Latest / The Accounting Podcast / Can AI Replace “Thought Leaders”? A 2026 Reality Check

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Can AI Replace “Thought Leaders”? A 2026 Reality Check · The Accounting Podcast

• Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding! David Leary: [00:00:04] The accounting thought leaders. None of them, none of them basically think their job could 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. Blake Oliver: [00:00:20] Hello and welcome back to The Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver. David Leary: [00:00:26] And I'm David Leary. Blake Oliver: [00:00:28] And welcome to our first episode of 2026. David, how was your time off? How was your new year? David Leary: [00:00:35] Years? I went to Napa, which is a whole nother lesson of expensive, like, every like even in the morning. We just want coffees and a bagel. You know, you're in for $80. Like it's very expensive place to be. Uh, it's apparently it's the second most, um, visited place in California, behind Disneyland. Wow. Napa is. Blake Oliver: [00:00:55] Never been. I've never been myself. I've been to wine country, but Napa specifically. So, um, well, glad you had a good time, even though your pocketbook may be a little light. David Leary: [00:01:03] 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 always how you get. That's how they really get you those. Wait, wait. Blake Oliver: [00:01:13] You went to Napa and you didn't taste wine? David Leary: [00:01:16] No. We did. Uh, it was somebody's birthday, so we'd like a spa day. We did New Year's, some dinners, you know, 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. This is. Blake Oliver: [00:01:27] Only. You 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. Uh, 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. Um, I've got this story about, uh, Trump and a commutation, if that's how you say it, of David Gentiles fraud sentence. Like, uh, 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 Today Year Ahead 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 thank our sponsors, our sponsors. David Leary: [00:02:37] This week we have uh, two new sponsors. We have uncW Kenan-flagler Business School for their Macc program. We have on pay and we have tax bandits. Blake Oliver: [00:02:46] Fantastic. David Leary: [00:02:48] So let's face it, the job 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 2026 faster than most other professions. That's where uncW Kenan-flagler Master of Accounting program comes in. It's one of the top ranked, top ranked Macc programs in the country, with 98% of the students accepting a job offer within three months of graduation and earning more than those with just a bachelor's degree. If you're currently working full time raising children, serving in the armed forces, or living halfway around the world, they're highly flexible. Macc program can also fit your lifestyle. You can choose their 12 month on campus program, evening courses, their online only option, and you have up to 36 months to complete your degree. Plus, you'll join the powerful 46,000 strong UNC Kenan-flagler Alumni network connections that will serve you throughout your career. If you want to set yourself up for a lifelong career, pick the Macc program with the proven ROI. To see why you should get your Master's in Accounting at the UNC Kenan-flagler Business School, head over to Accounting Today. That is accounting Podcast promo for monk. Blake Oliver: [00:03:57] David, I want to talk about how small business owners use AI. 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 LLM, AI tool and notebook. Llm 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. David Leary: [00:05:41] Money he's going to save is he's going to not need to pay his accountant for advisory work. Blake Oliver: [00:05:46] Except he wasn't before. David Leary: [00:05:47] He wasn't before. Blake Oliver: [00:05:48] Okay, that's the interesting part because very few accountants serving Main Street businesses like this actually will do that kind of work for a price that these business owners want to pay. Yeah, 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, QuickBooks 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 going to add is the oversight. Checking the numbers, making sure it actually makes sense. And they don't make bad decisions based on, uh, what do we call it, work slop or hallucinations? David Leary: [00:07:01] Hallucinations? Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:07:02] Yeah. David Leary: [00:07:03] That makes a lot of sense. I know I posted something on LinkedIn that I basically just said AI is never going to do bookkeeping. I'll die on this hill. And it got a lot of momentum. And I paste it in my efforts to upload an invoice to a, a portal so we could get paid. Blake and I would argue that is bookkeeping, like all this a lot. So much of this AI and these apps are like, well, it's matching. Matching the bank feeds is not bookkeeping. That's just matching. Right. Blake Oliver: [00:07:29] Categorization. Yeah. David Leary: [00:07:30] And that is not accounting. Accounting is I got an invoice that I have to send to somebody. So they pay me or submit it or whatever it might be. Right. And it's a comedy of errors. But my, my point is, is it's never going to be able to do all of that. And, you know, people disagree with me. Some people agree with me. You know the threads everywhere. But one of the things that people said is like, oh yeah, because the point of view that constantly gets brought up is AI is going to do the bookkeeping, the mundane, the 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 is really good at summarizing lots of disparate data that's everywhere and bringing it to a concise story. Blake Oliver: [00:08:10] Yes, it's good at synthesizing, right? It takes. David Leary: [00:08:14] That's the magic. Blake Oliver: [00:08:14] Word. All this, all this information that's all over the place. And it finds patterns, patterns and trends and it surfaces those to us and, 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. That's what we should be using it for. Yeah. David Leary: [00:08:47] And for sure quicker. Right. Blake Oliver: [00:08:48] Exactly. David Leary: [00:08:49] Way faster than you're going to be able to do it. Blake Oliver: [00:08:51] So so like you said, David, these these developers, these tech people, just these so-called thought leaders are all focused on how AI is going to 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 and they can't afford it. David Leary: [00:09:16] I remember Liveplan. Um, remember Liveplan it was like a they're really big in QuickBooks. They still exist, but they were really going after the QuickBooks ProAdvisor market. And they were they built all this training. They tried to teach QuickBooks ProAdvisor and bookkeepers, bookkeepers how to do advisory work. Blake Oliver: [00:09:31] How to do business plans. David Leary: [00:09:32] 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 is very hard to teach somebody to do. But now all those bookkeepers can basically offer that with AI, like just offer it out of the box and charge for that additional service. But I don't think I, I don't think that AI is freeing up your time to do that work yourself. And that's what we'll get into the thought leader survey here. Let's talk about thought leaders. Think it does. Blake Oliver: [00:10:03] Okay. This is a perfect transition. Perfect transition. So Accounting Today sent out a survey to a list of people in the profession. Thought leaders. David Leary: [00:10:12] 35 or so thought leaders. Okay. Put quotes around that. Um, and they broke it up into a four part four articles on Accounting Today. So they really strung this survey out. Uh, the titles of the articles are as follows. What will I 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. Um, and I also think, you know, that the thought leaders, almost all the views were aligned. There was no dissenters in this. It was very like a lot of the answers were the same answers from the same thought leaders. And most of it's the typical talk we've been hearing for a decade. It's going to give more time to do advisory, blah, blah, blah. You have to shift to advisory. It's the same sentences they all said about cloud accounting, right? You got to 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 this survey. Blake Oliver: [00:11:16] Well, that's my fault. Uh, I got back to work yesterday, and in my inbox was the questionnaire for the survey. I forgot to send it in, so. David Leary: [00:11:26] Oh, so you got asked. At least you were. You were. Your thoughts might have been valued by somebody. Blake Oliver: [00:11:31] They were. Um. And it's it's my fault. But, hey, here's the great thing, David. You can ask me the questions and I can just, uh, respond to them here on the air. David Leary: [00:11:40] Yeah. So not only that, but I'm going to 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 going to 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 going to compare and contrast 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. Blake Oliver: [00:12:13] Ooh, okay. So what was the consensus? David Leary: [00:12:18] Well, the consensus wasn't what AI said. Blake Oliver: [00:12:20] Okay. So what was the human consensus? What was what the human say? David Leary: [00:12:24] Well, I want your answers, though. Blake Oliver: [00:12:25] Oh, you want my answers. David Leary: [00:12:26] We want your answers. Blake Oliver: [00:12:27] 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 I've already said it. It's the drafting of the financial statement narrative that is already being done. There was 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. David Leary: [00:12:53] I mean, the in general, the thought leaders answers are it's the mundane, boring task. Blake Oliver: [00:12:59] Well, yeah, that's wrong. David Leary: [00:13:01] And yeah, it is exactly wrong. So here's what AI SaaS already been. Blake Oliver: [00:13:04] That stuff's already been automated. See, that's the thing is, like, you can already automate all of that transaction matching and categorization with rules non AI tools. Yeah. David Leary: [00:13:14] Yeah. So so so AI here's the answer I gave. And I thought it was actually pretty on point. So bank credit card coding right. Blake Oliver: [00:13:22] But we already do that with rules. David Leary: [00:13:24] It's already kind of yeah it's kind of getting done already. Um AI is going to learn to do a firm slash client coding patterns. Blake Oliver: [00:13:33] What's that mean? David Leary: [00:13:34] They're going to be able to take messy merchant strings and put it into consistent categories. Blake Oliver: [00:13:38] That's the same thing as number one. David Leary: [00:13:40] Yeah, exactly the same thing. Number one. Um, the one thing that was exactly what you said, quote unquote, drafting the narrative. Blake Oliver: [00:13:47] Yeah. Oh, good, I was right. David Leary: [00:13:48] Yeah. Drafting the narrative. Um, and then, uh, the other piece of this, like, humans will still review the exceptions, right? You're going to have still have humans. They're not they're not saying on this question humans are going to be gone. But let's go to question two. Conversely, what is an accounting task or process that you are confident will still mainly be done by humans in 2026? Blake Oliver: [00:14:12] Oh, 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 ten minutes is still going to be done by a human. David Leary: [00:14:25] You're basically on time. Okay. Blake Oliver: [00:14:26] Right. Because I've brought up this idea on the show a lot. Yeah. David Leary: [00:14:30] What's that? That that metric. Blake Oliver: [00:14:33] 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 that take about 4 or 5 minutes. And that's doubling every seven months. So in 2026, we should be able to do tasks that take ten minutes, maybe 20. Between 10 and 20. Maybe ten, 15. You know what I mean? Like it's this is just just for reference. Um, so maybe we get to that point in 2026, but like, it's not going to 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 going to also then have humans checking all the work, which then sort of negates the time savings of having the AI do the work, because checking the work takes just as long as 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 like just delegating completely. It's going to be tasks that are under ten 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 a ramp and ramps, uh, 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. David Leary: [00:16:39] So I think the in general, the consensus is all the human things, like, oh, the human relationship with the client. Ai is not going to do that. Like there's some history of accountants being great at the soft skills, right? So and then the other consensus is really the, um, all the stuff that historically is, well, it can't sign off on an audit like all these. Blake Oliver: [00:17:01] Not yet. David Leary: [00:17:02] Industry constraints that these rules that have just been dogma. That's the word I want dogma, right? All the dogma, it can't. It's not allowed to do this because of the dogma right now. Ai said it's going to be for some of the judgment calls like, should we accrue this, um, material materiality, right. And risk. But I even think some of that maybe the AI answers are wrong, because I think you're going to use that to help you come to your conclusion. Blake Oliver: [00:17:26] I think, um, AI would be great for determining materiality, for determining sample sizes, for all of this, like, um, all of this. It's like judgment based work, but it's highly numbers based. And I don't, I don't, I don't I don't know. David Leary: [00:17:47] The answer really answered this in one concise sentence. I really like AI can draft options. Humans will still be the ones who decide, defend and communicate. Blake Oliver: [00:17:57] So if they were doing that in the first place. Yeah, but see, most humans, most humans don't decide and, uh, determine and make judgment calls. Like, there's a lot of humans that are just, you know, pushing numbers around. David Leary: [00:18:10] Yeah, these are AI influencers. Hopefully they're they're beyond average humans. All right. Let's go to question three, which is actually I had to divide it in two parts because it doesn't fit all on the screen at the same time. So I'll read both back to back. 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So basically the 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. Blake Oliver: [00:20:25] Well, it depends how the firm is measuring the performance of its employees. David Leary: [00:20:30] If the answer. Blake Oliver: [00:20:31] If the firm is using timesheets, then the employee doesn't make any more money because the employees revenue and contribution to the firm is capped. And if the firm uses better metrics to track the employees contribution, then you can, uh, you can recognize it and pay more for it. David Leary: [00:20:53] So the, uh, the consensus did not touch on the billable hour. 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, because that's the way accounting firms really are. Blake Oliver: [00:21:05] 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. David Leary: [00:21:15] Those would be. Blake Oliver: [00:21:15] Bad. They might actually under that model, you should pay the AI employees less because they're working less. David Leary: [00:21:20] Yes. Blake Oliver: [00:21:21] Yeah. David Leary: [00:21:23] So. So the AI answer on this. Blake Oliver: [00:21:25] Um, so you ChatGPT is answer. David Leary: [00:21:27] Chatgpt is answer on this, uh, is not fully aligned with yours, because I don't think ChatGPT actually has the context of how accounting firms really run. Right. Blake Oliver: [00:21:36] I'm sure it does. I'm sure it does, but maybe just not in the context of this question. David Leary: [00:21:40] That's the question, right? So AI or ChatGPT 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 good in firms that actively measure throughput and leverage. So firms that measure outputs, yes, this person's going to be promoted, but where it's still tenure title driven band or like you said, the hourly, um, how many hours they bill for they're going to be paid less. They're not going to get paid more than the other person. Blake Oliver: [00:22:13] Okay. So I have a follow up story or a related story to this about the two numbers to focus on in 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. David Leary: [00:22:34] All right. Cue that up. So we're going to get the last the last four questions. And then we'll jump into that okay. All right. Question number four. What parts of your own job which you used to do yourself have now been largely automated via AI. And what has come to fill the time you've saved? Blake Oliver: [00:22:50] Oh, this is going to be kind of embarrassing, David. Okay, 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 ever used to do. Like a like what a research assistant would do for me. Like somebody like, if we had a producer on the show, that or a research assistant on this show, like, it creates that, it creates like a short social media type summary of the story. Um, that saves me hours and hours and hours every week. And then I've even built a ghost writer 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 a 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. David Leary: [00:24:10] Perfect. Blake Oliver: [00:24:11] 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 I don't I don't do any of that anymore. It's like I have a team that does that for me. Like I'm like 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 of honestly, like, I, I, I started working out and I just am enjoying life healthier. I'm really I'm not. What I should be doing is working harder to do better, but I've kind of just been enjoying the enjoying the time. David Leary: [00:24:48] You get healthier. Blake Oliver: [00:24:49] I got healthier, but you know what? This is the thing it's like, this is the thing about accounting is that like the the the biggest drawback to being in the 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 um, it's really interesting like work because it's always different. It different. It can always be different if you want it to be like so. So basically AI has made my job easy and fun. And yeah. David Leary: [00:25:27] 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. Blake Oliver: [00:25:47] Well, that's not but. David Leary: [00:25:48] Ai to pivot. It's like pivot. Blake Oliver: [00:25:50] Strategy actually is something that AI can like really help with. David Leary: [00:25:54] Yeah. And and I think that AI, the AI accounting thought leader answer is actually really on track. I'm just gonna read the whole thing. Blake Oliver: [00:26:02] So you're talking about the ChatGPT response. David Leary: [00:26:03] The ChatGPT. Yeah. The the the the fake, the AI accounting, uh, thought leader. Um, 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 into usable sop's or training docs. Generating first pass checklists. Review procedures. Essentially, the summary is less typing, more thinking, but all the the consensus of the people that were asked, they they almost think like their job is not like there. Well, I'm at the higher level, the strategy or the thinking level or decision making level in my firm. I'm a CEO. I'm this AI to replace the peons jobs. Blake Oliver: [00:26:50] That's true. So AI cannot replace the decision maker's job. And we see this in like, um, these experiments that have been done with creating like company stores that are run by AI story in the Wall Street Journal, uh, recently about how the Wall Street Journal had 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. David Leary: [00:27:20] We did a Microsoft story around this. Blake Oliver: [00:27:21] Yeah. 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 like there has to be somebody overseeing the AI and correcting it and keeping it on course. And so in a sense, like 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 ten minutes or less. Strategy is a task that takes like all day, all week, all month, all year. David Leary: [00:28:24] Well, jump into question five here. How is AI already affected the competitive landscaping landscape between accounting firms, for better and for worse, and how do you expect it will further affect it in 2026? Blake Oliver: [00:28:37] Mhm. 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. David Leary: [00:29:16] 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. Blake Oliver: [00:29:25] You're saying I wasn't qualified? David Leary: [00:29:27] No, I'm not saying you're. Well, you were you were a brand new bookkeeper. Like, why would I go to you? Right. Blake Oliver: [00:29:30] I wasn't a CPA yet. David Leary: [00:29:31] That's true. Cpa, you were new. You didn't have a lot of experience, but you use technology to bridge that gap. Blake Oliver: [00:29:37] I used technology. David Leary: [00:29:38] Yeah, we'll be there. Blake Oliver: [00:29:39] Yeah. That's true. David Leary: [00:29:40] The AI answer is really good on this. Excuse me. Um, this is something you've been hammering on. Firms with 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, uh, important in 2026. Expect speed as a differentiator. So faster closed cycles, turnaround times, responsiveness. You've talked about this a lot like can you? How do you communicate with your clients faster through text, etc. packaged 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 billable hour. Marketing content advantage for firms so firms can produce more high quality thought leadership more consistently. You know, pairing up with companies like earmark to help you with that. Um, and then this is going to AI and processes. Those firms that are have both are going to pull away from everybody else. Is its other prediction on what to expect in 2026. Not bad. Blake Oliver: [00:30:40] Question six how many questions do we have? David Leary: [00:30:43] Uh, there is six and seven. Eight. So the last three questions. Blake Oliver: [00:30:48] All right, we're gonna let's blast through these. David Leary: [00:30:50] How is AI already affected the cost for accounting firms, for better or worse. And what do you expect it will further affect costs in 2026. Blake Oliver: [00:30:58] 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. David Leary: [00:31:13] Yeah. 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 yet because it can do all these small things. It can reconcile some end to end. 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. Um, so then ultimately, until there's lower error rates in the real world, it's not really going to affect the cost. It was the AI answer. I jump to number eight. Uh, that was seven. Blake Oliver: [00:31:52] You mean. David Leary: [00:31:52] 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 things and think in terms of an entry level hire. Blake Oliver: [00:32:06] The tasks it can accomplish with 100% accuracy. Need to increase a lot. I mean we need it would 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 account would, which includes like the information in people's heads in the office. David Leary: [00:32:42] And who should I ask? Or where should I go next? Or what number should I call? Blake Oliver: [00:32:46] Yeah. Or talking to the client. You know, like. And clients aren't going to want to talk to an AI chatbot 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. David Leary: [00:33:15] Yeah. It's not like call centers are been the great experience anyways for years and years. Blake Oliver: [00:33:21] Yeah. David Leary: [00:33:21] All right let's jump skip on to number eight. What would you need to get genuinely worried about whether AI could do wholesale? Could wholesale replace you specifically and personally? You at your job. Blake Oliver: [00:33:33] Oh, me. Um, well. David Leary: [00:33:36] As an accounting. Blake Oliver: [00:33:38] So like the 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 have to 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. Um, now as an accountant, if I put my accounting hat on, I'm to. 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. David Leary: [00:34:38] 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 accounting or bookkeeping. They're all thought, thought influencers, accounting thought leaders. Blake Oliver: [00:34:54] David, that's why you and I do our own bookkeeping. David Leary: [00:34:57] 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, they're not doing accounting work. They're probably definitely not doing audit work at this point. But what I was shocked is nobody predicted that AI could take their jobs. Like they're all in a role that, like, is invincible from AI, which is. Blake Oliver: [00:35:27] Oh well. David Leary: [00:35:28] So naive, so. Blake Oliver: [00:35:29] Naive. If your job, if your job is like being employed at a company to like, say words to fill space and time, then yeah, your job has been already automated by AI. Somebody else can do your job well, like, they just they just don't have your brand, right? David Leary: [00:35:47] The answers from our AI thought leader are just as good as any of the answers that were provided to accounting today, including Urs Blake. They were just. Blake Oliver: [00:35:55] Tell me, okay, what's the answer? What's the answer that ChatGPT 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? David Leary: [00:36:06] Okay, so this is AI. Remember pretending it is an accounting influencer. I'll give you a summary answer right now. My moat is context plus judgment plus trust plus communication. Blake Oliver: [00:36:18] Context plus. David Leary: [00:36:20] Judgment. Judgment plus trust plus communication. Blake Oliver: [00:36:23] Okay. David Leary: [00:36:25] Um, but as each one of those become commoditized, then it would start worrying. Blake Oliver: [00:36:31] 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. Um, well enough, which doesn't do very well right now. What are the other ones? Judgment. Judgment does not have judgment. David Leary: [00:36:50] Does not have judgment. Blake Oliver: [00:36:51] 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? David Leary: [00:37:00] Uh, trust. Now, trust is a funny one because trust is defined. Like currently it's kind of defined by, um, dogma. It's like regulators, insurers, firms. Right. Are they willing to trust and sign let own the AI. Uh, conclusions. Blake Oliver: [00:37:20] Well, so the trust is rooted in dogma. David Leary: [00:37:23] Essentially. Blake Oliver: [00:37:24] I don't know what you mean by dogma. What do you mean by that? David Leary: [00:37:26] Like, it's just rules. We have to live by, like like somebody said this. We will do this on this day because of this. You know, it's the it's on a tablet somewhere, right? It's like a commandment to me. Blake Oliver: [00:37:37] The, the the source of trust in the profession is that we hold a license. Cpas and IAS have are 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 worked 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 our reputation because the regulators suck honestly at like taking away licenses from dishonest accountants. Right? So it's the reputation, um, 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, uh, their career on the line saying, this is true. And they've got an AI backing them up with like, the AI report. David Leary: [00:39:25] Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:39:26] What was the last one? David Leary: [00:39:27] Oh, uh, communication. Blake Oliver: [00:39:29] Yeah, communication. Although I think that's the one the AI is the best at. Ai is way better at communicating than most accountants at this point, because accountants don't learn how to communicate in school. We suck at it. Uh, and that's why, like, that's my favorite application is because it helps you to be an incredible communicator. David Leary: [00:39:52] This is great because you 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 QuickBooks uploading it and they're getting. What was your words good enough answer. So I'm going to read. Blake Oliver: [00:40:08] Because they're not something they weren't getting before right. They're getting insights that were not being provided to them. David Leary: [00:40:13] 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. Blake Oliver: [00:40:33] 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. David Leary: [00:40:44] Yeah. And but I think the issue I have with this whole article from Accounting Today. The survey is the accounting thought leaders. None of them, none of them basically think their job could be replaced. Which is crazy because essentially AI can at least do the thought leader job. Have you heard these will do other jobs in your firm? Blake Oliver: [00:41:03] Hey, David, maybe we should try an experiment. Did you have you read about these, like, um, AI. Ai, movie stars or AI created like influencers now. David Leary: [00:41:17] So I know of. Blake Oliver: [00:41:18] Yeah. So basically, there's this, this business, this thriving business now of artists and entrepreneurs who are creating AI influencers. David Leary: [00:41:30] To create AI influencer bot. This is genius. So it'll have its own podcast. Blake Oliver: [00:41:34] Let's make an AI accounting influencer. David Leary: [00:41:37] What do you do. Blake Oliver: [00:41:37] This and see if we can build its following to eclipse that of those real influencers. David Leary: [00:41:47] This could be a fun little spring project for us. Blake Oliver: [00:41:50] And then we could, you know, we could then and we could make sponsorship deals with companies. Right. To sponsor. Yeah. To be a brand influencer. David Leary: [00:41:58] It'll send out a newsletter once a month. People are always asking us, do you have a newsletter I can sponsor? I'm like, no, I don't have a newsletter. Blake Oliver: [00:42:04] You know, David Jason stats needs some competition. Let's give him some some. David Leary: [00:42:09] Okay. All right. So that's it with the survey. Um, awesome. I just 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 elitist that's always been the accounting industry. Well, I'm the CPA, you're just the bookkeeper. I'm better than you, which has been there since 30 years ago when I was taking tech support calls at QuickBooks. It's always been there. And the reality is it's 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. 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David Leary: [00:44:58] Thank 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. Blake Oliver: [00:45:07] As soon. David Leary: [00:45:08] As your human staff. Blake Oliver: [00:45:08] As I tell you about the two numbers that you must. David Leary: [00:45:11] Two numbers. That's right. The two numbers of measurement. Blake Oliver: [00:45:13] 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. David Leary: [00:45:59] Which is similar to what you talked about when. That's one of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple. Blake Oliver: [00:46:03] Yes. David Leary: [00:46:04] Like it doesn't matter how much money you make on the Apple Pencil and the iPad separately. It's it's all of Apple. Yes. On everything. Blake Oliver: [00:46:11] 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 5 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 you spent in January versus February versus March? What matters is did you, as a firm, make money on the client over the year? David Leary: [00:47:21] Because a client could be a headache for a six week period, but then they could go five months and not be headache at all, but they're still paying you the same amount of money, and you're barely touching them or dealing with them. Blake Oliver: [00:47:30] 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 perhaps another client. That's the only time it matters is when. David Leary: [00:47:54] You don't need to track. You don't have to track time to figure that out. You just go to your team and say, who's the biggest pain in the ass client? And they're going to tell you, you don't have to track hours for months to figure out the clients that are eating up your profits. Blake Oliver: [00:48:07] Exactly, exactly. So if you want to become more productive, if you want to 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. 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 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? David Leary: [00:49:05] See, I need AI that would have put my phone on Do Not Disturb because it just, uh, the alarm just went off. Stupid reason. Done. See. Blake Oliver: [00:49:14] Actually, David, we're gonna have to wait for that because I have a call to jump to. I'm sorry. David Leary: [00:49:18] Oh. Blake Oliver: [00:49:19] 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 tax podcasts on the earmark app. Go to earmark app in 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 and to the right. David Leary: [00:49:54] 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's it blows my mind because you. Blake Oliver: [00:50:05] Can't. David Leary: [00:50:05] Do it for free. Blake Oliver: [00:50:06] Don't do it. Start now. It's January. Get it done once week for free. And if you want to support us, subscribe for 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.