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A Private Equity Insider Explains What Happens After Your Firm Gets Acquired

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Devin Mathews has a 14-year-old dog that had never been sedated for a dental cleaning—not once in 14 and a half years. Then a private equity firm bought his veterinary office. Suddenly, the dog needed his teeth cleaned twice a year, at $1,000 a pop.

“I never knew my dog needed so many dental services,” Devin tells Blake Oliver on the latest episode of the Earmark Podcast. “It’s the upsell opportunity.”

This small anecdote captures the anxiety spreading through the accounting profession as private equity floods in. What really changes when PE takes over? Who benefits? Who gets hurt? And what about artificial intelligence? Is it going to make all these PE investments obsolete?

Devin brings an insider’s perspective with an outsider’s freedom to speak plainly. As a partner at ParkerGale Capital with 30 years in private equity, he knows the playbook. But since his firm invests in software companies, not accounting firms, he can share what really happens without affecting any deals. He regularly fields calls from employees at freshly acquired firms trying to figure out what just happened to their careers.

The Satisfaction Gap: Partners vs. Everyone Else

Blake starts with data that sets the tone for the entire conversation. An Accounting Today survey found that over two-thirds of partners at PE-backed accounting firms say they’re satisfied with their experience. But only about 15% of non-partner employees feel the same way.

“Let me get this straight. The partners who got paid in the transaction are ecstatic because they have terminal value,” Devin says. “And the rank and file who probably didn’t even know the business was for sale, their lives have completely changed, and expectations have gone through the roof.”

That’s the core issue. When PE acquires an accounting firm, the capital is there to buy out the existing owners, not fund operations. Partners cash out. Staff wake up to a Zoom call announcing new ownership and dramatically different expectations.

Most employees don’t realize how much analysis has already happened before that announcement. “Some 26-year-old in New York has run all that math,” Devin explains, “and they literally know you and your business better than you know it.” PE firms have sorted every employee by bill rate and utilization. They’ve hired McKinsey or Bain to benchmark everything against industry standards. They know exactly where they can push harder.

The first target is the person who gets paid a lot but doesn’t bill many hours. “This guy has been around for a long time,” Devin describes. “Maybe they’re great at business development, but they’re just not billing the hours anymore.”

How PE Actually Makes Money in Accounting

The mechanics are straightforward: bill more hours, raise bill rates, get more efficient, and make acquisitions. When revenue equals people times hours times rates, those are your main levers.

But Devin acknowledges the challenge with professional services. “The assets walk out the door every night.” Push too hard, and those assets can walk across the street to one of the 44,600 CPA firms in North America that aren’t owned by private equity.

Blake raises a critical point based on his own experience as a manager at a top-25 firm. The traditional path of working your way up, becoming a partner, and receiving ownership and profit distributions disappears under PE ownership. Instead, you get RSUs or phantom equity that only pay out if there’s an exit event.

“You drive home after that speech,” Devin imagines, “and you say to your spouse, ‘Remember that path I had to be a partner? That’s gone. Now I only get paid if there’s an exit.'”

Good PE firms try to address this through transparency and communication. Devin describes his ideal post-acquisition speech: acknowledge the surprise, address the fear directly, and promise that resources will match the higher expectations. “Expectations of ten out of ten, resources of ten out of ten. That’s a great combination.”

But the reality hits later on. “I walk you through the PowerPoint and it sounds really great,” Devin says. “Then six months later you’d be like, ‘Where’s Devin? What happened?'” The speech is easy. Delivering on it is where most PE firms struggle.

AI Changes Everything, But Not How You Think

The conversation takes an unexpected turn when they start talking about artificial intelligence. AI is threatening the entire economic model PE investments depend on.

Devin’s firm is all-in on AI. Every Friday is “DIY Friday,” and everyone spends two hours experimenting with AI tools, trying to replicate workflows, and testing what works. They pay for all the major models. They’re true believers.

But the results aren’t quite what they’re hoping for. “A lot of times it takes me twice as long to review and audit what the AI built than it would have taken me to build it on my own,” Devin admits. The tools hallucinate. It’s “wildly confident about things it knows nothing about.”

The key insight is that AI is a “ceiling raiser, not a floor raiser.” It makes experienced professionals amazing. It makes entry-level people only slightly better because of domain knowledge. An experienced accountant can spot what the AI got wrong and fix it. An entry-level accountant doesn’t know enough to catch the mistakes.

“An entry-level developer, like an entry-level accountant, doesn’t have enough domain knowledge or experience to see what the AI did wrong,” Devin explains.

“It’s a great time to be mid-level or experienced. It’s a bad time to be entry-level,” Blake observes, noting the cruel paradox. The routine tasks that used to train new accountants, like sampling, confirmations, and rolling forward work papers, are being automated first.

The legal profession offers a preview. Harvey, an AI platform for law firms, raised about half a billion dollars. It claims to work at the level of a fifth-year Harvard Law associate. Every major firm supposedly uses it. “But Kirkland and Ellis isn’t charging me any less than they used to,” Devin notes. The efficiency gains aren’t reaching clients. Firms capture them as profit.

Your Options Are Better Than They Appear

So what should accounting professionals actually do? Devin has specific advice.

First, if you’re at a PE-backed firm, demand transparency. “Show me Bain Capital’s value creation plan,” he suggests. “How did they underwrite this, and how are they going to get there?” Understanding the plan helps you align your work and see your compensation trajectory. If they won’t share it, that tells you something, too.

Devin identifies three problems that plague most firms before PE arrives. There’s no clear plan (or too many plans), no communication about why leaders make decisions, and nobody understands how compensation works. Good PE ownership can fix these issues. Bad PE ownership makes them worse.

The good news is, PE has bought only about 400 of the 45,000 CPA firms in the US. “There are 44,600 CPA firms in North America that aren’t owned by private equity,” Devin points out. “And you can leave.”

Devin has advice for early-career accountants facing pressure from private equity and AI automation: Start your own firm.

“Get really good with the AI. Way better than the 35-year-old or the 45-year-old. And start your own firm. Be an AI-first accounting firm, and you own all of it.”

It’s never been easier, he argues. You can set up an LLC on LegalZoom. You can reach clients directly through LinkedIn or YouTube. The barriers that kept young professionals locked into traditional firm hierarchies are crumbling.

“It’s pretty obvious most adults have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re mostly full of BS,” Devin says with characteristic bluntness. “So don’t wait for your turn. Go get it.”

The Bottom Line

The traditional accounting career ladder is being dismantled. PE is removing the path to partnership, and AI is removing the entry-level work that trains new accountants.

But professionals who understand what’s actually happening have more options than they might think. There are still 44,600 independent firms. Starting your own practice has never been easier. And if you’re staying put, you can at least demand to see the plan and understand where you fit.

As Devin puts it, “Why do you need to wait in line and have some private equity firm tell you how you get to run your business? Go find some other people who believe in it the way you do, and go build the firm in your image.”

For the full conversation, including Devin’s stories about his own podcast journey and more details on how PE firms evaluate acquisition targets, listen to the complete episode of the Earmark Podcast.

A Startup Claims AI Can Do Partnership Tax Returns Autonomously, But Where’s the Proof?

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Can an AI agent really complete a partnership tax return by itself? A two-year-old startup just raised $100 million claiming it can, but the hosts of The Accounting Podcast want to see the receipts.

In a recent episode, Blake Oliver and David Leary tackle the biggest AI claims hitting accounting right now. A startup called Basis says it built an AI that can prepare partnership tax returns autonomously. Intuit mentioned AI 150 times in one earnings call while announcing deals with both OpenAI and Anthropic. And new desktop tools let accountants automate recurring tasks without writing any code.

But that’s not all they covered. Trump’s tariffs were just ruled illegal, setting up a gold rush of refund claims. There’s finally a Senate bill to regulate tax preparers, because believe it or not, there are currently zero requirements. And one tax expert bet his life savings against DOGE and won.

A Billion-Dollar Claim (But Where Are the Receipts?)

The most jaw-dropping news comes from Basis, a startup founded in 2023 that just hit unicorn status. They raised $100 million at a $1.15 billion valuation, with money from Google Ventures and former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. The company claims it built an AI agent that can complete a partnership tax return autonomously.

Blake explained why this would be huge if true. “When you use TurboTax and you go through the wizard, it’s basically just taking your information and plugging that into the correct boxes on the forms. Partnership returns are much more complex because your balance sheet has to tie out, and you have to make all these adjustments and basis calculations. It gets really complex with the partners’ different shares of ownership.”

If Basis really pulled this off, accounting firms could skip having staff accountants prep these returns entirely. Everything would go straight to manager review. That’s a massive cost savings.

But David isn’t buying it without proof. “Their whole website’s optimized to raise money from investors,” he said. Until just before the fundraising announcement, Basis had no screenshots, videos, or demos anywhere. Its blog posts focus on the money they’ve raised and internal software development rather than showing how the accounting agents actually work.

“Where is this great blog post showing how they’re doing this return?” David asked.

Basis claims 30% of the top 25 accounting firms are “using” their software. But David, drawing from his Intuit days, knows better. “Using and using are not the same two words. A big accounting firm would buy 2,500 seat licenses for QuickBooks. A year later, they rolled out two to clients.”

Blake’s message to Basis was simple, “If you’re listening, we want to see it.”

Get Ready for the Refund Rush as Trump Tariffs Ruled Illegal

While everyone’s debating AI, there’s real money on the table right now from Trump’s tariffs. The Supreme Court ruled them illegal, and companies are scrambling for refunds.

“Eighteen hundred companies have already filed refund lawsuits against the federal government,” Blake reported. Big names like Costco, Goodyear, Barnes and Noble, and FedEx are in the mix. Through December 10th, at least 301,000 importers were subject to these now-illegal tariffs.

The kicker is Trump immediately announced new 15% global tariffs under a different law. But Blake thinks these are probably illegal too. “We have trade deficits, but we don’t have balance of payments deficits,” he explained. Trump is using a law from the 1970s when the U.S. was on the gold standard. Those conditions don’t exist anymore.

The administration’s own lawyers previously argued companies could get refunds if the tariffs were ruled unlawful. Now they’re stuck with that position. As one viewer commented during the livestream, “Only the richest companies will get tariff refunds, and consumers will get hosed in the end.”

“Offer this as a service at your firm,” David says, offering accountants a business idea. “Spin up a service and help importers get their tariff refunds.”

Intuit’s Playing Every Side of the AI Game

Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi mentioned AI about once every 30 seconds during the company’s recent earnings call, a total of about 150 times. But the real story is its strategy of partnering with everyone.

They’re working with OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude. Plus, they’re building their own AI. David compared it to Microsoft in the late ’80s. “Microsoft was working on Windows. At the same time, they were in bed with Apple working on Mac OS, and they were working with IBM on OS/2. Nobody knew which OS was going to win.”

Intuit’s betting that no matter which AI platform wins, it wins too.

Goodarzi made an interesting point about why AI companies want to partner rather than compete. “Frankly, in some ways, this addressable market is too small for them to even worry about.” Accounting AI is tiny compared to the trillion-dollar AI market. These companies would rather partner with Intuit than build their own accounting platform.

The company claims its AI saves customers 12 hours per month on accounting and 17 to 18 hours a week on financial statements. But David called BS. “I just can’t imagine any small business owner spending 18 hours a week building a P&L or a cash flow statement—maybe one week a year.”

But Blake sees why Intuit will survive. “They have the data. They are the trusted database for accounting, financial, and tax information. Somebody could build a QuickBooks clone, but you’re not going to get everyone to switch.”

The AI Tools You Can Actually Use Today

While companies make billion-dollar bets, there are tools available right now that work. Blake’s current obsession is Claude Cowork, which can access files on your computer and click around your desktop.

“You could say every time a new file is added to this folder, look at it and analyze it and figure out what to do with it,” Blake explained. “Maybe I want you to plug those numbers into some practice management system. Maybe I want you to take that file and create an invoice.”

Blake built his own automation that takes meeting notes from Google, extracts all the tasks he committed to, and automatically adds them to his task list with due dates. “I don’t have to wait around for somebody to have that bright idea. I can just build it myself right now.”

The workforce impact is already showing up. According to a Kantata survey, 87% of professional services firms plan to manage AI agents as part of their workforce. But it’s changing the nature of work. The study found that while AI makes workers faster, people end up taking on more tasks and working longer hours without being asked.

For accountants, you’re either a reviewer or you’re in trouble. “It’s hard to get an entry-level job or a job where you’re the doer,” Blake said. “But if you are a reviewer or manager, if you have experience and you know what you’re looking at, you are super in demand.”

Other Big Developments This Week

Other news Blake and David covered in this episode includes:

  • A Senate bill to regulate tax preparers. There are currently zero requirements to be a paid tax preparer in the US. A new bipartisan bill would let the IRS deny or revoke preparer ID numbers and crack down on ghost preparers who don’t sign returns.
  • SEC considers biannual reporting. Public companies might only have to report twice a year instead of quarterly. Blake likes the idea. “One of the problems in the US is that companies are expected to beat earnings estimates quarter after quarter. It incentivizes them to make short-term decisions.”
  • Washington’s CPA problem. Washington State issued a record 2,086 CPA licenses last year, but 60% went to international candidates. You don’t even need a Social Security number to get a CPA license in Washington. “Is the accounting shortage actually getting solved, or is Washington just becoming a gateway for outsourcing?” Blake asked.
  • The DOGE bet. Alan Cole, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, bet $342,000 of his life savings that the Department of Government Efficiency wouldn’t cut spending. He won $128,000 when the government spent more in 2025 than in 2024. “We were smart enough. We could have done this,” David observed.
  • IRS scam alert. A Michigan man lost over $1 million to scammers claiming they needed to move his money to a “federal IRS locker” for protection. “Send all your clients an email telling them that this doesn’t exist,” David advises accountants. “It’s a good story. Your clients will open it, and it looks like you’re providing value.”

The accounting profession is at a crossroads. AI agents might really be able to do complex tax returns. Legacy software companies are scrambling to stay relevant. And the tools available today are already changing how work gets done.

But as Aaron Harris from Sage pointed out, “Technology shifts faster than customer trust.” And David added, “It’s probably even worse with accountants.”

Want to hear the full discussion, including why IBM lost $31 billion in market cap when Claude learned COBOL programming? Listen to the complete episode of The Accounting Podcast.

Which Accounting Firms Have the Happiest Employees? And Does It Even Matter Anymore?

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In episode 475 of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary welcomed Dominic “Dom” Piscopo, CPA, from Big 4 Transparency to discuss his annual rankings of the best and worst accounting firms. What started as a conversation about job satisfaction and hours worked quickly evolved into a discussion on how AI startups might systematically dismantle the entire professional services industry.

The timing couldn’t be more striking. While Dom shared data showing Andersen topping the charts for employee satisfaction despite the stress of IPO readiness, the hosts were grappling with a different set of numbers. Intuit’s stock fell 33% in just 30 days, wiping out $110 billion in market value. Xero is down 22%. When an AI tax planning app called Hazel debuted, wealth management stocks plummeted. Raymond James dropped nearly 9% in a single day.

The Best and Worst Places to Work (While They Still Exist)

Before diving into the existential threats facing the profession, Dom shared his latest rankings based on over 21,500 data submissions from accounting professionals.

The winners surprised him. Andersen claimed the top spot for both job satisfaction (7.97 out of 10) and hours worked (averaging just 39 hours weekly). “I would have imagined that would have been a very tricky year for people at the firm,” Dom noted, given the IPO preparations. “But it seems like maybe the excitement, maybe some of the financial benefits have outweighed that.”

Plante Moran, last year’s champion, dropped to second place with a 7.73 satisfaction score, but the firm actually had the worst hours among all firms surveyed at 47.3 per week. “That hints to something else positive going on there,” Dom observed. “Might it be culture? Might it be compensation?”

Rounding out the top five were Weaver, Aprio (bucking the trend of struggling PE-backed firms), and Wipfli. On the other end, Citrin Cooperman posted the worst satisfaction score Dom has ever seen—just 5.13 out of 10. They were joined in the bottom three by MNP (a Canadian firm that acts like a PE-backed consolidator) and Cherry Bekaert.

The Big 4 landed squarely in the middle, with PwC slightly above average at 6.8 and the others hovering around 6.6. Tax professionals reported the highest satisfaction across all service lines at 7.05, while audit remained the lowest at 6.62, though both showed steady improvement year over year.

The Craigslist Prophecy

These rankings might soon become academic curiosities if a viral observation proves prophetic. Hunter Horsley’s tweet stopped David in his tracks. “In 2006, every section of Craigslist was a $1 billion marketplace startup waiting to happen. In 2026, every section of PwC’s website is a $10 billion AI startup waiting to happen.”

The parallel is haunting. Craigslist’s housing section became Airbnb and Zillow. Jobs turned into Indeed and ZipRecruiter. Dating spawned Tinder. One by one, entrepreneurs identified sections of the sprawling classifieds site, built specialized solutions, and captured massive value.

Now look at PwC’s service menu: audit, insurance, consulting, deals, digital assets, AI engineering, tax services. Each represents a potential target for AI disruption.

David had seen this movie before. “This is exactly what happened to QuickBooks desktop,” he explained. “Every menu in QuickBooks desktop got attacked by a SaaS startup.” Bill.com went after vendor payments. OnPay and others targeted payroll. Eventually, Intuit had to scramble to integrate or acquire these competitors.

But now the cycle is restarting with AI. As David put it bluntly, “AI isn’t going to take your job. It’s going to take away the business unit at the firm you work for. And then you won’t have a job.”

The Wealth Management Canary

Wall Street isn’t waiting for proof. Hazel AI is a tool that can ingest tax returns, pay stubs, and account statements to create personalized tax strategies in minutes. When it launched, the market’s reaction was swift and brutal.

Raymond James: down 8.87%. LPL Financial: down 8%. Charles Schwab: down 7%. These were established wealth management firms whose business models suddenly looked obsolete.

The consumer data explains why investors panicked. According to a Best Money survey, 82% of Americans now trust AI for financial information and guidance. More than half have actually used it, and of those who acted on AI’s advice, 65% said the outcome was good. Nearly two-thirds report their finances have improved since they started using AI.

Blake shared his own experiment. Facing a tax bill last year, he wanted to adjust his withholding. “I set up a ChatGPT project, took my pay stubs, dropped them in there, explained what happened last year, gave it my tax return, and said, ‘Help me adjust my withholdings.’ And it worked.”

This is exactly the kind of analysis CPAs charge for. But as Blake pointed out, the profession needs to stop asking whether AI will be as good as a human expert. The real question: “Is the AI going to be good enough to replace what I’m doing?”

For millions of underserved Americans who can’t afford professional help, AI doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than asking coworkers at the car wash for tax advice, as David’s 19-year-old son was doing.

The Battle Over Data Moats

Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi and Xero CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy aren’t accepting the market’s verdict quietly. Both argue that Wall Street fundamentally misunderstands their competitive advantages.

Their defense is simply that data creates moats. Companies that “deeply understand their customers and own proprietary data” will win, according to Goodarzi. Singh Cassidy claims Xero’s “ecosystem of trust” makes cloning it “impractical.”

Blake thinks they might be right, at least about the general ledger. “QuickBooks has been dominant for so long because it’s the trusted general ledger system of record,” he explained. “To replace that trust is really difficult.”

The evidence supports this. Xero spent billions trying to crack the U.S. market and barely dented QuickBooks’ dominance. Even when Intuit makes unpopular changes like the despised new navigation bar, nobody switches. The friction is too high, the trust too important.

But the GL might be safe while everything around it burns. “AI is not going to disrupt the GL,” Blake argued. “What it’s going to disrupt is all the processes around it: what you do with that data, how you analyze it.”

TurboTax, for instance, looks vulnerable. Tax prep is essentially logic applied to forms, exactly what AI excels at. Blake proposed a thought experiment: create an AI agent for each IRS form, train it on the instructions, and link them together. You could potentially build a tax engine that way.

Meanwhile, “vibe coding,” using AI to build apps without traditional programming, is already replacing small business tools. Companies are building custom internal workflow apps, replacing $40-per-month SaaS subscriptions one by one. “When is it going to be ‘I’m going to vibe code my own QuickBooks?” David wondered. Not yet, they agreed. Accounting systems are too complex. But the question itself represents a shift in what’s possible.

What Survives the Disruption

Dom offered a crucial perspective on what endures when automation comes for professional services. “The human’s role often is to provide comfort and almost like taste, via their lived experiences and what they’ve seen with other clients,” he observed. Simple execution is at risk, but “where taste comes into play or lived experiences, I think that might be a little bit safer.”

He even noted an unexpected upside: bad TikTok tax advice has actually generated work for CPAs. People see questionable guidance online and seek professional validation. “It got the ball rolling for people to bring this forward because they know enough to know they shouldn’t just blindly follow this.”

The picture that emerges is complex but navigable. Systems of record, such as the trusted GLs that anchor financial data, appear protected by switching costs and accumulated trust. Advisory work that depends on those systems faces more immediate risk. And human elements like judgment, experience, the ability to comfort anxious clients, may prove surprisingly durable.

For practitioners evaluating their careers, understanding which category your work falls into becomes critical. Are you doing rote execution that AI can replicate? Or are you providing the wisdom, judgment, and human connection that clients will continue to value?

The firms that survive will find ways to layer human value on top of AI efficiency. That might mean AI-assisted services at lower price points with human review. It might mean focusing on complexity that AI can’t yet handle. But the first step is acknowledging that the market has already begun to move.

As accounting professionals consider their next career moves, Dom’s firm rankings offer one lens for evaluation. But the bigger question is which firms are positioning themselves to thrive in an AI-transformed landscape, and which are simply rearranging deck chairs? Understanding the satisfaction data and the disruption trajectory has never been more important for making that choice.

Listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast for the complete discussion, including more details on firm rankings and strategies for navigating the AI transformation.

Human Connection Still Beats AI in Accounting Despite What the Headlines Say

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Breaking news dominated a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast as hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary analyzed the Supreme Court’s landmark decision striking down Trump’s global tariffs. But the conversation quickly turned to what this means for accounting firms: a massive opportunity to help clients claim refunds on $133 billion in tariffs already paid.

The episode also digs into why taxpayers are losing trust in AI for tax preparation, how law firms are hiking rates to offset AI-reduced billable hours, and why human connection remains the profession’s secret weapon in an increasingly automated world.

A $133 Billion Opportunity Knocks

“The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s global tariffs in a six to three decision,” Blake announced at the start of the episode, barely containing his satisfaction at having predicted this outcome in previous episodes.

The court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act doesn’t authorize the president to set or modify tariffs, which are a form of taxation. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, emphasized that tariffs require clear statutory authorization from Congress, something the emergency powers act doesn’t provide.

But US businesses have already paid $133 billion in these now-invalidated tariffs. And while the court didn’t lay out a specific refund mechanism, those funds are potentially recoverable.

“I think there’s a big opportunity,” Blake said. “Smart accountants are going to jump on this.”

The opportunity mirrors the Employee Retention Credit (ERC) and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) work that kept many firms busy during the pandemic. Firms will need to help clients identify affected entries, determine liquidation status, quantify refund amounts, and support administrative claims. If accountants charged even a small percentage fee for this service, Blake estimates it could generate “$1 billion to $10 billion in services revenue.”

David warned tariff refund mills will pop up just like ERC mills did, urging accountants to “beat them to the punch” by proactively reaching out to clients who import goods.

The situation remains fluid. Trump announced plans to impose new 10% tariffs under a different authority, using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. But for now, accounting firms have a huge opportunity to deliver value to clients who’ve been paying these tariffs.

Why Taxpayers Are Backing Away from AI

While accountants scramble to understand tariff refunds, they’re also watching taxpayers lose faith in AI for tax preparation.

According to Invoice Home’s latest survey of 2,000 US tax filers, only 37% would consider using AI to file their taxes instead of hiring a professional. That’s actually down from 43% last year, despite all the AI hype.

“I think people are getting burned,” Blake observed. “The more you use AI, the more you recognize its failings.”

The generational breakdown shows younger taxpayers remain more open. Half of millennials and 46% of Gen Z would consider AI tax prep. But even they’re growing skeptical as they gain real experience with AI’s limitations.

Blake has a similarly nuanced relationship with AI. He described using ChatGPT to draft legal agreements with “flawless” results, completing in minutes what used to take hours. Yet he readily acknowledges that taxes are different. “Small errors can compound and create big problems.”

This declining trust should reassure tax professionals worried about being replaced. Taxpayers seem to understand intuitively that tax preparation requires expertise and accountability that algorithms can’t yet provide.

The $3,400-Per-Hour Question

Meanwhile, the legal profession is showing accountants the problem with simply jacking up rates when AI reduces billable hours.

Top partners at elite law firms now charge up to $3,400 per hour, with some niche specialties pushing $6,000. Partner rates jumped 16% last year among the 50 largest firms. Even junior associates can run clients $1,400 per hour.

“If there’s less work, there’s fewer billable hours, and they’ve got to make up the difference somehow,” David acknowledged.

But Blake sees disaster ahead. “Businesses are going to say, wait a minute, why am I paying $3,400 an hour for legal work that’s being done by AI?” He can now draft his own legal agreements using a $30-per-month ChatGPT subscription—work he previously would have paid lawyers to handle.

The absurdity peaked with news that KPMG Australia fined a senior partner $7,000 for using AI to complete an internal AI training exam. The same firm that’s publicly committed to spending $2 billion on AI globally.

“If you know how to use AI to cheat on the test, you’ve passed the AI test,” David pointed out. “Obviously, you have the skills to use the AI.”

The contradiction perfectly captures professional services’ confused relationship with artificial intelligence: desperately embracing it while simultaneously punishing those who use it too effectively.

The Power of Human Connection

The episode’s most compelling segment came from David’s interview with Dawn Brolin about the Accounting Cornerstone Foundation, which helps accountants attend their first professional conference.

The foundation raised about $45,000 last year and sent 11 people to conferences—each one potentially life-changing. But it’s not just about money. They help recipients overcome travel anxiety, select sessions, and find their tribe in the profession.

“We get on a Zoom with them,” Dawn explained. “We talk through their anxieties. We give them travel tips.”

One recipient has since become active on social media, attended more conferences, and regularly sends thank-you letters. His life changed because he met people who understood his challenges.

“AI will never replace human interaction,” Dawn emphasized. “It will never replace the human touch.”

This stands in sharp contrast to how many firms actually treat clients. David described his experience with his own accounting firm. “Subject line: ‘Reminder you have outstanding task.’ And then I open the email in a giant font that says ‘Outstanding Task to Complete.’ It’s a horrible experience. It creates anxiety.”

Compare that to Intuit’s new TurboTax campaign offering free Uber rides to their offices. They understand customer experience in a way many accounting firms don’t.

“Accounting firms focus on their internal processes too much and not the customer experience,” David argued.

Focus Time Is the Real Productivity Crisis

A Hubstaff study cited in the episode found that average workers only get two to three hours of true focus time daily without meetings, messages, or tool-switching.

The productivity struggles “weren’t about effort,” the study found. “It’s about constant disruption.”

Workers use an average of 18 apps each day. Hybrid teams report the least focus time (31%), while in-office teams get slightly more (45%). The differences are smaller than expected, suggesting the problem isn’t location; it’s how we work.

Even AI adoption isn’t helping. Despite 26% of firms now using generative AI daily (up from 3% three years ago), it hasn’t meaningfully changed how employees spend their time.

Looking Ahead

The paradoxes explored in this episode reveal a profession in transition. Taxpayers are losing trust in AI just as its capabilities advance. Law firms are raising rates to offset efficiency gains, creating an unsustainable value proposition. And the most transformative professional experiences still happen through human connection, not algorithms.

Here are the top three takeaways for accountants:

  1. Jump on the tariff refund opportunity before the mills do. This could be the next ERC-sized revenue opportunity for proactive firms.
  2. Don’t follow law firms down the path of inflating rates to maintain partner lifestyles. Clients with access to the same AI tools will eventually revolt.
  3. Invest in human connections and customer experience. Sometimes the most valuable service is simply helping someone find their professional community.

As Dawn reminded listeners, “There isn’t any competition in accounting” when professionals support each other. The same collaborative spirit should guide how the profession approaches AI—as a tool that enables more human connection, not a replacement for it.

Thriving firms use AI for efficiency while doubling down on relationships, advisory services, and the judgment that no algorithm can replicate. Listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast for complete coverage of these stories and more insights on navigating the AI-augmented future of accounting.

From Ticking and Tying to Selling Out Arenas: How One Auditor Became EDM Royalty

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A former Big Four auditor traded spreadsheets for turntables and now commands 11.8 million monthly Spotify listeners, sells out Madison Square Garden, and has racked up over two billion career streams. His name is John Summit, and he might just be the most famous accountant in the world.

On a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary dove into John’s remarkable transformation from EY auditor to global EDM superstar. His career change story captures something profound happening in the accounting profession right now.

From Audit Room to Arena Stage

“If you’re into electronic music, then you know who John Summit is,” Blake explained to David during the episode. 

The numbers tell an incredible story. John—born John Walter Schuster in Naperville, Illinois—followed the traditional accounting path at first. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in accounting from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 2018 to 2019, he worked as an auditor at EY in Chicago, starting at $65,000 a year while DJing on weekends.

Blake even pulled up John’s CPA license during the show. “I went to the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, and I looked him up by his original name,” he said. The license was active in 2018 and expired in 2022, right around the time John’s music career went stratospheric.

Today, John’s success metrics are staggering. His debut album “Comfort in Chaos” hit number two on the Billboard Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart and cracked the Billboard 200’s top 40. He headlines festivals like Coachella and Tomorrowland, and his own festival, Experts Only, draws 50,000 attendees.

Leaning Into the Accounting Story

What makes John unique is how he’s embraced his accounting past. His new album “CTRL Escape” drops on April 15th, Tax Day, and the cover art shows him sitting atop office ceiling tiles, the corporate world below giving way to open sky above.

“He’s dropping one track from the album every Wednesday,” Blake noted. “And the reason he’s doing it on Wednesday is that he remembers Hump day being the toughest day in the office.”

The album’s merchandise had David cracking up. “Crappy accounting firm swag. This is great,” he said, looking at the offerings. “It’s a backpack that says Summit CPAs, a pen that says Summit CPAs. This is so great he’s leaning into it like that.”

The music video for “Lights Go Out” drives the theme home. John appears in an oversized tan suit at “Summit CPAs,” working at an old green-screen computer before leading his fellow office workers in what Blake described as “basically like an accounting firm turning into a rave.”

The Profession John Left Is Disappearing

Blake and David’s conversation takes a darker turn when they discuss Botkeeper. One of the original “AI bookkeeping” startups announced it was shutting down after 11 years.

“They did the typical tech company ‘fake it ‘til you make it,’” David explained. Botkeeper promised AI-powered bookkeeping but was actually using offshore accountants in the Philippines. When real AI technology finally arrived through companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, investors weren’t interested in funding a company that had burned through capital on the false promise.

It wasn’t just Botkeeper. Jenesys, a UK-based AI bookkeeping startup, also entered a formal sales process after key investors pulled out. Clearly, the old model of pretending to have AI while using human workers is dead.

Meanwhile, companies with actual AI capabilities are thriving. Tax AI startup Accrual raised $75 million, Audit AI startup Fieldguide raised $75 million, and Pilot announced what it called an “AI accountant,” a fully autonomous system capable of running end-to-end bookkeeping with “zero need for human intervention” in typical cases.

Why Tax and Audit AI Are Different

Blake explained why investors are pouring money into tax and audit AI while bookkeeping AI companies struggle.

“When we moved to cloud bookkeeping and accounting, we were able to set up rules-based systems,” he said. “You can still automate 80% of bookkeeping work today with just the old tech.”

But tax and audit are different beasts. “Those areas of accounting were not automatable with rules-based tech, because there are too many gray areas, there’s too much complexity. But AI is starting to handle it really, really, really well.”

To illustrate the point, Blake shared his own experience with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. He gave it access to a folder of scanned documents that his scanner had poorly named and asked it to organize them.

“It created a whole logical folder structure. Different types of files, receipts, legal documents, statements,” he said. “And then it put all the documents into those folders and renamed all the documents based on the content of the PDFs. And it did this in minutes.”

“You can get that if you’re a pro subscriber for like $20 a month. It’s incredible.”

The Entry-Level Jobs Are Vanishing

This AI revolution is having a profound impact on accounting careers. Technology is automating routine tasks that once defined entry-level positions at breakneck speed.

“We’re seeing reductions in entry-level jobs, not reductions in mid-career or later-stage career positions,” Blake observed. “It’s really, really hard to find a tax manager. Nobody can find a tax manager for their public accounting firm.”

The work being automated reads like a first-year auditor’s job description. “Requesting documents from clients, receiving and organizing them, rolling forward prior year workpapers, ticking and tying. AI is starting to do all of that stuff.”

As a result, “it’s really hard to get a job as a staff accountant because nobody wants to train you and they don’t have work to give you to justify the cost of training you for several years.”

Even the Big Four Feel the Pressure

In an ironic twist, even KPMG International is feeling the AI pressure. The firm recently pushed its own auditor, Grant Thornton UK, to lower its audit fee by 14%, arguing that AI-driven efficiencies should reduce costs.

“The negotiations reportedly included pressure tactics, where KPMG threatened to switch auditors if Grant Thornton didn’t agree to a significant reduction,” Blake said, citing Financial Times reporting.

The fee went from $416,000 in 2024 to $357,000 in 2025. As Blake wryly noted: “I think KPMG ought to watch out, because now clients are going to ask for the same fee reduction.”

The Pyramid Is Crumbling

This pressure on fees creates a domino effect. Lower fees mean less money for staff. Fewer entry-level positions mean the traditional pyramid model of public accounting, where large numbers of junior staff support a small number of managers and partners, is collapsing.

“The whole model is going to have to shift,” Blake said. “The pyramid model of accounting is going away. And that’s going to fundamentally change our profession, because that’s been the way everyone got into accounting for a hundred years.”

Blake predicted that within five to ten years, timesheets and time-based billing will disappear entirely. The firms that survive will abandon the old model of counting hours and bodies.

There is a silver lining for those who adapt. Blake shared his own experience. “I saw a 5x increase in my revenue just as a freelancer” after embracing cloud technology. His effective hourly rate went from $20 to $100, and his workload actually decreased.

The Escape Route Is Closing

John Summit celebrates his escape from accounting through music that resonates with millions who understand the cubicle grind. He drops tracks on Wednesdays because that was the hardest day to push through. He releases albums on Tax Day. He sells fake accounting firm swag as merchandise.

But the entry-level accounting experience he’s immortalizing—the fluorescent lights, the routine tasks, the path that led him from college to Big Four—is rapidly disappearing. Future accountants may never know that particular grind because the jobs simply won’t exist.

Accounting will likely survive with higher earnings for those who remain and adapt. But the traditional path into the profession will evolve.

As David suggested during the show, if you’re Summit CPAs—a real accounting firm that happens to share the name—you might want to figure out how to capitalize on all the traffic coming your way. Because in a profession being reshaped by AI, you need to grab opportunities wherever you find them.

For the complete discussion of John’s journey, the AI transformation of accounting, and what it means for the profession’s future, listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast.