When Accounting Today surveyed industry thought leaders about AI’s impact on the profession, every expert agreed that AI would automate the boring stuff like bank reconciliations, data entry, and transaction matching while humans would rise to strategic advisory work. Not one thought their own job was at risk.
On a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary did something clever. They fed the same questions to ChatGPT, asking it to respond as an accounting thought leader. The AI’s answers were just as good as the human experts’.
“None of the accounting thought leaders think their job could be replaced,” David said, “which is crazy because essentially AI can at least do the thought leader job.”
Blake and David argue that the profession has AI’s impact exactly backwards. While everyone confidently predicts automation will eliminate mundane bookkeeping tasks, the technology actually excels at synthesis, narrative-building, and strategic analysis—the very work that defines “thought leadership.”
What AI Actually Does Well
The standard story about AI in accounting is machines will handle the boring, repetitive tasks while humans ascend to strategic advisory work. It’s comforting and logical. But according to Blake and David, it’s completely wrong.
“AI can take financial statement information and turn it into a narrative better than I can, better than almost anyone can at this point,” Blake states. “That’s what we should be using it for.”
Consider Mike Salvatore, a Chicago business owner with two cafes, two bars, and a bike shop. He used to analyze his cost of goods once or twice a year, spending hours crunching numbers. Now he does it every three weeks by feeding data from QuickBooks and his point-of-sale system into Google’s NotebookLM, which creates a podcast-style summary of his business performance. He sends these AI-generated recordings to his managers.
“It’s essentially my CFO,” Salvatore told The Wall Street Journal.
This isn’t AI doing mundane bookkeeping; it’s performing executive-level analysis and communication.
Blake’s own experience drives the point home. He built an AI system that turns news articles into detailed research notes and social media posts. That work used to eat up hours each week. He also trained an AI ghost writer on hundreds of his past writings. Now he can dictate a voice memo and get back a polished article in his own style.
“Basically, it has made it so, as ‘thought leader,’ I don’t do any of that anymore,” he admits. “It’s like I have a team that does that for me. I started working out and I’m just enjoying life.”
Meanwhile, the supposedly “easy” transactional work is stubbornly resistant to automation. David, who spent years taking QuickBooks support calls before co-founding the podcast, gets fired up about this misconception.
“Matching bank feeds is not bookkeeping. That’s just matching,” he argues. “Accounting is sending an invoice to somebody so they’ll pay me.”
He describes his recent struggle trying to upload an invoice to a client portal. It’s a “mundane” task that should be simple but isn’t. The process requires navigating confusing interfaces, making contextual decisions, and handling exceptions that don’t fit predetermined patterns. AI can’t do this reliably because it lacks the real-world context that humans take for granted.
The disconnect is striking. Thought leaders keep repeating the same message they’ve preached about cloud accounting for a decade: technology will free you up for advisory work. But as David points out, “I don’t think AI is freeing up your time to do that work yourself.” Instead, AI is doing the advisory work directly.
Are You Willing to See the Opportunity?
Where things get interesting is the same AI capabilities that threaten thought leaders create a massive opportunity for regular practitioners if they’re willing to see it.
Mike Salvatore, the Chicago business owner interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, wasn’t working with an accountant before. His AI “CFO” didn’t displace a human. He simply started getting insights he’d never received.
“Very few accountants serving Main Street businesses will actually do that kind of work for a price these business owners want to pay,” Blake explains. “So they do it themselves, but they don’t do it often and they don’t do it well.”
AI is filling a vacuum, not replacing existing services. And that vacuum is huge.
If a business owner can get advisory insights that are even 50-80% accurate from AI, that’s better than the nothing they’re getting now. The question for accounting firms is whether to let clients figure this out themselves or to offer AI-powered advisory services with professional oversight.
“Firms can feed data from clients’ QuickBooks files and their point of sale systems into these tools to generate AI analysis,” Blake suggests. “You can charge for it, because you’re adding the oversight—checking the numbers, making sure it actually makes sense.”
David connects this to a decade-old challenge. He remembers when LivePlan tried to train bookkeepers to offer business planning services. “They really struggled with it because they’re good at bookkeeping. But it’s hard to teach somebody to tell a story and create the narrative around the numbers.”
Now, “all those bookkeepers can basically offer that with AI out of the box and charge for that additional service.”
When ChatGPT (playing the role of thought leader) was asked what would make it worry about being replaced, it gave a revealing answer: clients accepting “AI-generated advice as good enough, even in ambiguous scenarios.”
Blake’s interpretation is blunt. “That’s what AI will fill—the gap in the market where accountants aren’t providing the service. There’s a big gap and there aren’t enough of us.”
Why Billable Hours Kill Innovation
One survey question asked about the “AI premium.” How much more should an AI-savvy accountant earn compared to an identical colleague who doesn’t use AI? The thought leaders said these employees should obviously be paid more.
Blake laughed at this. “How can you pay them more if you’re looking at them in terms of billable hours? AI is going to actually reduce their billable hours, not add more.”
If an employee uses AI to finish work in half the time, they bill half the hours. Under the traditional model, they look less productive, not more. Under the traditional model, “you should pay the AI employees less because they’re working less,” Blake points out.
This creates a ridiculous situation where your most innovative, efficient employees appear to be your worst performers.
Ryan Lazanis, who built and sold an accounting firm and now coaches other firm owners, has a different approach. He focuses on just two numbers: bottom-line profit and monthly recurring revenue. Not billable hours, utilization rates, or time per client.
“He is not breaking it down by client. He’s not looking at individual job profitability,” Blake explains. The only thing that matters is whether the firm made money over the year.
This makes sense because staff costs are fixed. “The amount of hours they spend has no impact on your profitability,” Blake notes. You only need to worry if one client is so demanding they prevent you from taking on others.
“You don’t have to track hours for months to figure out which clients are eating up your profits,” David adds. “You just go to your team and say, ‘Who’s the biggest pain in the ass client?’ And they’re going to tell you.”
There’s also a technical angle to consider. Blake cites research showing AI is nearly 100% accurate on tasks that take humans 4-5 minutes. That accuracy drops for longer tasks, but the threshold is “doubling every seven months.” By the end of 2026, AI might handle 10- to 20-minute tasks reliably.
But this only matters if firms can capture the productivity gains. Under billable hours, faster work just means more hours to fill. Under outcome-based metrics, faster work means more capacity for growth.
Is the AI Accounting Influencer Coming?
As the episode wraps up, Blake and David float an idea that captures the absurdity of the current moment. They’re considering creating an AI accounting influencer—a completely artificial thought leader to see if it can build a following comparable to real industry voices.
“Let’s make an AI accounting influencer and see if we can build its following to eclipse that of those real influencers,” Blake suggests. They could have it write newsletters, create content, maybe even land sponsorship deals.
It’s partly a joke, but it makes a serious point. If an AI can answer thought leadership survey questions as well as humans, write articles, and provide strategic insights, what exactly makes human thought leaders irreplaceable?
The answer might be less comfortable than the profession wants to admit.
Looking Ahead
The Accounting Today survey offered some important insights, though probably not what it intended. The people most confident about AI’s limited impact are those whose work AI does best. When ChatGPT generated answers indistinguishable from human experts, it demonstrated the very vulnerability those experts deny.
The real story is that AI excels at synthesis and narrative, which are the heart of advisory work, but struggles with the contextual, exception-filled world of everyday bookkeeping.
Firm owners should rethink their services to capture the advisory opportunity AI makes possible, and abandon billable hours before they strangle your ability to innovate.
For individual practitioners doing transactional work, the news is actually good. Your skills remain valuable precisely because your work requires the messy, contextual judgment that AI lacks.
And for thought leaders? As David observed with obvious frustration, the elitist attitude that “I’m better than you” has been in accounting for 30 years. “The reality is completely opposite. People are completely missing what’s really going to be replaced by AI.”
The race isn’t between humans and machines. It’s between practitioners who recognize AI’s true capabilities and those who cling to comfortable narratives while missing the transformation happening around them.
To hear more about Blake’s AI-powered lifestyle, David’s thoughts on what bookkeeping really is, and their plan to create an AI influencer that might outperform the human ones, listen to episode 469 of The Accounting Podcast.