Can AI Replace “Thought Leaders”? A 2026 Reality Check

The accounting thought leaders, none of them basically think their job can be replaced. Which is crazy, because essentially AI can at least do the thought leader job, coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio. Hello, and welcome back to the Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver, and I'm David Leary. And welcome to our first episode of 2026. David, how was your time off? I was reading your-- Years? I went to Napa, which is a whole 'nother lesson of expensive, like every-- even in the morning, we just want coffees in a bagel, you know, you're for $80, like it's a very expensive place to be. Apparently, it's the second most visited place in California behind Disneyland. Wow. Napa is. Never been. I've never been myself. Napa specifically, so I'm glad you had a good time, even though your pocket book may be a little light. Well, it's actually good, because we never somehow-- I don't know how this happened. We never did any wine tasting, so it probably saved me money, because that's how they really get you to those places. Wait, wait. You went to Napa, and you didn't taste wine? No, we did-- somebody's birthday, so we'd like a spa day. We did New Year's. Uh-huh. It's dinners. Yeah, and then-- I don't know how this happened, but we were driving. We were leaving. I was like, we didn't do any wine tasting. It's only you who would go to Napa and not taste wine. Um, take me with you next time. I'll drink for both of you. Anyway, it's time to talk about the news. We've got lots of great stories for you. David, you have the accounting today, AI Thought Leader Survey. You've got a story about this California billionaire tax. How managing AI is just as much work as managing people. That resonates with me. I've got a story about how small business owners are using AI. And there's an example in there that I think will be very relevant to anyone who's providing CFO-type services to their clients. I've got this story about Trump and a commutation. If that's how you say it, of David Gentile's fraud sentence, like he's been commuting a lot of sentences. And I think this one is worth calling out because it's a financial fraud. We've got the accounting day, your head survey, the two numbers to focus on as a firm, why busy season is self-inflicted. So much, we will probably, as always, never get to it all. So let's get into it. But first, David, let's think our sponsors. Our sponsors this week, we have two new sponsors. We have UNC Keenan Flagler Business School for their Mac program. We have on pay and we have tax bandits. Fantastic. So let's face it, the jog market is especially tough right now. But every industry needs accountants. And accountants are always in demand. In fact, employment for accountants is projected to grow 10% through 206 faster than most other professions. That's where UNC Keenan Flagler's Master of Accounting program comes in. 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I saw this article in the Wall Street Journal. The headline is, "These small business owners are putting AI to good use." It was back in November, and there's an example here that is really fascinating. So Mike Salvatore, he's the owner of Heritage Hospitality Group in Chicago, and he used to run reports once or twice a year on cost of goods for his two cafes, two bars, and a bike shop that he owns. So five businesses, and he needs to figure out what's going on with the cost of goods. And he would spend hours crunching the numbers, trying to figure out price adjustments based on the cost of the raw materials that he's purchasing to turn into beverages and bikes. Now, instead of doing it once or twice a year, he does it every three weeks using ChatGPT. He takes the information from his point of sale system and from QuickBooks, and he feeds it into Google's Notebook LM, AI tool, and notebook LM makes a podcast for him about how the business is doing and how it could improve. And he sends this recording to the managers of his businesses. He says, quote, "It's essentially my CFO. "Every day is a new use case." And he told the Wall Street Journal that it's tough for him to quantify how much money the AI has saved him, but he does say that he now employs only one bar manager instead of two, and he didn't replace an event planner who left earlier last year. So, why did I bring him? - So nobody he's gonna save is he's gonna not need to pay his account for advisory work. - Except he wasn't before. - He wasn't before, okay. - That's the interesting part because very few accountants serving mainstream businesses like this actually will do that kind of work for a price that these business owners wanna pay. So they do it themselves, but they don't do it often and they don't do it well. And what AI is doing is allowing somebody who never had that service from an accountant to get something. Now it may not be as good as what you'd get from a CFO. It's probably far, you know, far less. We can imagine there may be many errors, right? Maybe it's only 50 to 80% accurate, but it's better than nothing. And I think this points to an opportunity for firms to use tools like this, to feed data from clients click with files and their point of sale and their operational systems into tools like this to generate AI analysis of the numbers and give that to clients for a fee. And you can charge for it because what you're gonna add is the oversight. Checking the numbers, making sure it actually makes sense and they don't make bad decisions based on what do we call it, work slop or hallucinations. - hallucinations, yeah. - That makes a lot of sense. I know I posted my own LinkedIn that I basically just said, AI is never gonna do bookkeeping, I'll die in this hill. And it got a lot of momentum and I paced it in my efforts to upload an invoice to a portal so we could get paid, Blake. And I would argue that is bookkeeping. Like all this, so much of this AI and these apps are like, oh, it's matching. Matching the bank feeds is not bookkeeping. That's just matching, right? - Categorization, yeah. - And then that is not accounting. Accounting is, I got an invoice that I have to send to somebody so they pay me or submit it, a river might be. And it's a comedy of errors, but my point is, it's never gonna be able to do all of that. And people disagree with me, some people agree with me, you know, it's the threads everywhere. But one of the things that people said is like, oh, because the point of view that constantly gets brought up is AI is gonna do the bookkeeping, the mundane, the grunt work, so I can do advisory. And your argument just now proves it's the opposite. And I truly believe it's the opposite. AI's really good at summarizing lots of disparity of data that's everywhere and bringing a new concise story. - Yes, it's good at synthesizing, right? - That's the word, that's the match. - All this information that's all over the place and it finds patterns and trends and it surfaces those to us. And translates information from one form into another, takes the numbers and makes a narrative. That is something that takes so much time to do manually, really, really difficult to do. AI can take financial statement, information, and turn it into a narrative better than I can, better than almost anyone can at this point. So that's what we should be using it for, yeah. - And for sure quicker, right? - Exactly, way faster than you're gonna be able to do it. - So like you said, David, these developers, these tech people, just these so-called thought leaders are all focused on how AI is gonna automate the work that we're doing today. And yes, it will, but the real value is in allowing us to do work that we don't do at all yet, that we don't do for clients because it's too time consuming and too expensive and they can't afford it. - I remember live plan. Remember live plan, it was like a, they're really big and quick book short. They still exist, but they were really going off to the QuickBooks Pro Advisor market and they were, they built all this string and they tried to teach QuickBooks Pro Advisors and bookkeepers, groupkeepers, how to do advisory work. - How to do business plans? - Business planning and advisory work, and they really struggled with it because they're good at the bookkeeping, but then telling that story and creating the narrative around the numbers is very hard to teach somebody to do. But now all those bookkeepers can basically offer that with AI, they just offer it out of the box and charge for that additional service. But I don't think the AI is freeing up your time to do that work yourself. And that's what we'll get into the Fought Leaders survey here. - Let's talk about that. - That's what a Fought Leaders think it does. - Okay, this is a perfect transition. - Perfect transition. - So accounting today, sent out a survey to a list of people in the profession Fought Leaders. - It's about 35 or so Fought Leaders, put quotes around that. And they broke it up into a four part articles on accounting today. So they really strung the survey out. The titles of the articles are as follows. What will AI do for you in 2026? How much is the AI premium? Tech spending outpaces people spending as firms adopt AI. And then AI can't replace accountants. Could it ever question mark? Now the titles didn't really always line up to the questions. And I also think that the Fought Leaders, almost all the views were aligned. There was no dissenters in this. Well, it was very like a lot of the answers were the same answers from the same Fought Leaders. And most of it's the typical talk we've been hearing for a decade. It's gonna give more time to do advisory, blah, blah, blah. You have to shift to advisory, which it's the same sentences they all said about cloud accounting, right? You gotta do more advisory like that. That's just for a decade we've heard this now. But I did notice Blake that you and I were not included in the survey. - Well, that's my fault. I got back to work yesterday. And in my inbox was the questionnaire for the survey, I forgot to send it in. - Oh, so you got asked, at least your thoughts might have been valued by somebody. - They were, and it's my fault. But hey, here's the great thing, David. You can ask me the questions. And I can just respond to them here on the air. - Yeah, so not only that Blake, I'm gonna have you respond to the questions, but I also asked AI. I told AI I said, pretend you're an accounting thought leader being asked questions regarding AI and accounting. When you're ready, I'm gonna give you the questions to answer. So Blake, I also gave these questions to AI. And they don't align to what all the thought leaders say. So I'm gonna, we'll compare and contrast with what your answers are. So we'll start with question one. What is an accounting task or process that will see substantially less human involvement in 2026 than 2025 because of AI? - Ooh. Okay, so what was the consensus? - Well, the consensus wasn't what AI said. - Okay, so what was the human consensus? - Well, I want your answers, though. - Oh, you want my answers. - Do we want your answers? - What's an accounting task or process that will see substantially less human involvement in 2026 and 2025 because of AI? Well, I think I've already said it. It's the drafting of the financial statement narrative. That is already being done. There was like an article in Wall Street Journal, maybe it was CFO about how that's what teams are using it for. All of that, all that stuff, like yes. I mean, already, it's already being substantially reduced. - I mean, in general, the fault leader's answers are it's the mundane boring task. - Well, yeah, that's wrong. - Yeah, it is exactly wrong. So here's what AI said. - That's already been automated, see? That's the thing is, like you can already automate all of that transaction matching and categorization with non-AI tools, yeah. - Here's the answer AI gave. And I thought it was actually pretty on point. So bank credit card coding, right? - But we already do that with rules. - It's already kind of getting done already. AI's going to learn to do firm/client coding patterns. - What's that mean? - They're going to be able to take messy merchant streams and put it into consistent categories. - That's the same thing as number one. - Yeah, it's actually the same thing as number one. The one thing that was exactly what you said, quote unquote, drafting the narrative. - Yeah. - Oh good, I was right. - Yeah, drafting the narrative. And then the other piece of this, humans will still review the exceptions, right? You're going to have to stop humans or not. They're not saying on this question, humans are going to be gone. But it's good, I question too. Conversely, what is an accounting task or process that you are confident will still mainly be done by humans in 2026? - Well, I know the answer to this one. And it's not a specific task or a specific process. It is any task that takes more than 10 minutes, is still going to be done by a human. - You're busy on time, okay. - Right, because I've brought up this idea on the show a lot. - Yeah, what's that, that metric? - Time to complete a task. So you have a list of tasks that humans do and how long it takes them. And then you test the AI and see how accurate it is at doing those tasks. And as the time goes up, the time to complete for a human goes up, the AI gets less accurate. And right now, we only get 100% or near 100% accuracy with tasks to take about four or five minutes. And that's doubling every seven months. So in 2026, we should be able to do tasks that take 10 minutes, maybe 20 between 10 and 20, maybe 10, 15, you know what I mean? Like it's, this is just for reference. So maybe we get to that point in 2026, but like it's not gonna be accurate enough to delegate to AI in accounting or finance for tasks that are longer than that because the AI will only be 80% accurate or something, 90% 80%, that's not enough for us unless we are gonna also then have humans checking all the work, which then sort of like negates the time savings of having the AI do the work because checking the work takes just as long as it's doing the work a lot of the time if you have to check everything. I mean, there's ways around that. Have AI do some review, score the results, only review the ones that it's not confident about. But like the actual of like just delegating completely, it's gonna be tasks that are under 10 minutes long. And tasks where the AI has access to all the context it needs just like a human would. So what's a great example? It is like ramp and ramps feature where when an expense comes in on a corporate card, it searches across your email accounts in your entire domain and finds the receipt. That's like an AI task that would take a human, I don't know, a few minutes, maybe five minutes to complete for each receipt. And it does it nearly perfectly. - So I think the, in general, the consensus is all the human things like, oh, the human relationship with the client, AI's not gonna do that. Like there's some history of accountants being great at the soft skills, right? So there's some sort of, and then the other consensus is really the all the stuff that historically is what it can't sign off in on audit. Like all these industry constraints that these rules that have just been dogma, that's the word I want, dogma, right? All the dogma, it's not allowed to do this because of the dogma, right? Now, AI said it's gonna be for some of the judgment calls, like should we accrue this? Material, materiality, right, and risk. But I even think some of that, maybe the AI answers are wrong because I think you're gonna use that to help you come to your conclusion. I think AI would be great for determining materiality, for determining sample sizes, for all of this, like, all of this, it's like judgment-based work, but it's highly numbers-based. And I don't, yeah, I don't know, I don't know. - The way I influence to really answer this, and one concise sentence I really like, AI can draft options. Humans will still be the ones to decide defending, communicate. - So if they were doing that in the first place, but see, most humans don't decide and determine and make judgment calls, like there's a lot of humans that are just, you know, pushing numbers around. - These are AI influencers, hopefully, they're beyond average humans. All right, let's go to question three, which is actually, I had to divide it in two parts 'cause it doesn't fit all on the screen at the same time, so I'll read both back to back. - Great, before you get to question three, I wanna thank our next sponsor of this episode on pay. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of client experience? Manual workflows are creating bottlenecks, compliance nightmares, and endless support calls that go nowhere. Well, there's a better way for your team and your clients. On pay is the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love. Why? 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To book a demo, head over to accountingpodcast.promo/onpay. All right. Let's jump into question three here. So it's two parts. So part one, what is the actual AI premium in terms of compensation? Imagine two identical staff accountants, one who regularly uses AI and the other who has never used AI. Otherwise, their skills, qualifications, et cetera, are exactly the same. How much more is the former paid over the ladder? So the basic question is, if you have an accountant that has AI skills in your company or any employee, how much more are they going to be paid than the person that has the equivalent role, equivalent skills, but not using AI? Well, it depends how the firm is measuring the performance of its employees. If the firm is using time sheets, then the employee doesn't make any more money because the employee's revenue and contribution to the firm is capped. And if the firm uses better metrics to track the employee's contribution, then you can recognize it and pay more for it. So the AI, the consensus, did not touch on the billbauer. The consensus was they should just get paid more. So your answer, you'd be the dissenter here. But I think your answer is probably the most accurate. And that's the way accountant firms really are. How can you pay them more if you're looking at them in terms of billable hours? Like AI is going to actually reduce their billable hours, not add more billable hours. Those would be bad employees. Actually, under that model, you should pay the AI employees less because they're working less. Yeah. So the AI answer on this-- So you touch EPT's answer? Chech EPT's answer on this is not fully aligned with yours because I don't think Chech EPT actually has the context of how accounting firms really run, right? I'm sure it does. But maybe just not in the context of this question. That's a question, right? So AI or Chech EPT's answer says that they probably should get like a 5% or 15% premium because-- or they're going to be on a faster promotion path because they're going to-- infirms that actively measure throughput and leverage. So firms that measure outputs-- yes, this person's going to be promoted-- but where it's still 10-year title driven banner, like you said, how many hours they bill for them, they're going to be paid less. They're not going to get paid more than the other person. OK, so I have a follow-up story or a related story to this about the two numbers to focus on your firm. I'm not going to interrupt you now, but I want to talk about that next because that story has the answer to what you should use instead of time sheets to measure employees that are using AI so that you can pay them more. Cue that up. So we're going to get the last four questions, and then we'll jump into that. OK. Question number four, what parts of your own job would you used to do yourself have now been largely automated via AI? And what has come to fill the time you've saved? Oh, this is going to be kind of embarrassing, David. OK, so what did I used to do myself? I used to do a lot of writing. I used to write a lot for the show. I would read a ton of news articles about accounting and business every week, and then I would take copious notes bullet points in notion. I built an AI that does that for me now. So literally all I have to do is forward an article that I like into Zapier runs it through an AI process that I've written, which creates detailed notes about the story in a format that's far superior to what I've used to do, like what a research assistant would do for me, like if we had a producer on the show that or a research assistant on the show, it creates that. It creates a short social media type summary of the story. That saves me hours and hours and hours every week. And then I've even built a ghostwriter that can write in my style. I've fed it like hundreds of examples of my writing from the past. And now I can just give it like bullet points, or actually I can just dictate like a voice memo to it. And it will draft me anything that I want in my voice. And it's not perfect. It's like you're a fly post to your-- Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's like 90%. And so basically it has made it so that me as a quote, unquote, thought leader, I don't do any of that anymore. It's like I have a team that does that for me. Like I'm like Malcolm Gladwell or something, right? But I'm not. It's just me. And what do I do with all that extra time? Honestly, I started working out. And I just am enjoying life. I'm really, what I should be doing is working harder to do better. But I've kind of just been enjoying the time. You got healthier. But you know what? This is the thing. It's like this is the thing about accounting. Is it like the biggest drawback to being an accounting profession has always been the overwork, in my opinion. And like we can eliminate that completely. And accounting then becomes like the best job because you can do it from anywhere on flexible hours. And it's really interesting work, because it can always be different if you want it to be. So basically AI has made my job easy and fun. And yeah. So this is where the survey answers from the quote unquote accounting thought leaders starts to go off the rails a little bit. Because the vibe of a lot of the answers to the rest of the questions are a little bit like, well, I'm in strategy at our accounting firm. So like they think it's very about me. Like I'm so great. AI could never do my job. Well, that's not it. It's the pivot strategy actually is something that AI can like really help with. Yeah. And I think that AI, the AI accounting thought leader answer is actually really on track. I'm just going to read the whole thing. So you're talking about the chat GPT response. The chat GPT, the fake AI accounting thought leader. AI has eaten a lot of my blank page work. First drafts of outlines, talk tracks, client emails, summarizing long guidance or agreements into what matters bullets. Turning rough notes, usable SOPs or training docs. Generating first pass checklist review procedures. Essentially, the summary is less typing or thinking. But all the consensus of the people that were asked, they almost think like their job is not-- well, I'm at the higher level, the strategy of the thinking level or decision making level in my firm. I'm a CEO on this, AI is to be placed on jobs. That's true. So AI cannot replace the decision maker's job. And we see this in these experiments that have been done with creating company stores that are run by AI. Story in the Wall Street Journal, recently about how the Wall Street Journal led an AI agent run a vending machine in their newsroom with a $1,000 budget and full autonomy to buy inventory and set prices. And this has happened before. This has been done before in the market. We did a Microsoft story around this. And basically, what happens is that if you give AI full decision making authority, eventually small errors and probably it just-- it goes off the rails and it fails. So there has to be somebody overseeing the AI and correcting it and keeping it on course. And so in a sense, I agree with those responses because that's the job of the firm leaders is not to do the work, but to point everybody doing the work in the right direction. And that-- I don't see how you can fix that because AI is not conscious. And it's statistical and it can't-- like that context window is still very small. And so strategy is not a task that can be done in 10 minutes or less. Strategy is a task that takes like all day, all week, all month, all year. We'll jump into question five here. How has AI already affected the competitive landscape between accounting firms for better and for worse? And how do you expect it will further affect it in 2026? So AI is going to be like cloud where it's going to allow firms that adopt it to do more for less for their clients. So you'll be able to offer a better service for a lower price and undercut your competition and take their clients. That's what I did. I was able to offer a superior bookkeeping service, better client experience for far less than the firms in LA with their brick and mortar offices. So same thing. I think that's true, too. It's going to be the equalizer, right? Less qualified people are going to be offered the same service as a highly qualified person for lower price. You're saying I wasn't qualified? No, I'm saying you're-- well, you were a brand-new bookkeeper. Why would I go to you, right? I wasn't a CPA, yeah, that's true. You weren't a CPA, you were new. You didn't have a lot of experience, but used technology to bridge that gap. I used technology, yeah. We'll be there. Yeah, that's true. The AI answer is really good on this. Excuse me. This-- I mean, you've been hammering on. Firms are strong processes and clean data and good trading are accelerating. Firms that rely on heroics and tribal knowledge are getting exposed. So this is the answer, which I thought was really, really important. In 2026, expect speed is a dimfrient shader. So faster closed cycles turn around times responsiveness. You've talked about this a lot, Mike. Can you-- how do you communicate with your clients faster through text, et cetera? Package services is becoming more common. So fixed fee type services, right? It's going to be a bundle and a package getting away from the bill of hour. Marketing, content, advantage for firms. So firms can produce more high-quality thought leadership more consistently. You don't be pairing up with companies like you or Mark to help you with that. And then this is going to-- AIM processes, those firms that have both, are going to pull away from everybody else. Is it's other prediction on what to expect on 2026? Not bad. Question six. How many questions do we have? There is six and seven, eight. So that was the last three questions. All right, we're going to-- let's blast three of these. You blast three. How has AI already affected the cost for accounting firms for better or worse? And would you expect it will further affect costs in 2026? It's going to increase the cost of technology spending that's been on the upward swing. We spend a lot on AI tools. But it's going to reduce payroll costs or keep it steady. We're not going to have to hire more people. It's funny. AI gave an answer that basically said, until AI can own the full workflow, the whole stack, that it doesn't really want to answer the question in. Because it can do all these small things. It can reconcile and it can detect anomalies here. It can do all these pieces of accounting, but not enough to impact the cost in a direct way. You can't replace a whole department or a whole set of employees. So then ultimately, until there's lower air rates in the real world, it's not really going to affect the cost. It was the AI answer. I jumped to number eight. That was seven, amen. Seven. We often hear that AI cannot wholesale replace a staff accountant. What would you need to see happen before you would reconsider this stance? Think in terms of an entry level hire. The tasks it can accomplish with 100% accuracy need to increase a lot. I mean, it would need to be able to do tasks that take like an hour or more. And it will be able to do that, but not for, at the current trend, not for several years. So it's not going to happen in 2026. And the other reason why it won't happen is because it doesn't have enough context. Yes. AI agents need access to like all the data that a staff accountant would, which includes like the information in people's heads in the office. Or who should I ask, or where should I go next, or what number should I call? Yeah, or talking to the client, you know, like, and clients aren't going to want to talk to an AI chat bot because have you tried that yet, David? It's like, when you call up customer service and you get an AI, it's like more frustrating than a call center. Yeah. Well, honestly, actually, no. Based on my last interaction with Cox, I would say that the call center was, I would have preferred an AI agent. But it's like not, it's on par, right? It's not great. Yeah, it's not like call centers or been the great experience anyways for years and years. Yeah. All right, let's jump skip it on to number eight. What would you need to get genuinely worried about whether AI could do wholesale replace you specifically and personally you at your job? Oh, me. Well, as an accounting. So like the video generation, AI video generation is getting better and better and better. And so there's a point at which like, and I'm already getting pitched this where people are like, Hey, we can make videos of you to post on like TikTok and Instagram and you don't even do anything. Like we will just make the videos using your image and you pay us, right? And so and it looks so real that people can't tell the difference. So like that is something that could replace me. But at the same time, I own my image and likeness. So like that's great. I own the IP. Now, as an accountant, if I put my accounting hat on, yeah, it's the same thing. It's the same answer as the last question. AI has to have more context and it has to be more reliable for longer tasks and it will never be able to completely own the process itself because a human needs to observe and correct. And this is where this whole series of questions makes me want to scream, right? Because I don't think anybody on the list is actually using AI to do a accounting or bookkeeping. They're all thought influencers accounting and thought leaders. David, that's why you and I do our own bookkeeping. Yes, I have to stay in the weeds. Other than Donnie Shimamoto, he might be the only person in that list that I think still maybe is in the weeds doing some accounting work. I don't know, I don't know for sure. But I think of all the people, because so many people are partners and CEOs, they're not doing bookkeeping them. They're not doing accounting work. They're probably definitely not doing audit work at this point. But what I've shocked is nobody predicted that AI could take their jobs. Like they're all in a role that is invincible from AI, which is so naive. So if your job is like being employed at a company to say words to fill space and time, then yeah, your job has been already automated by AI. Somebody else can do your job. Well, they just don't have your brand, right? The answers from our AI thought leader are just as good as any of the answers that were provided to accounting today, including Ores Blake. They were just as good as that. Tell me, okay, what's the answer? What's the answer that Chatchee PT gave to this question? What would you need to see to be generally worried about, genuinely worried about whether AI could wholesale replace you specifically and personally at your job? Okay, so this is AI remember pretending it is an accounting influencer. I'll give you the summary answer. Right now my mode is context plus judgment plus trust plus communication. Context plus judgment plus trust plus communication. Okay. But as each one of those become commoditized, then it would start learning. Okay, so context, we don't really have that issue right now because there's a lot of work to be done to connect these AI agents to all the systems. And it's not going to get into people's heads. So it'd have to be able to talk to people well enough which doesn't do very well right now. What are the other ones, judgment? AI does not have judgment. Does not have judgment. It's like the, and that will not exist based on the current technology. The current technology, like AI is not conscious, does not have judgment. What's the next one? Trust. Now trust is a funny one because trust is defined. Like currently it's kind of defined by dogma. It's like regulators, insurers, firms, right? Are they willing to trust and sign, let own the AI conclusions? Well, so the trust is rooted in dogma. Essentially. Well, I don't know what you mean by dogma. What do you mean by that? Like it's just wolves. We have to live by like somebody said this. We will do this on this day because of this, you know, it's on a tablet somewhere, right? Well, to me, the source of trust in the profession is that we hold a license. CPAs, NEAs have our licensed and CMAs have a, well, not a license but a certification. But we have these, we have this piece of paper, right? That we work hard to earn. And if we don't uphold the ethics rules, if we are not ethical, then that could be taken away from us. So we are putting our license on the line when we, in our reputation, actually, it's more of our, it's even more reputation because the regulators suck, honestly, at like taking away licenses from dishonest accountants, right? So it's the reputation that keeps us, that keeps the public trusting us. And the public could learn to trust an AI, that's possible. Like somebody could create a super intelligent audit AI. And then you have like an audit firm that's run by an AI, or at least all of the audit is like supervised, signed off on, managed by some sort of AI. I think actually the public might trust that more than they trust the big four. But what would be even better would be a human, paired with that AI. And then the public trust that combination, because that combination is the most trustworthy, right? You've got a human putting their reputation, their license, their integrity, their professional, their career on the line, saying this is true. And they've got an AI backing them up with like the AI report. Yeah. What was the last one? Oh, communication. Yeah, communication. Although I think that's the one that AI is the best at. AI is way better at communicating than most accountants at this point. Because accounts don't learn how to communicate in school. We suck at it. And that's why that's my favorite application. It's because it helps you to be an incredible communicator. I mean, this is great, because you've talked about how small businesses are using AI, right? In the previous article you talked about, right? And you said that they're putting it all quick books, uploading it, and they're getting, what was your words? Good enough answer. So I'm going to read, 'cause they're not, something that weren't getting before, right? They're getting insights that we're not being provided to them. So I'm going to read the AI thought leader response here. Relationship and judgment get productized. If clients stop valuing my synthesis, prioritization and judgment, and instead accept AI-generated advice as good enough, even in ambiguous scenarios, that's when you're going to feel like you're replaced, or you could be replaced. Right. And that's the thing is, that's what AI will fill is. The gap in the market where accountants aren't providing the service. And there's a lot. There's a big gap. And there aren't enough of us. Yeah, but I think the issue I have with this whole article from accounting to the survey is the accounting thought leaders, none of them basically think their job can be replaced, which is crazy. Because essentially AI can at least do the thought leader job. Have you heard any of us do other jobs in your firm? Hey David, maybe we should try and experiment. Did you, have you read about these like AI, AI movie stars, or AI created like influencers now? So no of. Yeah, so basically there's this business, this thriving business now of artists and entrepreneurs who are creating AI influencers. Oh, we're going to create AI influencer bots. Right. So it'll have its own podcasts. Let's make an AI accounting influencer. We do this. And see if we can build its following to eclipse that of those real influencers. This could be a fun little spring project for us. And then we could make sponsorship deals with companies to sponsor, yeah, to be a brand influencer. It'll send out a newsletter once a month. People are always asking us, do you have a newsletter I can sponsor? You know, I don't have a newsletter. David, Jason Statz needs some competition. Let's give him some. Stop. OK. All right, so that's it with the survey. Awesome. I just wish people would reconcile like that. The mundane task driven stuff is probably the hardest stuff to for AI to do. And the thought leader and summarizing of data is the easiest thing for AI to do. And there's a disconnect because the people that do that work don't think AI is coming for their job. They think it's going to take them mundane. Because it's that typical lead us. That's always been the accounting issue. Well, I'm the CPA. You're just a bookkeeper. I'm better than you. Which has been there since 30 years ago and I was taking tech support calls at QuickBooks. It's always been there. And the reality is, it's a completely opposite. I think people are completely missing what's really going to be replaced by AI. It's not going to be the boring and mundane. That's so far away. David, let's think our next sponsor. And it is tax bandits. If you're feeling the pressure of juggling 1099s, W2s, and ACA 1095 forms, listen up. Tax bandits is the solution you've been waiting for. They've got over a decade of experience and support 100 plus tax forms, including everything from your 9.4X series to those tricky state filings. Tax bandits handles both federal and state e-filing seamlessly, so your set, no matter how many states your clients operate in. Tax bandits is IRS certified, meaning they offer instant processing of your forms and provide real-time status updates, ensuring accuracy and eliminating the risk of B notices. For additional peace of mind, tax bandits goes a step further with 10 matching USPS address validation and the Bandit Commitment. They're promised to stand by your filings. 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That is accountingpodcast.promo/taxbndits. - Blake, you want me to cover my article about how you'll spend just as much time managing your AI agents as you currently do on your human beings? - As soon as I tell you about the two numbers that you must-- - That's the two numbers, that's right, the two numbers of measurement. - The two numbers that you need to focus on as a firm owner, according to Ryan Lazanis, who owned a firm and now coaches firm owners in his future firm community, puts out a podcast, a newsletter that I love to read. And I really like this because it's the alternative to looking at people's billable hours and top line revenue. Ryan says that when he built his firm, he focused on just two numbers. Bottom line profits, not broken down by client or service, just the overall cash that lands in the account. Bottom line profit, not broken down by client or service. He's looking at-- - Which is similar to what you talked about when that's the one the first thing Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple. - Yes. - It doesn't matter how much money we make in the Apple pencil and the iPad separately, it's all of Apple. How many we can do everything? - He got rid of all the segment reporting so that Apple could just focus on bottom line profitability. The other number to focus on is monthly recurring revenue, whether clients paid recurring fees that contributed to predictable income. So he's looking at two numbers, the recurring revenue number and the bottom line profit. He is not breaking it down by client. He's not looking at individual job profitability. He is not looking at one service line versus another like tax versus bookkeeping. And he says that firm owners are wasting their time by focusing on billable hours, utilization rates and time spent per client. It doesn't matter if a client takes five or 15 hours a month, only whether their recurring fee was profitable over the course of the year. So this is important. It's not that he isn't looking at client profitability but he's looking at it over a long time span the whole year. Who cares how many hours he spent in January versus February versus March? What matters is did you as a firm make money on the client over the year? - 'Cause a client could be a headache for a six week period but then they could go five months and not be a headache at all but they're still paying you the same amount of money and you're barely touching them or dealing with them. And your costs are fixed. So your people are a fixed cost, the amount of hours they spend has no impact on your profitability. The only thing you need to look out for is whether or not your capacity is being used up by a client that's too demanding because you could take those hours and bring on per taps and other client. That's the only time it matters. - You don't have to track time to figure that out. You just go to your team and say who's the biggest pain they ask client and they're gonna tell you, you don't have to track out for months to figure out the clients that are eating up your profits. - Exactly, exactly. So if you want to become more productive, if you wanna do more for your clients, for less while making more money, which is what you totally can do with cloud and AI, you have to change the mindset of your firm so you're not focused on top line billable hours revenue and utilization rates. You cannot motivate people to do more when what happens is that they just get more billable hours or they get more clients. There is like no incentive to be more productive under a billable hours model when you're already maxed out. So that's my practice management tip for 2026. Why don't you tell us, David, about why managing AI takes just as much time as managing humans? - See, I need AI that would have put my phone on, do not disturb 'cause it just. - Just went on. - Just went on. - Just went on. - Actually, David, we're gonna have to wait for that because I have a call to jump to, I'm sorry. - Oh. - And so we will resume this next week. Thank you everyone for tuning in. You've been listening to the accounting podcast. You can earn free CPE for this podcast and many other fine accounting techs podcasts on the earmark app. Go to earmark.app and your web browser, download the free earmark app from the app store, start earning one free CPE every week and get your CPE requirement done for free with earmark. And thank you to everyone who signed up. We had a record December, David, like the chart is just up until the right. - 2500 people or 25 certificates were issued in the last 12 hours of the year. People literally wait till the last second to get their CPE, it blows my mind. - 'Cause you can use earmark for free. - Don't do it, start now. - It's January, get it done once week for free. And if you wanna support us, subscribe for a subscriber-only content and to support the work we do for the low, low price of currently $170 a year. All right, David, I will see you here next week. Thanks everyone who tuned in. Bye. (upbeat music)