify its own claims is not an end-all product for accountants, but it provided the framework for what is to come in what it lacked: the verification, the workflow integration, the domain depth, the connection to real financial data, the trail a reviewer could follow. All of this needed to be built with purpose. In the distance, you could see an entire ecosystem was needed that did not yet exist. Founders and those who looked around the corner began moving, and so did the money.

Venture capital, the engine behind the innovation in America saw the opportunity. The money that funded the PC, the internet, and the smartphone turned some of its attention to, of all things, accounting. The VC’s saw that the new technology can finally handle these laborious, often inefficient tasks. Coupled with the trends in the market of a profession hemorrhaging talent, with hundreds of thousands of accountants having left during COVID and the pipeline behind them collapsing, the opportunity for automation and tools was exploding.

Andreessen Horowitz aka “A16Z” is one of the most influential venture firms in the world. They have been ahead of most others and published a piece called “Death, Taxes, and AI” that mapped the opportunity. They have been a major catalyst in creating the new ecosystem. They have been funding a new generation of companies to build the things the chatbot could not do on its own.

A company called Rillet raised money to do something almost nobody had dared attempt in thirty years, rebuild the accounting ledger itself, from scratch, with AI in its bones. A company called Basis built AI agents designed for accounting firms, on the principle that every action a machine takes must leave a trail a human can verify. Companies began going after receivables, tax preparation, audit, close automation. Within two years of the chatbot demo, there were dozens of serious, well-funded companies building the ecosystem the demo had implied, and many of the world’s leading tech investors were competing to fund them.

The investors were also clear-eyed about the limits, which is exactly what made their conviction credible and personally provided me with sources to listen to and learn from. In January 2025, two of them at Andreessen Horowitz, Seema Amble and Marc Andrusko (now with Oak) described the state of things in one sentence:

“While AI pilot programs are prevalent industrywide and firms are enthusiastic to try them, fully deployed vendor relationships are still relatively scarce. This is probably because AI models are not yet as proficient with numbers as they are with text, and because accountants (unsurprisingly) are fairly risk averse.”

That statement “not as proficient with numbers as with text” was key. The machine could talk, but it could not yet count reliably enough for people whose signatures carry legal weight. But notice the word the investors used: “yet”.

The biggest software company on earth was reading the same map. Microsoft, which had invested billions in the lab that built ChatGPT, took the technology and bolted it into the tools the whole world already used, calling it Copilot. Emails summarized in Outlook. Slides drafted in PowerPoint. And, in theory, help inside Excel, please hold on to that phrase, ‘in theory,’ because what Copilot could and could not do inside a spreadsheet turns out to be one of the hinges this entire story swings on, and it is where Part Three begins. I’ll be getting to this, soon. 😊

We have been very fortunate at Wiss to have colleagues that saw the potential of the opportunity and helped create WissLabs. We knew that we were so close to the work and how the hours of an accountant’s week were consumed by reading, extracting, summarizing, and re-keying. We knew that our world both qualitatively and quantitatively would increase tremendously if a machine could replace even half of these tasks. We needed to build our own innovation arm to invest and partner with the companies building the missing ecosystem. It had been the missing piece we have long desired in accounting, to rebuild a more human way in accounting.

The chatbot was not the final product, but an inspiration for what can be and proof that machines could now read, reason, and respond. The real products that impact accounting will be built down in the plumbing of how businesses run, where the operating history lies, some of that remain in a filing cabinet, most in a system of record. The ledger will become intelligent.

That is where the story begins. Next week, Part Two: the thirty-year reign of the most boring software in the world, the day Salesforce cut off its own head, and the builders who decided the unglamorous plumbing of business was the most valuable real estate in technology.

The Ledger and the Machine continues next week with. Part Two: The Filing Cabinet and the Brain.

England deserved better.

I want to point out what I think was a colossal leadership failure, and the lessons we can learn.

The Hiring Premise

When Thomas Tuchel was appointed England manager, the theory of the case was simple. Gareth Southgate had taken England as far as a manager could. What Southgate did not have, the argument went, was the tactical acumen to beat the best teams in the biggest moments. England had lost the Euro 2020 final on penalties and lost in the Euro 2024 final. It was claimed he wasn’t able to break down top opposition when it mattered.

Tuchel was supposed to be the alpha. The Champions League winner. The tactical mind. The German efficiency layered on top of English talent. The move was, at minimum, a bet that a more strategic game plan would take England further. Tuchel got the job because of one thing: the belief that his tactical ceiling was higher.

What happened in this World Cup, from the moment England won a difficult quarterfinal against Norway to the moment Messi walked off the pitch as a two-goal architect against a six-defender English wall, was that the very thing Tuchel was hired for became the thing he abandoned in the biggest moment.

Alpha became omega.

The tactical advantage England paid for by hiring him disappeared exactly when they needed it most.

The Norway Match - the Leader Turned on His Own Team

England beat Norway 2-1 in the quarterfinal in Miami. A hard-earned win against a tremendous opponent who had dominated Brazil in the prior game and includes massive talent in the likes of Haaland, Ødegaard, Nusa, Sørloth. The kind of team that would have knocked England out in previous tournaments. This time, England prevailed.

Common sense should have won out after the game. Tuchel as the manager should have publicly praised the win, credited the players, and either absorbed or deflected any criticism. It is Leadership 101 and basic leadership. Why wouldn’t you ride the positive momentum and infuse more energy heading into a semifinal against Argentina?

For some unknown reason, Tuchel did the opposite. In his post-match interview, he said this:

That is a manager criticizing his own players, on national television, immediately after they had just fought through a difficult win to keep the country’s tournament alive. Did he think this was a preseason game?

Jude Bellingham, England’s best player, was asked about the criticism the next day.

His response:

Bellingham went on: “It’s difficult out there. All of the players have put in a very tough shift.” He named the opposing players by name: Haaland, Ødegaard, Nusa, Sørloth, as if to say, quietly and pointedly, you understand who we were playing, right?

To me, this moment represented what we see time and time again, a Leader who divides the team instead of uniting and lifting. “Yeah, well, whatever” is not indifference. That tone signals disgust from having to swallow something undeserved.

Tuchel later said he held a meeting with the whole team to “clear the air.” Which is what leaders always say after they have created air that needed clearing. The meeting does not undo the interview. The team goes into the semifinal carrying an extra weight, added by the person whose job was to remove weights, not add them.

The Argentina Match — the Leader Abandoned What He Was Hired For

Anthony Gordon scored in the 55th minute. England led 1-0. Fifty-five minutes of confident, disciplined football against the World Cup holders now held a lead.

What happened next stunned every analyst covering the game. Tuchel decided to “park the bus.” Over the remaining minutes, he began making substitutions, not to inject fresh legs into the attack. To bring on defenders. The killer move, Declan Rice off for Nico O’Reilly. Rice, one of the most important two-way midfielders in the tournament, off in the 82nd minute of a World Cup semifinal, replaced by another defender. England now had six recognized defenders on the field.

Who would ever invite Messi to go ahead and attack us for the rest of the game? Where is the alpha in that? As Argentina was able to attack at will into England’s half, England retreated further and further into its own goal. The team that had played confident, disciplined, coherent football for the first hour had transformed itself into a wall trying to survive the last thirty minutes. They couldn’t survive. Who could?

Argentina advanced to the final. England was left playing for third place.

The Three Failures Buried Inside the Tactical Choice

First: He stopped using England’s strengths.

England’s strength through this entire tournament had been their attacking players. The team was designed to attack, and they had won by attacking. It’s a reminder to deploy your strengths.

Second: He stopped attacking Argentina’s weakness.

Argentina’s outside backs had been vulnerable throughout the tournament. Every serious team that had pushed Argentina had done it by attacking down the flanks and forcing their fullbacks into defensive positions. England had exactly the wingers to do this. Instead, Tuchel pulled them off and stopped attacking altogether. He gave Argentina’s weaknesses a rest. The one place England had a structural advantage, Tuchel neutralized it.

Third: He handed the game to Lionel Messi.

He invited Messi to do what Mess does best. He made it his game where he can use his vision and create at will. Tuchel backed his entire team thirty yards toward their own goal, gave Messi acres of open space in front of him, and allowed him to find a way to break the game open.

The Non-Apology Tells You Everything

After the loss, Tuchel took the podium. Here is what he said about the tactical decisions:

He is explaining the substitutions as if they were forced. Argentina was crossing. So we had to defend. It sounds like a manager explaining a reasonable adjustment. But it hides the actual causal chain. Argentina started crossing more BECAUSE Tuchel had already pulled his attackers off. The reason the crosses were coming was because his tactical shift had invited them. He is describing the symptom he created as if it were an external condition.

Then he added this humdinger:

Only days earlier, he had publicly criticized his players after a victory. Now, after a defeat, he offered what sounded like accountability while defending the very decision that lost the match.

That is performing the appearance of taking responsibility while simultaneously arguing that the decision was right. It is the leadership equivalent of: “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Why I Am Writing About This in an Accounting and AI Newsletter

We are seeing many of these examples across our industry.

Fear outweighing judgment.

Tuchel had a lead. He had a plan. He had a team that had gotten him to a semifinal by playing a specific way. In the moment that mattered most, fear of losing the lead outweighed his judgment about how to win the match. He stopped playing his game and started playing not-to-lose. A lot of accounting firms are being pressured right now to change. Fear is real and it may be getting in the way of thinking through the long term. It can make you hold on to what you have instead of building and playing to win.

Panic with AI.

The AI wave arrived and it demanded a response. There may be the temptation to pull back defensively, go into a shell. That is Tuchel bringing on his fifth defender. It looks disciplined and it feels safe, but it also could be abandonment from doing what’s needed. Do you want to look back on this and regret going too defensive instead of leaning in?

Forgetting what your core is.

England’s core is attacking football with world-class attacking players. This is the Alpha that Tuchel was hired to use as an advantage. Is it possible that the consolidation press releases are pulling firms away from that core? “AI transformation.” “Strategic partnership.” “Cultural preservation.” Is that really what is going on? How will any of this strengthen your core?

Devolving into someone else’s game.

Tuchel invited Messi to find a way to score. What game are you inviting to be played and will it match your core? Will multiples, scale, and the number of acquisitions you can bolt on become the standards you choose to live by? Is this your game?

The Leadership Failure That Bothers Me the Most

Tuchel publicly criticized his players after they won. Then, when he made the biggest tactical mistake of the tournament and lost the semifinal that England had a real chance to win, he issued the passive non-apology of “if it doesn’t go well, it’s easy to say it was wrong.”

I am tired of seeing this pattern over and over again in leadership across every industry. It is corrosive and so unfair to all of the people who put faith and trust into a leader’s hands.

Fortunately, there are examples of great leadership. The South Korean Men’s Coach, Hong Myung-Bo, displayed absolute accountability after his team failed to move past the first round and underperformed. He immediately came out and said, “I failed to deliver the results….the responsibility lies entirely with me as the head coach.” He also stepped down. He did all of this to protect his players and to prioritize the big picture by commenting how his departure will allow for a reset. That’s beautiful, accountable leadership.

Alpha and Omega

Tuchel was hired to generate alpha.

What he actually did in the biggest match of his tenure was abandon his tactical acumen, distrust his team, retreat into his fears, hand the initiative to the best player in the world, and then decline to take responsibility for the decision he made.

He delivered omega. In the end, the distrust in his players and in himself, did the team in.

We have an opportunity in accounting to transform the way the work gets done. Let’s not allow fear seep into what we have the potential to create. Trust our game. Keep attacking.

Deliver on the Alpha.

Sources Referenced

“Tuchel defends tactics after Argentina send England packing from World Cup” — Al Jazeera, July 15, 2026

“Jude Bellingham pushes back on criticism from England manager Thomas Tuchel after win over Norway” — Yahoo Sports

“’Whatever’ — Thomas Tuchel, Jude Bellingham Pitted Against Each Other After World Cup Win” — Sports Illustrated

“Alan Shearer Exclusive: Thomas Tuchel got it wrong” — Betfair

“England bottle World Cup semi-final as Argentina smash Tuchel’s bus to pieces” — Football365

Harry Kane and Lautaro Martinez post-match quotes from AP wire coverage of the semi-final, July 15, 2026

The show resonated with me so much because of my experiences over the years as an accountant. I never realized how many similarities we shared with the people behind the scenes of a restaurant. More than any piece of culture I have seen in the last decade, The Bear captures something the accounting profession is going through right now and does not yet have the medium to highlight it.

The Bear is more than a show about a restaurant. It is a show that was released at the perfect time because during Covid, people started thinking more about artistry and craft. It reminds us of the beauty about a craft profession and the amount of effort and passion that goes into bringing ideas to life. We needed a show like this to remind us of the humanity behind service.

I believe that the reason it resonates so widely, especially with chefs, finance leaders, lawyers, doctors, teachers, architects, musicians, and many others (and of course accountants too) is because we know the feeling from the hard work over the years that it takes to get right. The apprenticeship. The way the more experienced people teach the younger staff something that cannot be taught from a textbook.

The Donut Scene

In one of the earlier episodes of The Bear, there is a scene where Carmy, head chef, is teaching Marcus. Marcus has been a line cook but is interested in becoming a pastry chef. Carmy lays out the dough. He shows him the laminating technique. He walks him through the timing. Marcus repeats it. The first batch is wrong. He tries again. The second batch is closer. The third batch, by the end of the night, is good. Marcus is determined to get it right. He wants the blessing from Carmy, so he stays late and continues to work on perfecting this after hours.

Anyone who has ever apprenticed under a senior in a craft profession recognizes that scene. The shame of the first error caught at review. The continued misses along the way. But they also remember the pride they felt when their efforts paid off - when they received that comment written into the review notes: well done.

They remember the senior who showed them how to work through challenges they had never seen before. They remember the value of repetition that turned a procedure they were following into one they truly understood. Each of us, who at one point, was an eager junior staff, remembers what it felt like to be Marcus.

The relationship between Carmy and Marcus is the apprentice-to-master relationship that every craft profession depends on. Personally, I love how The Bear captures moments like this without sentimentalizing them. The teaching is not gentle and the standard is not lowered. The respect is earned by the work and the journey of improvement.

That apprenticeship model is also one of the most fragile parts of any profession. It cannot be documented in a policy manual or automated through technology. It is passed from one person to another, over years, through shared experience. Because judgment cannot be downloaded. It has to be developed.

That is why the current wave of consolidation in accounting gives me pause.

The Consolidation Wave

Rollups have been a successful strategic tactic throughout the years. Independent pharmacies, hospitals, dental practices, veterinary clinics, PT centers, etc., have been bought, branded, and standardized to create economic scale and to generate a return on investment. I wrote recently about Baker Tilly’s acquisition of Anchin, a 103-year-old firm. The pace is accelerating.

Scale can improve many things, but craftsmanship depends on something different. It depends on people teaching people. That is much harder to preserve than an operating model or a brand.

What is refreshing about The Bear and why it captures our heart is because it is rooted in making something great, memorable. It’s not a story about a guy named Carmy looking to franchise The Beef. Rather, it’s the story of a world-class chef returning to his roots to build something meaningful with his late brother’s restaurant. The artistry is not what gets in the way of the business. The artistry is the business.

What We Want You to Know

We believe accountants to business are as important as chefs to restaurants. We hope to continue to show you this through authentic video, conversations and writings.

The effort that goes into great accounting is rarely seen. Our masters that spend significant amounts of time teaching young apprentices go unnoticed. The care and commitment accountants have for the owners they serve runs deep, many times transcending across generations.

The Closing Image

At the end of one of The Bear’s seasons, there is a moment that does not require words. Carmy signs his name on the new menu. His handwriting is unsteady, his signature is small. His pen is the same pen he has been using since the beginning of the show. The camera holds on it for a beat before the season ends.

That signature is a trademark of the show. The chef putting their name on the work. Saying, with a scratch of ink, this is mine. I am accountable for this. The institution stands behind this because I stand behind it.

The same image exists in our profession, and it will continue to exist here, at Wiss. It is the partner signing the audit opinion or the tax return. It is the senior signing the close. It is the moment an accountant puts their name on work that carries legal, fiduciary, and personal weight, and stands behind it. The signature marks the ownership of the craft.

The Bear lives it. The best accounting firms do, too.

Social media has been abuzz after the dismantling of the USA team by Belgium. The one that has gained significant attention is the interview post game with Christian Pulisic, who has been the face of American soccer for a decade. Pulisic came off in the 59th minute with an ankle injury. After the match, on camera, in front of millions of fans that had just watched its team get outclassed on home soil, Pulisic said this:

“I just twisted my ankle and just sprained my ankle. It’s just frustrating to end like that, of course. But now I’ve got time to rest, so it’ll be okay.”

Wow!

Personally, I think in the moment it was a defense mechanism that his words were used to block him from the truth in that he personally didn’t live up to his potential. Unfortunately, the words he used have no empathy for the fans who were crushed, nor did he speak about his teammates and every person who works in the US soccer federation. It was about HIM. His ankle. His rest.

Carli Lloyd said what a lot of us were feeling. She called it out publicly, immediately. She has two World Cup gold medals, but she has had similar moments where she didn’t live up to expectations in big moments. She knows what a loss on this stage demands from the player wearing the shield and what that represents.

Whatever the intent behind Pulisic’s comment, the impact is severe. He is viewed as the Leader. Whether he wants that title or not is irrelevant. People look to the top to get a sense for where their head is and does it match what you as the colleague or customer feel. Pulisic is a symbol of a country of people who invested belief, hope, and time in what the team was trying to build. A leader must be reflective to demonstrate to all who follow whether their belief in you is warranted. What they deserve to hear when disappointed is “we let you down”.

The Falsity of the Rally Cries

“Why Not Us.” “We Believe We Can Win.” We have heard versions of these type of slogans for a long time now. These have been on t-shirts, billboards, commercials and included time and time again with the announcers and the analysts. Think about this in 1994, the USA lost in the round of 16 (same round as in 2026) 1-0 against Brazil who eventually won the World Cup. That team 32 years ago exceeded the moment, forget about even match the moment.

These slogans are words with air.

One of my greatest mentors of all time said to me, “Always be mindful with people who say they will try instead of they will. It most likely means they aren’t doing it because they gave themselves an excuse already not to.” “We believe we can win” is very different from “we will win.” You can have all of the rally cries in the world but when you resort to them continually, I believe it means you are looking for some magic to truly get you there.

That you truly don’t believe. It’s an acknowledgement in advance that you know deep down there is a difference between us and other countries. We haven’t done the developmental work that other countries do, patiently, boringly, for decades before their moment arrives. 32 years ago, same result.

Slogans are not development. Belief is not development. Development is development.

Hype and predictions are everywhere right now. Kalshi is living proof of this. Words with air has grown exponentially over the years and a lot of us in accounting have been victim to it. I’m sure workers from other industries feel the same way when behaviors are in conflict with mission statements and stated values. The “we care about our people” and “we are building something special” statements are referenced to consistently, yet one morning these workers wake up to find out their organization has been sold. They read the press releases about “preserved culture” from firms that just sold. They see the disconnect, and they are afraid to say anything because they are scared to lose their jobs.

Worse yet, when important moments finally arrive, when we are desperate for supportive, empathic leadership, it fails us.

Being Able to Question with Invitation

Landon Donovan, on his podcast Unfiltered with Tim Howard, said what we expect our leaders to say. He told the truth in a personal way. He drew on his experience from the 2006 World Cup where he admits how he let the Team down. He acknowledged how much harder this will be on Pulisic because of the increase in social media usage and fan base. This line is one that great advice to Pulisic who is living through backlash:

“This is an opportunity to help and to change your life forever.”

Delivered not as an attack. As an invitation. From an athlete who has been through exactly the moment Pulisic is in now and who used the opportunity to change and grow.

Donovan also named the specific pattern to back up why he believes this moment for Pulisic could be an inflection point. He said:

“I’m starting to look back, Tim — it’s more than just a trend now. Like, when the games are easy, and it’s a home qualifier, and it’s Jamaica, yes. But in the big moments and the big games, he just hasn’t. I’m not criticizing. I’m just saying it factually.”

In contrast, Tim Howard the co-host to Donovan, added his thoughts with this response when asked about Pulisic, he said Pulisic is a “nice footballer,” and then added:

“Outside of that, you’d have to ask me very direct questions to which I could give you very direct answers.”

That is the diplomatic disapproval that we normally hear from our leaders in accounting. It says nothing on the surface, yet it says everything to all of us who know what they mean even if they aren’t saying it. Never quite direct. Never quite honest. Always leaving us as recipients enough room to interpret the message however they need to.

The Landon Donovan voice is the one that says “I care about you enough to tell you what everyone else is thinking.” We need more of this. It is missing from most rooms it needs to be in.

I have been writing about this for a few weeks now. All of us want to be respected for what we contribute. We are looking for leaders who see us, respect us, and are willing to be honest about where the organization actually is.

There is a longer arc here that I want to continue to call out and why I am using the World Cup examples above to illustrate how examples like these contribute to negative effects such as: the talent pipeline collapse, the 340,000 accountants who left our profession during COVID and the fifty percent of accountants under thirty who say they regret their career choice.

The disease accounting suffers from is the accumulated cost of words with air. Rally cries that were not backed by development. Promises made in meetings that were quietly abandoned three years later. “We are building something special” statements at every holiday party for a decade that turned out to mean “we are selling to the highest bidder when the multiple gets there.” Values posters on the wall that the leadership was the first to violate. (We at Wiss have suffered from this too by the way. We have let our people down at times. We are not immune from this problem. But, we are steadfast on owning up to our mistakes and improving).

A small piece of the profession’s soul weakened over time with each small betrayal. It’s accumulated into a profession where many no longer believe the words they are hearing. The cost of broken promises is the actual reason so many accountants have felt used, disrespected, and worn out over the past two decades.

The soul of the profession is not gone. It is hurting and waiting to be restored. It starts with leaders willing to keep their word.

Sometimes the Loss Is What You Need

I wrote recently that sometimes a loss is what you need to see where you actually stand. That the turning point is not the win. That the turning point is usually a loss that stripped away the illusion.

I am referencing this again with Pulisic. We are not where the rally cries were hoping we are. The development has not been done and the leadership culture has not been built. The disconnect between the shield on the jersey and the actual work of representing the shield is real. That is a hard truth, but conversely, it makes the next ten years exciting. It’s a truth that can be used as a factual rally cry to work on those pieces that aren’t where they need to be to match the moment.

The accounting profession can use this as a rally cry too. The next ten years can be exciting for those who choose not to sell and who choose to adopt new ways. For those of us who choose to meet the moment we can rebuild the soul through improving leadership and emphasizing and rebuilding our developmental programs. It’s a chance for all of us to heed the advice of Landon Donovan and take a hard look at how we have done things and how we can use this disruptive moment to build the accountability structure that has been missing. The accountability for leaders to finally keep the promises that have gone unkept for decades.

This team had us believing, which is a wonderful thing. They formed an identity. Up until last night, it had been wonderful to see an attacking and aggressive style, one that had been missing for a long, long time. There were some iconic moments, the Tillman free kick, the stadium singing along to “Country Roads.”

Unfortunately, there will be a meme that will overshadow a lot of the better moments that occurred over these past few weeks. The USA goalkeeper came out appropriately to settle and clear a ball to prevent an oncoming attack. The goalie became indecisive, pressure ensued, and in a panic went to kick a ball but instead kicked the turf. Belgium seized on the opportunity and scored a goal to put the game essentially out of reach. It’s a visual that will be displayed throughout the world, especially after the world outrage against the USA from the suspended red card matter.

To compare this image to another recent, famous meme of Jack Hughes draped in an American flag with a smile displaying his broken teeth. Why is it that the USA hockey team was able to step up and represent the spirit of a Nation and the USA soccer team hasn’t been able to. Instead, the face of USA soccer limps off the field around the 60 minute mark, and you could see it in his face, not from the pain of the injury, but the pain of the moment representing a group of people who did not fully believe they belonged in the fight.

I couldn’t sleep last night. I am a rabid soccer fan. The biggest moment for USA soccer was a complete flop. The missed passes, the lack of aggression, zero leadership, the team looking uncertain about who they even were. As I wrestled with the acceptance of this last night, I thought about how there are a lot of similarities these two different memes above highlight the state of accounting and who we are. Two athletes. Two responses to adversity. One let the moment slip and limped off. One had his teeth knocked out and kept skating. Moments matter.

The reason I am writing this today, and not in a week when the game is a distant memory, is that sometimes a loss is what you need to see where you actually stand.

Every team that has ever won something meaningful will tell you there was a moment that set the stage for the turn around, it’s typically not a win, or a feel good moment. The turning point is usually a loss that stripped away the illusion. The loss that made everyone on the team, in the group, in the organization to face the reality of where you are. The prominent question becomes, “are we willing to do the work to get to the next level and are we capable of changing to do that?”

These moments are painful, but they can be the beginning of something real. USA soccer must do that.

So must accountants. The accounting profession is having that moment right now. Many are acknowledging through a monetization event that they aren’t willing to do what it takes. Others are trying to figure it out. Some refuse to change. Some are adapting and redefining.

Thirty Days

In the last thirty days, three of the most established firms in the country have sold. Crowe to KKR on June 12. Baker Tilly announced the Anchin acquisition on June 17. Eide Bailly sold a majority stake to Reverence Capital on June 23. Three top-25 firms. Combined, they represent over 240 years of institutional history.

They all put out press releases that used the same language. Strategic partnership. Long-term growth. Preserved culture. Continued independence.

Nobody in the profession believes those words the way they used to. And that is one of the tragic occurrences that has perpetuated over the years in accounting. In an industry of Trust, it’s been difficult to Trust leaders and what they say and what they promise. Look at the comments on going concern, how many accountants feel misled and hurt from empty statements at holiday parties around not selling out.

Personally, I do not think this moment is bad for accountants in the long run. I think it might be the most useful thing that has happened to accounting in my thirty plus years.

Here is what I have been noticing, and what has been making me hopeful. Firstly, the way people have come together to support their fellow country over the past few weeks has been beautiful. In a world that seems so divided at times, has come together and embraced one another, celebrated and accepted each other’s cultures.

Secondly, over the past few weeks we have had a number of conversations with our colleagues, clients, accountants from other firms and companies. They want belonging. They want to feel a part of something that is tangible, solid, not going away.

People don’t realize that most accountants have had moments in their career where they have been Jack Hughes. The memes of accountants and the narratives surrounding us are outdated and inaccurate. We have been the ones behind the scenes getting our teeth knocked out…not literally, of course, but metaphorically speaking, we put the hours and the work in whenever it has been needed. We have shown up in big moments. We don’t look for or demand credit. But, we rise up to the challenge and the occasion each and every time.

What we want is to be appreciated. To be respected for what we contribute. To be told the truth. The work required ahead for accountants to redefine our work is going to be hard, challenging. We will meet the moment as we have for years and years.

Some firms will look at the events of the last thirty days and see the writing on the wall. They will negotiate their own exits before the multiple gets worse. They will call the press releases “strategic partnerships.” They will assure their clients that nothing will change.

Other firms will look at the same events and see the opposite. They will see the moment as the reality check they needed. They will double down on the craft. They will invest in their people. They will decide that the standard of the work matters more than the exit multiple, and they will keep going.

That is the Jack Hughes moment. It is the decision, made in the middle of the play, that whatever you have absorbed will not stop you. You keep skating. You keep working. You keep signing your name on the deliverable. You do not need to hold a press conference about it. You simply show up tomorrow and do it again. This is what we as accountants do.

At Wiss, we know what we are going to do. Keep skating.

The Coming Together

The last thing I want to say today is that the “coming together” people are looking for is real. It is not naive. It is not a marketing campaign. It is not a slogan that goes on a wall.

It is a group of people, working together, deciding that high standards are worth defending. It is the senior teaching the junior. It is the partner signing the audit opinion. It is the staff accountant staying late to catch the exception that the model missed. It is the client picking up the phone and hearing the same voice they heard three years ago.

Belgium destroyed the USA last night. The USA has to live with that. Maybe, just maybe, that’s the moment the USA needs.

The events over these past 30 days present a moment we needed too. It becomes a moment the team can decide who it actually wants to be.

I know who we are and who we want to be.

After I heard the news recently that Anchin sold to Baker Tilly, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of sadness.

I thought about all of the changes our city has gone through over a century. From the Great Depression to the boom days of the 80s and the financial crisis in 2008, Anchin was there to help guide businesses through all of it. The same week the Knicks win their first championship in half a century, we say goodbye to a bedrock NYC firm.

Anchin, Block and Anchin was founded in 1923. The kind of firm every accountant of my generation grew up understanding to be the model. Partner-owned, locally led, built on relationships that compounded across decades. The accounting profession as we have known it for thirty years is changing rapidly, and I am not sure most of the industry and business community has fully absorbed what that means. Including myself.

The Artistry

What will be lost in these deals is not just headcount or real estate or a brand name. It is the artistry.

Accounting at its best has never been a service business in the way consulting is a service business. It is a craft. Built through an apprenticeship model, colleague to colleague, partner-by-partner, decade-by-decade. The senior who teaches the staff how to put together a cash flow statement. The mentor who teaches a junior associate how to deliver a hard message to a CFO without jeopardizing the relationship. The relationship partner who has been signing the same family’s returns for thirty years and knows which question to ask before the family knows they need to be asked.

Those are not processes. They are not transferable in a deal. They are the accumulated judgment of people who chose to invest in each other over time. That is what firms like Anchin actually were. A living, breathing community where former partners entrusted future generations of partners to carry on something they spent their careers building.

That kind of institution is an extension of people’s lives. It is hard to build. It is easy to underestimate how much it matters until it is gone.

What Doesn’t Transfer

The stability a 103-year-old organization provides will inevitably be tested when it becomes a division of something ten times its size.

According to EY, employee turnover following a merger averages 47% within the first year. Within three years, that number reaches 75%. The partners who built the relationships that made Anchin worth acquiring are not contractually required to stay. Some will retire. Some will leave. Some will stay and discover that operating inside a $3.36 billion national firm is a fundamentally different experience than the one they signed up for.

The industry prices this in. Most accounting firm deal structures include a retention clause: if client retention drops below 90% in the first year, the purchase price is adjusted downward. The buyers know clients leave when the partner they trusted walks out the door. They model it into the spreadsheet and proceed anyway.

The Client Didn’t Get a Vote

When a merger or buyout like this occurs, generational businesses who have been with a firm like Anchin for years will naturally wonder what happens to the relationships they have relied on for decades. Some may feel a sense of loss. Some may feel something closer to betrayal. You will not see that in the press release.

What is being sold in many of these transactions is not just equity. It is trust that was built over years, sometimes decades, with clients who never agreed to be part of the transaction.

A client who has worked with the same partner for twenty years made a choice. They chose a firm. They chose a person. They chose a relationship. That choice assumed a level of continuity that a sale does not guarantee. When partners cash out and the firm they built becomes a division of something much larger, the client does not get a vote. They get a letter. They get a new contact. And they get to decide whether to stay.

I am not questioning the legal right of any firm’s partners to sell. They built something real. They took real risk. They deserve to be compensated for it.

But the profession needs to be more honest about what is actually happening in these transactions. The relationship was the asset. The sale monetizes the value created by that relationship, even though the client had little say in how it evolves afterward. That creates tension around something accounting, more than almost any other profession, depends on: trust, continuity, and stewardship.

The Wave

Baker Tilly acquiring Anchin is not an isolated event. It is a data point in a restructuring that has been accelerating since Covid.

Accounting consolidation has increased fourfold since 2021. In 2025 alone, fewer than 200 private equity investments in accounting firms generated roughly 900 subsequent transactions. That is 7.6 acquisitions triggered for every single direct PE investment. The capital goes in once and the deals keep compounding.

Annual deal volume tells the same story. There were 22 accounting firm transactions in 2023. That number rose to 65 in 2024. It crossed 100 in 2025. January 2026 opened at more than three times the prior year’s monthly average pace.

This is not simply a wave, where there is a peak and a trough. What we are seeing is a rapid restructuring of the accounting industry as it existed in 2020. What existed for the last century is increasingly being reorganized around a different ownership model, a different incentive structure, and potentially a different definition of what it means to be in this profession.

Baker Tilly illustrates the moment. PE-backed, recently the sixth largest accounting firm in the country following its acquisition of Moss Adams, now moving its headquarters to New York City. The Anchin deal is the next move in a strategy being executed with real urgency. PE firms hold investments for three to seven years. The early investors in PE-backed accounting firms are approaching their exit windows. The acquisitions will not slow down. They will accelerate because they have to.

We Have Seen This Before

Before we accept the premise often found in consolidation press releases (that scale automatically creates better outcomes for clients), it is worth looking at another industry that traveled a similar path.

Healthcare consolidation was built on a compelling argument. Scale creates efficiency. Efficiency creates margin. Margin funds better care. The logic was difficult to argue with.

Yet over time, researchers, regulators, and patients began asking a different question: efficient for whom?

A recent Harvard Medical School study found patients at private-equity-owned hospitals experienced higher rates of preventable harm. The lesson is not that accounting and healthcare are the same. They are not. The lesson is that ownership structure matters. Incentives matter.

When the people making acquisition decisions are optimizing for an investment horizon measured in years, while clients are optimizing for relationships measured in decades, tension can emerge between what is best for the owner and what is best for the customer.

Healthcare learned that scale alone is not a strategy. It is certainly not a guarantee of better outcomes.

Accounting would be wise to remember that lesson as consolidation accelerates.

Staying Put

The consolidation wave is real. It is accelerating. There will be firms that build significant businesses within it.

But I do not believe the firms that define this profession ten years from now will be the ones that bought the most.

At Wiss, we have made a deliberate choice to stay independent. Wiss has been here since 1969. Fifty-seven years. We are not yet what Anchin became at 103, but we know what it took to build a firm that lasts that long, and we understand what is at risk of being lost when institutions like that disappear into something larger.

That choice has a cost. The economics of consolidation are not imaginary. The capital available to PE-backed platforms is real. We are watching firms that were our peers a few years ago become subsidiaries of national platforms.

And we are staying put.

Because we believe we have an obligation to the founders of Wiss before us and the clients we serve today. Because we believe the relationship is the product. We want our clients to trust the firm as much as they trust the person who has been serving them. At Wiss those are not two separate things. We are not going to sell that trust to fund a liquidity event.

What we are doing instead is building. Wiss Labs is our investment in the future of this profession: AI tools and new infrastructure that make us sharper, faster, and more valuable to clients. We are deepening relationships by improving performance. We aim to give our colleagues technology that amplifies judgment, not replaces it. We are strengthening the apprenticeship model and building an intelligence layer that contextualizes years of client interactions.

The version of this profession we have all known is going away. But we are not.

The artistry is worth defending. The craft is worth defending.

Clients will ultimately decide which model wins.

The PE consolidators are buying firms on a thesis of cost reduction. The offshoring providers are pitching cheaper labor as the path to margins. The AI vendors are pitching headcount cuts as the value proposition. Three different players. One identical bet. Shrink the labor line, expand the margin.

They are betting against the accountant.

That bet is wrong, and the next few years are going to prove it wrong.

I have been writing about this shift for a long time now. Seema Amble and Steph Zhang at Andreessen Horowitz published two pieces last week that name what I have been seeing from inside the profession. Seema’s is called “Is Software Losing Its Head?” Steph’s is called “From System of Record to System of Intelligence.” Read together they describe how the moats in enterprise software are moving. Out of the database. Into the intelligence layer above it. Their conclusion lines up with what those of us building inside accounting have been saying for years.

That migration is the single most important thing happening in our industry. It is also the thing the consolidation wave is pricing in backwards.

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The Moats Are Moving

The classic moats of enterprise software are getting hollowed out by agents.

UI does not matter when the agent does the clicking. Muscle memory does not matter when the agent does the workflow. Frequency of use does not matter when the agent shows up daily and the human does not. Salesforce spent twenty years building a fortress on those moats. The fortress is now a commodity.

The new moats live somewhere else. Proprietary data the product uniquely causes to exist. Operational logic. Context. Execution in the real world.

Look at that list and tell me it does not describe accounting.

There is one more thing the agentic world demands, and it is the thing most people miss. Agents need exactly what a new hire needs. Explicit rules. Permissions. Process definitions. Context for the decisions they are being asked to make. Without those, an agent cannot act safely, and a new hire cannot either. That requirement makes the people who carry the rules and the context more valuable, not less. The accountant who knows why this client closes the books the way they do, and what the auditor flagged three years ago, and how the CFO wants the variance commentary phrased, is the source of the logic the agent needs. Strip that out and the agent is dangerous. Keep it in and the accountant gets leverage they have never had before.

That is the moat shift in one sentence. The value used to live in the software. It is moving into the people who know how the work actually gets done.

Accounting Is Real World Execution

The signed audit opinion is execution in the real world. The filed tax return is execution in the real world. The reconciled close that gets sent to the board on Monday morning is execution in the real world.

Software vendors do not produce those artifacts. Accountants do.

Software vendors have been trying to climb into our industry for two decades. None of them have produced an audit opinion. None of them have signed a tax return. None of them have stood in front of a CFO and explained why a number that looked clean six weeks ago needs to be restated. That is the work. That is what we do. That is the moat.

The reason this matters in the agentic era is that pure software has nothing to put its name on. A SaaS company ships a feature. An accountant ships a deliverable that carries legal weight, fiduciary weight, and personal weight. You can sue an accountant. You cannot sue a chatbot. The accountability lives with the human, and so does the trust, and so does the relationship, and so does the price.

That is not a problem AI removes. It is a problem AI makes more valuable to solve.

The Intelligence Layer Lives in the Accountant

Steph’s piece extends the argument. The system of record, the database, becomes infrastructure. The system of intelligence, the layer above it, becomes the product.

Translate it into our world. The ERP becomes plumbing. NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, all of them. The intelligence layer is what sits above the ERP. It orchestrates the GL, the bank feeds, AR, AP, tax, payroll, time tracking, audit workpapers, and the client conversation. It reads, reasons, and acts on the data. That is where the value migrates.

That layer does not exist inside the ERP. It lives in the accountant’s head. It always has.

This is what we filed a patent on earlier this year with the Client Intelligence System. The premise is straightforward. Every engagement at Wiss should compound. Every exception we resolve should become context that informs the next engagement. Institutional knowledge should not live trapped in someone’s head or buried in a software system you cannot extract it from. It should be captured at a level that is impossible to pull out of a generic database.

This is the layer the profession has needed for fifty years and never had the technology to build.

Institutional Memory as Product

Steph wrote a sentence that should be tattooed on every managing partner’s wall.

Institutional memory becomes something a company can actually ship.

Worth sitting on that for a minute. The thing our profession has bled out for fifty years is the thing that becomes the product.

Every senior who retires takes a decade of client context with them. Every staff who quits takes the workflow they built in their head. The pipeline collapse made it worse. We are losing accountants faster than we are replacing them, and we are losing institutional memory continuously. The turnover has been brutal for as long as I have been in this profession, and the cost of it has always been invisible because nobody could measure what walked out the door.

That is the part the agentic era changes.

When the intelligence layer captures the logic, the context, the playbook, and the judgment patterns of a senior accountant, the firm finally owns the asset it has been losing every two years to attrition. The successor inherits the institutional memory instead of starting over. The client gets continuity instead of a relearning curve. The firm gets a moat that compounds instead of resets.

That is what shippable institutional memory means in our world.

The Pie Is Getting Larger

Now look at the consolidation thesis again.

The PE rollups assume labor is the cost line to shrink. The offshoring shops assume labor is interchangeable. The AI vendors assume software replaces labor. All three assume the value lives in the database and the workflow.

It does not. The value lives in the accountant.

Steph also published the data point that breaks the cost cutting argument. Companies adopting AI in their sales and marketing functions are spending more on labor, not less. ROI per dollar is rising. The pie is getting larger. Software is doing more and the team is doing more, simultaneously.

That is the contrarian case our industry has not made out loud yet. AI does not shrink the labor pie in accounting. It expands it. Because the leverage on a great accountant goes up, not down.

The harvesting path priced in a world where labor was the problem. The building path is showing up in a world where labor is the product.

Pick a Side

We are at the sharpest inflection point in a hundred years of accounting.

Most of the writing on the industry comes from inside it, which makes it incremental, defensive, and at times self serving. The Andreessen pieces matter because they describe where the value is migrating from a seat that watches dozens of industries at once. They are not telling us anything practitioners building in this space did not already know. They are validating it with a framework the market will recognize.

The value is moving up the stack. Out of the tools. Into the people. The accountants who learn to own the intelligence layer become more valuable, not less. The ones who do not become the commoditized input in someone else’s intelligence layer.

That is the bet at Wiss Labs. We deploy AI to amplify accountants, not to replace them. The accountant stays in control. The AI handles what does not require judgment and surfaces the parts that do. The senior signs every deliverable. The institutional knowledge gets captured instead of walking out the door.

The harvesting path is going to lose. The building path is going to win.

Pick a side.

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When my partners and I took over Wiss in 2011, the firm was in rough shape. There was in-fighting, factions, a culture that had been badly damaged by a leader who put himself above the firm. We were merging firms in, de-merging firms out, still reeling from the 2008 crisis, and fighting with an insurance company because someone’s ego had gotten in the way of filing a legal claim on time.

The first few years weren’t about building anything. They were about repair. Restoring trust. Getting back to the foundational layer that made Wiss special before someone spent a decade dismantling it. That work isn’t glamorous and you don’t get to talk about it in press releases, but it mattered. Everything we’ve built since then sits on top of it.

By 2016, we finally felt like we had the culture we wanted to build upon. And that’s when I felt ready to attack this question I’ve been obsessing over since I began my career. How can we make accounting feel like a more exciting profession?

The First Attempt

We launched something called WEST in 2016. Wiss Early Stage Technology. The name was a little ambitious, but so were we.

The idea was to bring real accounting and advisory to pre-seed, seed, and early-stage companies at a price they could actually afford. A few hundred dollars a month. Matt Barbieri led the charge. We got a ton of clients fast, which felt great until it didn’t. The math never worked, and there were two reasons for that. First, investors had flooded the outsourced accounting space with capital, funding companies like Bench and driving pricing down aggressively. Second, accounting is nuanced. The existing tools in the market couldn’t create capacity. The only way to scale was to add more people, and the margins made that impossible. Clients felt like they weren’t getting enough. We felt like we were giving too much away. Nobody was happy.

To try to solve the scaling problem, we built software on top of it. An alert system that could tell a founder when their cash dropped below a certain threshold, when a check was written outside of normal parameters, when something was off before it became a real problem. Insight, not just reporting. We were genuinely excited about it.

But the labor component never went away. The market wasn’t ready. We took our lumps and brought the business back into Wiss to create a better version. We were determined to fix it. Little did we know we were planting the seed for what would eventually become our AI technology “lab”.

I think about that period a lot. Not with regret, exactly. More like the feeling after a loss you could have prevented. We saw something real. We weren’t wrong about the problem, we were just wrong about the timing and what the technology could actually solve at that point.

But we didn’t stop.

What I Learned Losing a Soccer Game

Sports have always been my thing. Soccer especially. So when the opportunity came up to help coach varsity soccer at Hanover Park High School while working at Wiss, I jumped at it. I loved every minute of it, and there is one game that I still think about in particular.

Once in a while, a team has that one player who just isn’t fair. Ours was Jake Edwards. Kid went on to play professionally in England, eventually became President of the USL, and now runs Huddersfield Town FC. My son plays FIFA and is always complaining that certain players are so overpowered they ruin the game. Jake was that guy. Except it was real life and he was on our team, so it was great haha.

We were playing Chatham late in the season in a nail biter that was winding down to the last few minutes. Their gameplan was pretty simple and they ran it the whole game. Swarm Jake every time he touched the ball, double teams, shadow marking, the whole thing. He couldn’t do anything with it. I saw it happening in real time and kept telling my guys to find Jake anyway. Same instruction, every possession, even as it stopped working right in front of me. I couldn’t bring myself to change the plan. Whether that was pride, stubbornness, or a combination of the two, we gave up the lead with less than a minute left, lost in overtime, and Chatham went on to win the entire state tournament that year.

I hate losing. What makes it worse is when you know the other team didn't outclass you… they just found a crack and walked through it. That kind of loss sits differently.

I knew what was happening and did nothing about it. That has stuck with me for a long time. The older I get the more I believe that the best leaders are the ones who can look at a situation honestly, admit when something isn’t working, and trust the people around them enough to change course without it feeling like a crisis. That’s harder than it sounds when you’re standing on a sideline with a lead and a plan you’ve been running all season. But that’s the job. Read it, adjust, trust your guys, and move. I’ve tried to bring that into everything I do at Wiss ever since.

A Random Meeting

In 2022, one of our colleagues, Mike Castle, got a LinkedIn message from a Babson College alumni connection. Two guys wanted to come in and talk about what they were building. I didn’t know what to expect. I have been in enough of these meetings to know most of them go nowhere.

But these guys were different in a way that was hard to put my finger on at first. They weren’t selling a product. They were trying to solve a problem that had been bothering them the same way it had been bothering us for years. Big dreamers swinging at something genuinely hard in an industry most people ignore. That resonated with me. We had done the same thing with WEST and taken our bruises for it, so I knew exactly what that kind of ambition felt like and what it cost.

Beyond the idea, I just liked them. Good character is hard to fake in a room. You can tell pretty quickly whether you are dealing with people who are in it for the right reasons. We had good chemistry, genuine mutual respect, and a shared belief that accounting deserved better tools than what existed. I trust people before I trust products. These were good people.

We wrote one of the first checks into what is now a billion-dollar company. Not a bad bet.

The Last Mile

We had proven something with our early bet. That the right founders, working on the right problem, could actually change how accounting worked. But one great partnership wasn’t a strategy. It was a proof of concept.

The question became what we do with it.

There are hundreds of tools being built for this industry right now. AI that handles month end close, accounts payable and receivable, cash flow forecasting, expense management, revenue recognition, the list goes on. Some of it is genuinely impressive. A lot of it is noise. Most firms don’t have the time, the technical fluency, or the live environments to figure out which is which. So they either chase everything and get nowhere, or they ignore it entirely and fall behind. Both are versions of standing on that sideline watching something fail and doing nothing about it.

That is the gap we kept seeing. We had been doing this work quietly for years, dedicating real resources to evaluating tools and then actually stress testing them before they ever got near a client. After enough positive feedback we figured it was time to formalize it and give it a name. That is Wiss Labs.

Where This Actually Goes

Here is what I know after thirty years. The firms that win are not the ones with the best resources or the most prestigious names. They are the ones willing to look at a situation honestly, change course when something is not working, and bet on the right people before it is obvious to everyone else that they should.

We have been building toward this moment since 2011. The culture repair, WEST, the early bets, the failures and the adjustments. None of it was wasted. It was preparation.

What makes Wiss Labs different is not one thing, it is the combination of all of them at once. Decades of institutional accounting knowledge that every fintech startup needs but cannot replicate. AI that is finally powerful enough to do something meaningful with that knowledge.

And a firm with the DNA to actually move on it rather than study it from a distance. We have never been the kind of place that waits for permission or consensus. We try things. We adjust. We go again.

That is a hard thing to build. It took us a long time to get here. But we are here, and the timing has never been better.

She told me the compression feels worse, not better. And then almost as an aside, that she knows it’s temporary.

She wasn’t complaining, but rather just stating it as fact. That’s what got me.

The Equation Is Broken

I’ve been asking myself all weekend how it’s still like this. We’ve been investing in this profession for years. The answer is in the numbers.

The federal tax code was 1.4 million words in 1955. It’s over 10 million today. Americans spend nearly 8 billion hours a year on tax compliance, and that number grew by more than a billion hours in a single year. Right now approximately 19 million individual returns are sitting on extension. Meanwhile 340,000 accountants left the profession during COVID, a 17% drop in the total workforce. Enrollment has been falling for years.

Demand up. Supply down.

And the tools we were sold during that stretch? Honestly, a lot of them were just crap. For decades the software sold to accounting professionals demanded that you learn it rather than making you better at your job. You didn’t adopt tools that elevated your thinking. You became fluent in their quirks, their menus, their workarounds. You mastered the software. The software didn’t work for you. The intelligence was never in the tool. It was always in us. And we spent most of our time feeding these systems our expertise rather than applying it.

This wasn’t for lack of trying. Botkeeper raised close to $90 million trying to solve this problem. They were genuine pioneers, founded in 2015 before most people were even talking about AI in accounting. They built something real. By the end of last year their platform could autonomously reconcile accounts and code over 80% of transactions with 98% accuracy. They were two months away from launching a voice-activated assistant when they shut down in February. The technology got there. The business couldn’t survive long enough to see it.

That’s not a failure of vision. That’s how hard this problem actually is.

This Isn’t Just Our Problem

And it doesn’t stay inside the firm. Her clients feel it too.

Think about what this looks like for a typical business owner. Their S-corp can’t close its books by March 15 so it files an extension. Every partner and shareholder downstream now can’t file their individual return. They need to make an estimated tax payment but they don’t actually know what they owe yet so they guess. Distributions get held. A retirement contribution deadline passes with incomplete information. For the ones whose Medicare premiums or ACA coverage depend on prior-year income it doesn’t stop there either.

Nobody in that chain did anything wrong. The accountant worked throughout the weekend. The return got filed. The system just doesn’t have enough people or tools to process the complexity being asked of it.

What Private Equity Got Wrong

Here’s what makes me most frustrated. At the exact moment the profession needed to invest in its people and double down on the mission, most of the industry went the other direction.

Private equity moved into accounting in a big way over the past several years. Valuations went up, outgoing partners did well. I understand the business logic. But watch what happened when PE moved into hospitals and you start to see a pattern worth paying attention to.

Studies found that after PE acquired hospitals, patient complications went up 25%. Hospital assets declined by nearly a quarter in just the first two years after acquisition, while non-PE hospitals were growing theirs. Prices went up. Staffing went down. Some facilities closed entirely. The model is straightforward: acquire, cut costs, sell within a few years at a profit. The financial outcome works. The mission doesn’t always survive it.

I’m not saying accounting firms are hospitals. The stakes are different. But the underlying dynamic is the same. When the dominant question becomes how do we lower the cost of delivery, the answer is almost always some version of reducing the humans who do the work. In accounting right now that answer is offshoring. I get blasted with messages about it daily. And look, I get it. Margins matter. Scalability matters.

But my partner is still telling me the compression feels worse. Moving work somewhere cheaper doesn’t fix a broken equation. It relocates it. And I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

We have said no to PE money. I want to be direct about that. Wiss is independent and we intend to stay that way. Our partners are young, energetic, and genuinely excited about where this profession is going. Nobody here is looking for a golden parachute. We have too much pride in what we’re building and frankly too much left to prove. The firms that cash out now and hand the keys to someone whose primary obligation is to a returns target are making a bet I’m not willing to make with our people or our clients.

The firms that are going to win the next decade are not the ones who figured out how to deliver the same thing for less. They’re the ones who figured out how to deliver something fundamentally better. That requires staying in the game long enough to actually build it.

What I Believe Is Coming

I believe AI-enabled tools, designed the right way, will actually rebalance this. Not by automating tasks but by multiplying what a skilled accountant can do. The relationship between the professional and the tool finally inverted. You bring your expertise, your judgment, your knowledge of the client. The tool amplifies it. For the first time the intelligence is actually in the tool.

But I want to be honest about what getting there requires, because there has been too much BS in this industry.

Changing workflows that run on muscle memory is hard. For a real stretch of time teams will be running two systems at once: the old way that works and the new way that isn’t quite there yet. Training on new tools on top of an already full plate. Moments where the new thing fails and the old workaround has to carry the day. That transition period has a real cost and it lands on top of already-stretched people. The firms that make it through are going to be the ones who were straight with their teams about that upfront. Not the ones who sold it as seamless.

We are approaching it in focused 30-day sprints. Learn what works, adapt, go again. Not sweeping multi-year transformations that sound impressive but that nobody can sustain.

Near. Not There.

I keep coming back to that. By the end of 2027 I believe accounting looks fundamentally different. I’m putting that on the record.

But that’s not where we are today. The people living through April are in the gap between the model we’re leaving and the one we haven’t finished building. Every tool we are building at Wiss Labs has to answer one question: does this actually change the experience for the people carrying the load? Not eventually. In a way they can feel.

Paul Peterson is CEO of Wiss & Company and co-founder of WissLabs. He writes about accounting, AI, and the future of the profession.

I’ve been in this profession for nearly 30 years, starting as a young, clueless accountant. This question has been on my mind for a long time.

It started in college. Two things stood out. Most of my professors taught accounting as if it were a solo career: head down, no teammates, just you and the numbers. And there was this obsession that if you didn’t get an offer from one of the national accounting firms, you were basically a loser. It created this weird, competitive atmosphere where certain classmates pretended not to care about grades while secretly being cutthroat about them. Honestly, I was repelled by it.

Then I had a summer internship at a brand name shop. I thought, okay, this is the real world. It must be more like a team, something I was used to from sports. Not at all. It was impersonal in a way I hadn’t expected. Show up, grab your laptop, find your seat assignment (good luck with that last part). Seas of beige cubicles, hardly a noise. I met a few good people, but I didn’t learn a damn thing. I had no idea how my work connected to the big picture. On the bus rides into the city, I kept thinking: there’s no way I can do this.

So I did the next best thing… I started a cookie business with a friend during my senior year. I graduated with an accounting degree and spent the next 18 months slaving away baking cookies. Best thing I ever did. I failed, and lost basically all my graduation gift money, but I was forever changed. I learned about business and how hard it is to make a dollar.

After that, I gave private accounting a shot and went to work as an accounting analyst at a major retailer. I was excited to actually apply what I’d learned. A few weeks in, between the gossip, the backstabbing, and having to nearly stand on a stool to see over my cubicle wall, I was disenchanted. The accounting department was shoved to the back of the building, not that I minded since the back staircase helped me avoid my boss when I came in late. (I have a punctuality problem 😊.) We had zero interaction with any business or sales professionals. Zero. I oversaw Department #2. I’d run some DOS queries, generate some reports, and send them off to someone I didn’t know. One day I received a question: “How come diaper sales were down this month?” I had no idea. I wanted to write back, “Can I talk to a salesperson?” I barely lasted 6 months before leaving to find something where I felt more in control of my own destiny.

Thankfully, I found Wiss. Something was immediately different. People were talking to each other. There was laughter in the air. My coworkers were great. There were no official training programs, just a green file with the prior year workpapers in it. I remember being genuinely humbled watching how fast the experienced people could punch numbers into a calculator. My first attempt adding up a 300-page accounts payable run was not pretty.

Most of my learning was on the job. Sitting next to people who were better than me, watching how they thought, absorbing things you simply can’t learn in a classroom. The hours were brutal at times, but man did the finish line feel good. And hidden fact: accountants can get after it at a post-season tax party lol. There is at least one place that will never let us back in.

More than anything though, it was the relationships. I was sometimes shocked they were paying me, especially once Doom came out and you could play multiplayer. I look back on those years with real fondness. It felt like an extension of college: shore houses, vacations, pickup hoops. Those were good years.

But something started changing at the upper ranks. We all felt it.

The Structures and Cultures of Firms

As you got promoted, you had to become someone else. After I made manager, one of the partners told me point blank: “You’re not allowed to fraternize with staff.” I started reading about how professional service firms are structured, and it clicked. Many accounting firms were built as kingdoms. We had it better than most, but we weren’t immune. When some wrong leadership took over it felt like my firm had lost its way. Humanity was stripped out. Selfishness and greed filled the void. You were what your hours said you were. What your cost-run said you were. What your lead count said you were.

Collaboration? Sharing credit? Belonging? The top dogs called that “Soft.” We became like every other firm. Maybe worse.

Meanwhile, as the war for talent heated up, every firm started talking about culture. I remember a cringey piece on the front page of the CPA Journal: older white guys in suits and sunglasses under the headline “Accounting is Cool.” Yikes. That spin spread everywhere. Every firm claimed their culture was what made them different. But when you talked to someone on the inside, it was always the same story: long hours, impersonal environment, and not much else.

That gap between what firms said and what they actually were started to feel personal to me. I couldn’t keep playing the game.

I was lucky to come up through the ranks with a few like-minded people. I’ll spare you the back-room drama, there was plenty, that’s a documentary in itself, but through a real commitment to building something better, the good guys won.

Turning around a culture is harder than any HBR article lets on. I’m grateful I read Tribal Leadership early in the process. It helped me play the long game, to understand where we were as an organization stage by stage, and to keep pushing toward Stage 3, then Stage 4... and man, if we could somehow get to Stage 5.

The Lack of Accountants

One of the dumbest decisions the AICPA Standards Board ever made was recommending in 1988 that students who want to become a CPA complete 5 years and 150 credit hours of college courses. The rule became official in 2000. Did anyone bother to look at the demographics of the profession first? In 2000, nearly 30% of CPAs were approaching retirement age. By 2010, it was 40%. By 2020, 75%. As accountants, you’d think we’d be able to read those numbers and make a reasonable decision. It’s hard not to be sarcastic, but this is part of why accounting has been such a crappy place to work.

The profession was already struggling before March 2020. The talent pipeline was thinning, burnout was real, and the billable hour model was quietly grinding down the mid-level layer: managers and senior associates who carry the most weight and get the least recognition. Too many firm cultures were purely transactional. Work hard, bill more, repeat.

Then COVID hit and everything fragile became visible at once. 340,000 accountants and auditors left the profession during that period, a 17% reduction of the total workforce. Holy cow. And enrollment was cratering alongside it: in 2022, only 67,000 candidates sat for the CPA exam, a nearly 20-year low.

The Invisible Innovation

One unexpected upside of COVID was realizing, almost by accident, that we could actually work remotely. That meetings didn’t have to be in person. That I didn’t have to drive an hour back from a client to show my face at the office at 6 pm during tax season. COVID broke a lot of the annoying, unspoken “games within the system” that nobody had ever formally agreed to, but everybody played.

The best innovation of that era had nothing to do with accounting itself. It had to do with breaking the norms. And it took a pandemic, not an accountant, to do it.

The Tools Failed Us

For decades, the technology sold to accounting and finance professionals was software that demanded you learn it, not software that made you better. You didn’t adopt tools that elevated your thinking. You became fluent in their quirks, their menus, their workarounds, their logic. You mastered the software. The software didn’t work for you.

Meanwhile, accounting and tax work kept getting more complex with fewer people to do it. The tools made us spend more hours, not fewer. We had to trace every number through multiple systems and spreadsheets to make sure nothing got lost. I spent years becoming expert at navigating databases with complicated interfaces. The intelligence was never in the tool. The intelligence was in us. Always. And we spent most of our time feeding these systems our expertise rather than applying it.

Most of us stayed in accounting because we genuinely love working with clients and colleagues. There is nothing more satisfying than helping a business leader make a better decision or solve a genuinely hard problem. But we’ve spent most of our working hours doing things that had nothing to do with that. Not because the work didn’t need doing, but because the tools created as much friction as they removed.

Even with better flexibility and improved cultures, the lack of purpose and meaning persisted. Because we were always drowning in what it takes just to get the actual work out the door.

Post-COVID

A couple of years ago, we were exhausted. Bad tools, talent hollowed out by the pandemic, disengagement at what felt like an all-time high.

Enter Private Equity. Valuations went up and outgoing partners did well. But the industry’s dominant response to that new reality has been to talk almost exclusively about efficiency and lowering the cost of delivery. I get blasted daily with messages about offshoring work.

The cultural conversation largely disappeared. It’s been replaced by metrics. Reduced headcount. More output per person. Numbers that look clean on a board deck.

I understand the business logic. I care about margins and scalability too. But I think we’re making a profound mistake if we treat this moment purely as an operational efficiency play. There’s something much bigger available to us right now if we’re willing to see it.

Hope: The Emergence of AI

A few years ago, we met two recent college graduates who came to talk to us about machine learning and AI. I was blown away. I walked away thinking: our entire industry is going to change. For the first time in a long time, I felt genuinely hopeful. Maybe, just maybe, the question I’d been carrying for 30 years could finally get an answer.

I’m very fortunate to have a team that has run with me since that day. We built WissLabs, where we’ve been working alongside VC-backed founders to develop tools that actually help us do our jobs better. The accounting itself, the work, the results, is more accurate and more insightful. For the first time, the intelligence is actually in the tool.

These tools don’t require you to learn their quirks before they’re useful. You don’t have to speak their language. You bring your expertise, your judgment, your knowledge of the client. The tools amplify all of it. The relationship is inverted. For the first time in this profession’s history, the software serves the human.

That is not a small thing. That is the thing.

What’s been missing for all these years is purpose and meaning. The ability to walk into work knowing you have everything you need to actually do your best. No ceilings. No wacky cultures. No insane workarounds. No more agonizing over a number that ended up in the wrong cell because you were rushing. All of that, gone. Think of Michael Jordan playing pickup ball for years in sandals, and then someone hands him a pair of Nikes.

This is the accountant’s moment

Here’s what I believe: by the end of 2027, accounting is a dynamic, exciting place to be. Our new mission is already forming, and it’s what’s driving everything we’re building at WissLabs.

Reinventing accounting. Moving it from the back of the building to the front. Modernizing accounting and finance departments. Accountants will thrive in the next decade.

That’s the work we came into this profession to do. Most of us just never got enough of it, because the volume and the tools that processed it consumed us.

AI changes that. Not automatically, not just by being deployed somewhere. We have to make a deliberate choice to redesign not just the workflows, but the meaning of the work itself.

I’m not naive about how hard this will be. Changing a culture that has calcified over decades, in an industry shaped by tradition and hierarchy, while navigating a technology transformation at the same time, this is hard work.

But for the first time, we have tools that match the talent we’ve always had. More meaningful. More human.

Hope is on its way.....

— Paul Peterson CEO, Wiss