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How Do Accounting Firms Stay Valuable When Everyone Has the Same AI Tools?

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If polished output becomes as easy to produce as heating up dinner, what will clients still pay your accounting firm for?

David Leary calls this AI’s “microwave moment.” Anyone can get useful results without the setup that once required technical skill. But easier tools don’t guarantee better service. They can also send generic replies or change a database without asking.

In Episode 507 of The Accounting Podcast, David and co-host Blake Oliver explore what firms can offer when competitors (and clients) have similar tools. Their discussion points toward personal attention, accountable automation, professional judgment, and relationships beyond the deliverable.

When Useful AI Requires Less Setup

David tested Meta’s AI, Muse, while researching bar events before a Bills game in Los Angeles. It produced a polished, web-page-style schedule. Blake noted that Claude could create something similar if asked for an artifact. David’s point was that he hadn’t needed to ask.

“I didn’t have to create projects,” David said. “I didn’t have to configure background agents working. I didn’t have to ask for an artifact. I didn’t even know I wanted one.”

But Blake questioned the economics. Generating those results uses tokens, which cost money. David noted that basic use is free, with paid subscriptions available to heavier users, but both remained skeptical of Meta’s privacy promises.

Easier, faster work also raises a pricing question. Blake cited PwC partner Jeanelle Johnson, who said clients now expect some projects that took eight to ten weeks to take about four.

“If the time shrinks, what happens to the bill?” Blake asked. He expects consulting fees to fall unless firms deliver more value.

That pressure also affects how clients reach the firm.

Your Client’s AI May Become the Front Door

David asked Muse to book a haircut. It couldn’t because his barber only takes phone calls. He warned that firms without online booking may lose business when clients ask AI assistants to schedule appointments.

Blake imagined a firm with its own MCP server, which is a connection that lets AI assistants work with its systems. Clients could submit documents through their assistant. “No more portals, no more emails.” David pictured an agent finding tax documents in Google Drive, sending them to the accountant, booking an appointment, and paying.

These are future possibilities rather than a current firm setup. David also said he hadn’t connected Muse to his email or calendar because of privacy concerns.

The hosts disagreed about the platform risk. Expensify’s availability in Claude and Xero’s connections with ChatGPT and Claude worry David. He feels like vendors are “training your users to not open your app.” But Blake sees integration as necessary: “If they don’t, somebody else will do it.”

For Blake, AI assistants are becoming the main interface, like an operating system. But a convenient interface can’t replace personal attention.

Better Presentation Is Not Personal Service

After blood work, David received a generic cholesterol message recommending 30 to 60 minutes of daily exercise. His doctor already knows he exercises because they attend Orangetheory classes together. David suspects AI wrote the note, though he couldn’t confirm it.

His concern was that busy accountants would send similarly pointless replies. “Why did I hire this person just to send me a templated email?” Blake asked, capturing the client’s likely reaction.

Presentation still matters. A video Blake shared showed how companies once treated annual reports like carefully designed publications. He recommends firms make reports attractive enough that clients want to open them. David emphasized the experience, not simply making reports fun to look at.

That care should also extend to what AI can change behind the scenes.

Give Agents Limits and Develop Human Reviewers

Blake’s AI, acting through his administrator access, added a “pending” status to the hosts’ advertising database. David fixed it quickly, but said an unnoticed change could have caused calculation errors or overpayments. He reduced Blake’s access afterward.

Blake called it “a good lesson in internal controls.” For his own month-end close, he gives his AI agent a separate Xero login without administrator rights. Its actions appear separately in the audit trail. David agreed agents should have their own inboxes and logins so firms can track activity and control access.

Permissions address one problem. Developing judgment is harder.

Blake described PCAOB chair Jim Logothetis’s distinction between audit’s “science” (transaction work and procedures) and its “art” (skepticism, judgment, and industry knowledge). David wasn’t convinced, suggesting AI is good at those things too.

Blake pictured managers, directors, and partners supervising agents. When David asked where future reviewers would learn judgment, Blake answered, “By doing the work.” He then acknowledged the problem: “How do you make more reviewers if you don’t have preparers, and nobody’s figured that out yet.”

This was a forecast, but both hosts said they haven’t seen meaningful accounting job losses from AI. Blake argued that talent shortages could make AI an opportunity to do more with fewer people.

Even capable teams, though, need a reason for clients to choose them.

Build Something Beyond the Deliverable

Blake discussed Giles Pearson’s Accounting Today op-ed comparing AI in accounting with Spotify in music. Streaming gave musicians global distribution, but competitors gained the same access. Musicians had to build identities, audiences, and experiences beyond recordings.

Pearson warns adopting AI isn’t a strategy by itself. Early adopters may gain an edge, but that advantage fades as tools become widely available.

Blake endorsed Pearson’s advice to build community through seminars, roundtables, and client events. “What musicians today sell is the relationship,” he said. David added: “The experience.”

For firms, the challenge is to pair easier access and faster work with controls, judgment, and service clients recognize as personal.

Listen to Blake Oliver and David Leary discuss these trade-offs in Episode 507 of The Accounting Podcast.

Why Do Nearly Half of Occupational Fraud Cases Never Reach Law Enforcement?

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Caleb Newquist opens this episode with a confession. He spent about four hours online researching whether a raccoon could beat a goose in a fight. His verdict is the raccoon would probably win, though one Reddit thread made “a very compelling argument for the goose.” The trouble is that the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) lists “excessive internet browsing” as a behavioral red flag for fraud.

In this solo episode of Oh My Fraud, Caleb works through the ACFE’s 2026 Occupational Fraud Report to the Nations, which comes out every two years. (He and Greg Kyte covered the 2024 edition in Episode 58.) Tips uncover the most fraud, and Caleb suspects luck plays a bigger role than the numbers show. Nearly half of cases never reach law enforcement, so some fraudsters with clean records likely move on to new jobs and do it again.

A huge report about a tiny slice of fraud

The ACFE received more than 10,000 survey responses and used 2,402 of them. Those cases cover 143 countries and $3.4 billion in losses. To make the cut, a fraud had to be detected, investigated by a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) and completed, with no open cases. It also had to be the respondent’s single largest case. The report doesn’t include frauds nobody found and frauds a non-CFE handled.

The ACFE estimates worldwide occupational fraud at $5.5 trillion a year. That figure is a best guess, based on the assumption that organizations lose 5% of revenue to fraud. Even if it’s close, the report captures less than one-tenth of 1% of it.

“To say that’s a drop in the bucket is a flagrant disrespect to drops,” Caleb says. Still, the data comes from a credible organization, so it’s worth using. Just remember it describes a sliver of the problem.

Tips, dumb luck, and the 2% auditors

So how does fraud get found? Mostly because someone speaks up. Tips account for 43% of detections, three times the rate of the next method, internal audit. More tips now arrive through web forms or email than by phone. “The hotlines have gone online,” Caleb notes.

Another 4% of cases were caught by accident. Caleb thinks luck plays a bigger role than that. He suspects plenty of internal audit and management review catches involved someone stumbling onto something during their normal duties. Nobody calls that an accident, “but that’s still kind of lucky.”

External auditors caught just 2%. “Greg’s favorite external auditors are two percentage points less smart than fraudsters are dumb,” Caleb says. Auditors say their audits aren’t designed to find fraud. Still, they must obtain reasonable assurance that the financial statements are free of material misstatement “whether caused by fraud or error.”

Materiality means something is important enough that a reasonable investor would make a different decision. Caleb points to the SEC’s Staff Accounting Bulletin 99, which says auditors can’t dismiss an item on its dollar size alone. By that logic, he says, you could argue any fraud is material.

Surveillance and monitoring caught another 2%. That’s strange at a time when employers track mouse movements, badge scans and billable hours. Confession came last at 1%. “I look forward to the day when confessions are tied with external audits in fraud detection,” Caleb says.

Controls shrink losses but don’t stop fraud

The report’s flashiest prevention stat appears on page 39. The mere presence of an anti-fraud control cuts losses by 37%. Caleb isn’t impressed. “If a loss occurs, the control didn’t prevent the fraud.”

Fraud awareness training has a similar problem. “See something, say something” assumes people know what they’re looking at. Fraud doesn’t look like a guy loading fertilizer into a box truck. “Fraud is committed by dorks in frumpy business casual clothes or fast-talking deal makers, or the pastor of a megachurch,” Caleb says.

The basics are often missing too:

  • A lack of internal controls was the primary weakness in one-third of cases
  • A quarter of organizations with more than 100 employees have no anti-fraud policy, yet 95% have a code of conduct

Red flags aren’t a reliable backstop either. Sixteen percent of perpetrators showed no behavioral red flags. And gambling appears zero times in the report’s roughly 25,000 words.

The stakes rise with collusion and seniority. Median losses run $55,000 with one perpetrator, $125,000 with two and $324,000 with three or more. Frauds by male owners and executives have a $500,000 median.

Caught, then quietly released

Getting caught often doesn’t mean much. Only 75% of non-owner perpetrators were terminated. Six percent received a written or verbal warning, which Caleb translates as “hey, knock that shit off.” Four percent got no punishment at all.

Owners and executives fare even better. Only 52% were terminated, and 12% faced no punishment. “If you’re an owner of a business, it’s basically a coin flip,” Caleb says.

Some perpetrators simply leave. Jim Hammes from Episode 120 was confronted with evidence of his fraud in a meeting, walked out and never came back. Nathan Mueller, interviewed in Episode 28, excused himself to the bathroom mid-confrontation and didn’t return.

Even lawsuits can backfire. In 13% of civil cases, the result favored the perpetrator. Caleb wonders whether Lionel Hutz represented all the defrauded companies.

Then there’s the biggest gap. Forty-six percent of cases weren’t referred to law enforcement. Of those, 35% cited fear of bad press, and 51% felt internal punishment was sufficient. Caleb compares it to the HBO show, Succession. “If Kendall Roy and a caterer drive into a pond and only the caterer drowns, then that’s totally fine. Logan will clean things up from here.”

Caleb’s bigger worry is what happens next. Eighty-eight percent of perpetrators had no prior record. It’s safe to assume not all the unreported ones retire. Instead, many are “just out there walking around getting a different job, working somewhere else where they could commit fraud again.”

A clean record proves less than you think

A spotless background check tells you little when so many frauds never create a record. The lessons for accountants are:

  • Invest in tip channels, and make sure people know where to report
  • Write an explicit anti-fraud policy instead of relying on a code of conduct.
  • Train staff on what fraud actually looks like, frumpy business casual and all
  • Refer cases to law enforcement so the next employer has a record to find

Otherwise, as Caleb puts it, “Not good. Really not good.” Listen to the full episode for more of Caleb’s takes, and earn CPE credit through Earmark while you’re at it.

The real limits on your accounting firm have nothing to do with client count

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In 2020, Marilyn Melendez’s father got sick. Her mother, whom Marilyn calls “the end all and be all for the firm,” stepped away to care for him. Within one month, four of the firm’s 20 employees left and took a substantial book of business with them.

On a recent episode of Who’s Really the BOSS?, Rachel and Marcus Dillon talk with Marilyn, an enrolled agent and president of Dalia Tax & Business Advisors, a bilingual firm in West Palm Beach, Florida. The 43-year-old firm has seven employees and brings in about $1.4 million. Her mother retired this year. Marilyn’s story shows a firm’s real limits are time, energy and culture, not client count. For her, respecting those limits led to a smaller firm that earns about the same money.

A crisis that exposed a firm full of silos

Every operations question and client issue went to Marilyn’s mother. When she stepped away, “the firm really suffered.” The lesson was, “We can’t have a firm full of silos. We needed to integrate,” Marilyn says.

Her mother was old school and believed the customer is always right. “You don’t say no to business. It’s always more, more, more.” Marilyn wanted the opposite. “You need to protect your employees. Make sure a client is the right fit and grow based on the amount of effort you want to put in.”

She recommends founders “look at succession planning way earlier than you think you need it.” Her own transition brought dips, including lost clients and employee turnover. Rachel suggested handing off responsibilities while the founder is still around as a safety net, so the successor can “try and potentially fail or succeed” before the founder exits.

Fewer clients, same revenue

“I found that less is more,” Marilyn said. “My firm is smaller in size and has fewer clients, and we’re making about the same amount of money.” She can now “do more for those clients and get in deeper with them.”

Her sweet spot is businesses with $1 million to $3 million in gross revenue and usually around 25 or fewer employees. Companies with too many management layers don’t fit. Her niche is a type of person, not an industry. She prefers second-generation owners like herself, women entrepreneurs, and Spanish speakers learning to do business in the U.S. Rachel noted that people are often best qualified to help clients who are “where they were at one time.”

Marilyn says financial statements are “a byproduct,” not the goal. She sits down with each client and asks, “What’s your why?” Rachel pointed out that advisory doesn’t require having every answer. Often clients reach their own answers by talking a problem through out loud.

The takeaways are:

  • Define your ideal client by shared experience, not only by industry
  • Treat the P&L and balance sheet as tools that support the client’s real goals
  • In advisory meetings, ask questions and listen more than you prescribe

Not every dollar costs the same

When Marilyn reviews proposals and pricing, she reminds herself that “not every dollar costs the same.” She considers emotional investment, not just profit margin.

She described certain clients, the “Wolf of Wall Street” type, who leave her drained after every interaction. “They’re not yelling at me, but it feels like they’re yelling at me.” Even if they pay above her rate, it doesn’t matter. “That dollar costs me my peace.”

For clients who don’t act on her advice, her limit is two or maybe three years of “same as last year.” Then she refers them to someone else. There’s also the caller-ID face. “Everybody who owns a firm knows the face.” You reset your voice, get through the call, then have to “off-gas” the interaction afterward.

Marcus admitted owners hang on too long “because you’re worried about the revenue.” But “revenue is fleeting,” he said. Time and the people you spend it with matter more. Marilyn also recommends letting go gracefully of prospects who can’t fit within your numbers, because they may come back when they can afford you. Three years later, “that’s a blink of an eye.”

Price without taking it personally, and protect the team

Marilyn asked Marcus a pointed question. When you price a proposal, is “a rejection of that proposal a rejection of you?” Marcus admitted he does see it as a personal rejection.

So he removed himself from the sales process. Rachel now does much of that work, and Lezlie Reeves, DBA’s Director of Accounting & Advisory, brings a more analytical eye to pricing. As Marcus described Lezlie’s view, if clients “opt out, that’s great. We’ll have more capacity to serve more clients.” That beats agonizing over whether a $5 increase will spark a negative Google review. Rachel doesn’t lose sleep over a no. It just means something didn’t align.

Marcus tied pricing to culture. “Every time we say yes, that shifts culture.” Each new client changes what a team member’s day looks like. Marilyn guards that with a “no jerk policy.” Clients must speak to her staff in the same tone they use with her. Enforcing it shows employees she’s on their side and the client isn’t always right.

Less is the gold

“Doing more with less. If anybody takes anything away from this, that is the gold,” Marcus said, summing the conversation up. Marilyn put the stakes plainly. “You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.”

  • Audit clients for energy cost, not just fee
  • Separate pricing from personal identity
  • Start succession planning early

Listen to the full episode to hear about Marilyn’s team retreat to the Dominican Republic and her unusual sabbatical.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 28 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with Streamlined OS, an operating system for accounting firms, mastermind groups, and one-on-one advisory.

What is every ‘yes’ on your calendar really costing you?

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For years, Marit Burmood, CPA, EA, worked toward a seat on the advisory board for a tax group she taught. Only the most knowledgeable people sat on it. When the invitation finally came, “I knew in my heart this might not be the best move,” Marit says. She said ‘yes’ anyway. A couple of months in, she wrote her resignation letter.

On Episode 39 of She Counts, host Nancy McClelland and Marit dig into the irony of explaining opportunity cost to clients but rarely running the calculation for ourselves. They argue that evaluating opportunities based on emotion, one at a time, without counting the related sacrifices is costing women more than we realize.

Why we say yes before doing the math

Nancy calls out the feelings behind these decisions: Status matters, and so does respect. Marit agrees, with one condition: “The emotion can sit in the back seat or the passenger seat, but they can’t drive.”

The trap cuts both ways. One side is the fear that the chance won’t come again. The other is the fear that “I’m not good enough for it yet,” which keeps us from trying. Nancy adds that women “have historically had to prove their competence and credibility,” so we say ‘yes’ to show we can be counted on.

Once we commit, walking away gets harder. “Accountants aren’t quitters,” Marit says. She resigned but felt terrible about letting down the man who invited her, a longtime mentor. She learned, “Everything we say ‘yes’ to has a cost, even if it doesn’t have monetary value.”

Your calendar is a portfolio, and time is the asset you can’t rebuild

Nancy wonders if the real problem is judging one decision at-a-time. Marit offers an investing analogy. You assess individual stocks, but you also manage the whole portfolio and sometimes cut the losers.

“You can literally lose every dollar in your bank account” and rebuild, Marit says, but you can’t get time back. At 43, she knows half her life is already gone. Stack up enough yeses, Nancy warns, and we end up with “a portfolio we didn’t intend to build.”

Marit lived it. Speaking at post-tax-season conferences meant missing her kids’ last day of school three years in a row. No pickup, no blasting “School’s Out for the Summer,” and no ice cream. This year, an unpaid conference landed on that date, and she turned it down. “It hurts to say no,” she admits.

Count the full cost, not just the event day

Jennifer Dymond often sends Nancy recovery memes on social media because Nancy rarely makes time to clear email, catch up on sleep, do laundry and rebuild energy.

Marit used to rush home to her twin 8-year-olds and her 10-year-old and walk straight into stories, squabbles and owies, with zero recovery. Last time, she booked a flight that landed after the kids were asleep, then took an Uber home. “That night of recovery made a world of difference.”

For Nancy, Advisory Amplified looked like “six days over three weeks.” Counting travel, each of the six cities took three days. And booking all the travel and lodging took two-and-a-half days.

So what’s the solution? First, know where your time goes. Mariette Martinez color-codes her Google Calendar and can filter it to see how much time she spent with family. Marit tried it and showed her kids how much family time she logged that month when they complained she was “always working”. For a lighter option, try Sharrin Fuller’s time audit: guess your hours first, then track them. She reasons, “the bigger the gap, the more careful you have to be moving forward.”

But watch the blank spots. Nancy lost 45 minutes to an accidental Dolly Parton rabbit hole and another 45 to a “quick question” call with David Leary. Both were enjoyable, but neither was planned.

The four-step opportunity cost audit

You can’t judge the cost until you know what you’re building, so take time to define and rank your personal and professional goals. Then:

  • Step 1: List your commitments. Your calendar will show you quickly what you said ‘yes’ to.
  • Step 2: Run the numbers. Weigh the returns, including financial, career, relationships, learning and energy. Then add prep, travel, admin, follow-up and recovery to the cost.
  • Step 3: Ask the uncomfortable question. “Would I choose this again?” Marit found the joy of missing out (JOMO) by filling the time she freed with higher-ranked priorities like froyo with her kids and, that same week, a two-to-three-hour in-person recording of the Universal Accounting podcast.
  • Step 4: Decide for each commitment. Keep it, change it, delegate it, renegotiate it, finish it or let it go.

Money belongs in the ranking. “As women, it’s okay to say we want to do things for money,” Marit says. She once ranked money so low it caused stress elsewhere. Nancy asks, “What does enough look like for you?” The point, she says, is to stop letting your calendar “have a direct transfer to your bank account of time, energy and money.”

Choose the price you’re willing to pay

“Maybe ambition isn’t the problem after all,” Nancy says, reframing the conversation. What matters is whether you’re consciously choosing the price you pay. Marit isn’t asking anyone to stop being ambitious… only to be intentional about it. If you choose to keep a passion project that pays nothing, she says, “I better not complain” about its cost.

They close with a quote from Annie Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Listen to the full episode, then answer this question on the She Counts LinkedIn page: Which commitment in your “portfolio” would you choose differently?

Intuit is going high and low—and accountants are in the middle

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Intuit’s fiscal 2026 fourth quarter results include two numbers that tell an interesting story. Revenue rose 14% to about $4.4 billion, beating the company’s guidance of 10% to 12%. Yet the number of paying QuickBooks Online customers grew only about 3% globally, reaching 8.9 million. Meanwhile, average revenue per customer climbed 15%.

That difference explains Intuit’s next move: attract more businesses at the low end, keep expanding into the mid-market, and earn more when money moves through payments, payroll, and lending.

In Episode 161 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, Alicia Katz Pollock translates that investor story into a language accountants can understand. She explains why Intuit is moving downmarket and upmarket at the same time, and what firms should do before automation, new products, and advisory opportunities arrive at their doors.

Strong revenue can’t hide slower customer growth

The quarter itself was strong. Global Business Solutions, which includes QuickBooks, generated about $3.1 billion in revenue, up 15%. QuickBooks Online revenue reached about $2.28 billion, up 20%.

The concern is what comes next. Intuit expects total company growth of 9% to 10% in fiscal 2027 and Global Business Solutions growth of 13% to 14%. Management also lowered its three-year growth range for that segment from 15%–20% to 10%–15%.

This is a reset of expectations. U.S. QuickBooks Online customer growth was healthier at 6%, but global customer growth still trails revenue growth. Intuit is good at earning more from existing customers. Now it needs to bring more businesses into the ecosystem.

That need reshapes both ends of the QuickBooks product line.

Intuit is widening the front door

At the low end are QuickBooks Free and QuickBooks Lite. Intuit describes them as a wider front door for new and very small businesses. More than 20,000 customers already actively use QuickBooks Free or move into it from a paid product.

The business model is to bring in a business at little or no subscription cost, then earn revenue through payments, payroll, lending, upgrades, and other services. These products could help microbusinesses move away from spreadsheets, personal bank accounts, and payment apps.

But Alicia warns that simple and safe aren’t the same thing. Test these products with a sample company. Review the automated workflows, run reports, and make mistakes on purpose. Then decide which clients are a good fit.

This wider front door also creates a larger gap between entry-level tools and higher-priced plans. Accountants may have to explain why a client needs to upgrade, even when they didn’t choose the original subscription.

The mid-market offers a different kind of opportunity

While Intuit moves downmarket, it’s also pushing higher. Revenue from QuickBooks Online Advanced and Intuit Enterprise Suite grew 38% during the quarter. Full-year mid-market revenue rose 39%, and the number of mid-market customers increased 28%.

These customers bring more entities, employees, approvals, integrations, and reporting needs. They also adopt more services. Advanced customers have a payroll attachment rate 13 percentage points higher than core QBO customers and a payments attachment rate nine points higher.

Enterprise Suite passed a $145 million annualized revenue run rate, about four times the prior year. Its construction edition also shows early traction.

Most important for accounting firms, accountants influenced 25% of new Enterprise Suite contracts over the last year. That creates opportunity, but product knowledge alone isn’t enough. Firms need methods for discovery, scoping, conversion planning, access controls, integrations, documentation, and post-launch support.

The financial link between Intuit’s smallest and largest customers is clear when we follow the money.

Money movement supports both ends of the ladder

QuickBooks Money revenue grew 31% in fiscal 2026. QBO payment volume, including Bill Pay, grew 30% and passed $225 billion. Businesses also create more than $2.7 trillion in invoices through QuickBooks Online each year.

At the low end, Intuit can offer inexpensive software because it may earn money when a business gets paid. At the high end, more invoices, employees, bills, and entities create more service revenue.

For accountants, subscription price isn’t the only cost to consider. Transaction fees, payroll, lending, and related services also belong in the calculation. This strategy also explains why QuickBooks frequently advertises service upgrades inside the accounting workflow.

Automation creates time, not an advisory practice

Intuit says more than 150,000 accountants use Intuit Accountant Suite. Those users report increaing advisory work about 30% as routine tasks become automated. Intuit also says its AI experienceshelp customers get paid four days faster.

Those are useful outcomes, but automation only creates available time. It doesn’t decide how a firm uses it. To turn that time into advisory revenue, ask:

  • Do we have a defined advisory offer?
  • Can our team recognize decisions clients need to make?
  • Have we set boundaries around what’s included?
  • Can we turn a forecast into a useful conversation instead of a long report?

Software can flag a cash shortage. An accountant helps the owner decide whether to change payment terms, use a line of credit, postpone a hire, or raise prices. Helping someone make a better decision is advisory work.

Turn the strategy into action

Alicia recommends three practical moves:

  1. Build a product-fit matrix. Compare transaction volume, inventory, entities, users, approvals, reporting, payroll, payments, and integrations across QuickBooks plans and non-QuickBooks options.
  2. Define one repeatable advisory conversation. Start with cash flow, project profitability, or receivables, and connect the discussion to a decision.
  3. Test the automation. Use a sample company to document what Intuit’s AI recommends, what data it uses, and where human review changes the answer.

Also keep watching desktop migrations and Mailchimp. Desktop still represents about a quarter of Global Business Solutions, while Mailchimp is now reported separately after roughly flat to slightly lower revenue.

Intuit’s quarter was strong, but its strategy is changing. For accounting professionals, that offers an opportunity. Match products to complexity, test automation before trusting it, and make human judgment stronger as the software gets smarter.

For Alicia’s complete analysis, listen to the full episode.