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The Accounting Profession Is Growing—So Why Can’t New Graduates Find Jobs?

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Something strange is happening in accounting right now. The profession is growing, with employment for accountants projected to increase by 10% through 2026, faster than most other careers. Yet new accounting graduates are struggling to find jobs. How can both things be true at the same time?

In a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary tackled this paradox head-on, sparked by a sobering prediction from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: AI could displace 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.

“Accountants coming out of school are having a hard time getting jobs right now, which is strange,” Blake said during the discussion. “The profession is growing, but entry-level jobs are declining.”

The reason behind that paradox is AI is automating exactly the kind of work that new accountants traditionally cut their teeth on. And that’s creating a bigger problem than just unemployment. It’s threatening the way accountants have learned their craft for generations.

The Work That’s Disappearing

Think about what entry-level accountants actually do (or used to do). They gather documents for audits and organize them into folders. They copy last year’s work papers and update them with new numbers. They reconcile accounts, enter data, and basically do the grunt work that teaches them how financial information flows through a business.

These aren’t exciting tasks, but they serve a purpose. By doing this work, new accountants develop an eye for what looks right and what doesn’t. They learn where errors hide and build intuition.

Now, AI is making all of that work disappear.

During the episode, Blake described Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork feature. It’s AI that can literally click around on your computer as a human would. In one example, a journalist asked it to organize a messy folder of business receipts. The AI asked a few questions about how to sort them, then went to work. Five minutes later, it produced a clean Excel spreadsheet listing two years of expenses.

“File management, organizing folders, batch renaming, generating summary spreadsheets,” Blake noted. This is exactly the kind of work that used to take hours of a staff accountant’s time.

The capabilities keep expanding. Claude now has an Excel integration that lets you skip learning formulas entirely. Need to split a column with full names into separate first and last name columns? Just type what you want in plain English.

“All the Excel wizards are going to be in trouble,” David joked, “because I’ll be able to type in ‘put two more columns, first name, last name separately,’ and it’ll go do the formula for me.”

Another striking example is that Gusto now lets you run payroll directly through ChatGPT. Just type “@Gusto, help me run payroll” and have a conversation. No separate login or clicking through menus—just chat.

Where Do New Graduates Go Now?

This automation creates a problem that goes way beyond individual job losses. Most accountants start their careers in public accounting, doing exactly this kind of entry-level work. That’s how they learn the skills they’ll need to become managers and partners later on.

“Where do accounting graduates go to get their first jobs if they don’t go into public accounting?” Blake asked. “Who’s going to want to hire them?”

The challenge is that new graduates don’t have the experience to do the mid-career jobs that are actually in demand. They can’t review work they’ve never done themselves. As David put it, “They don’t have the skills to monitor AI yet, or know when AI is wrong.”

Workers sense this shift happening. According to a survey mentioned by CFO.com, 60% of U.S. adults believe AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates by 2026. Only 16% think AI could never replace what they do.

This fear is already changing behavior. Last year, 51% of workers said they’d quit if their company demanded a return to the office. This year, that number crashed to just 7%.

“The pendulum has swung back to employers,” Blake observed. “Employers have the power in the market.”

The Industry Starts to Respond

Some companies are beginning to tackle this problem, though it’s unclear if their efforts will be enough.

Intuit announced its most ambitious initiative so far: a program to upskill 1 million accounting students over the next five years. They’re focusing on “digital data and advisory skills,” basically teaching students to work alongside AI rather than compete with it.

The program includes online learning, mentorship, and certifications like QuickBooks ProAdvisor. It kicked off with a virtual event in early February about “Skills for the New Era of Accounting.”

But beyond formal programs, the hosts suggested that individual accountants need to change how they think about their work entirely.

“The most important skill in the AI era is going to be curiosity,” Blake argued.

He shared a practical tip for working with AI. Instead of trying to write the perfect prompt, have the AI ask you questions. His go-to addition to any request is, “First, ask me questions to clarify exactly what I’m looking for. After each of my answers, reply with your next question. Include a confidence score as a percentage. When you achieve 100% confidence, ask me to confirm I am ready for you to do the task.”

David added another crucial insight. “That ‘please wait until I say go’ is the most important prompt.” Without explicit instructions to wait, AI tools tend to race ahead with incomplete information.

A Paradox for Payroll Companies

The episode raised an interesting question about companies like ADP, which announced new AI agents for payroll and HR tasks. These agents can audit for errors, flag missing tax IDs, and answer HR questions using company handbooks.

But as David pointed out, there’s something odd about payroll companies embracing AI so enthusiastically. “If you believe AI is going to be important, that’s going to kill millions and millions of these jobs that get paid through ADP,” he said. If AI eliminates 50% of entry-level jobs, that’s potentially half of ADP’s revenue from running payroll.

Paychex mentioned AI 50 times in their recent earnings call. Investors are clearly asking hard questions about how payroll companies will survive if their customer base of employed humans shrinks dramatically.

What Happens Next?

The tools reshaping accounting are here now. Claude can organize receipts. ChatGPT can run payroll. AI agents can audit for errors. Every month brings new capabilities that used to require human hands and human hours.

The mismatch is striking. Technology advances in months, while professional training evolves over years or decades. Universities design programs on multi-year cycles. Firms have hiring patterns built over generations. Everyone assumes the entry-level work that has trained accountants forever will continue to exist.

That assumption is crumbling. The document gathering, data entry, and reconciliations are becoming prompts typed into AI interfaces rather than skills learned through repetition.

For firms, this means rethinking how new hires develop competence. For educators, it means teaching students to verify and question rather than just execute. For students and early-career professionals, it means learning to supervise technology rather than compete with it.

As Blake put it near the end of the episode, “I can be ten times as productive now doing everything I do with AI, and I don’t need to hire a huge team to do it.”

That’s great news for experienced professionals who already know their craft. For those just starting out, it’s an entirely different story—one the profession is only beginning to write.

Listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast for more insights on AI tools reshaping accounting workflows, practical prompting techniques, and updates from Intuit, Xero, ADP, and other platforms. Understanding how AI affects entry-level work is table stakes for anyone making decisions about talent and training in the years ahead.

New CPA Mobility Rules Mean Your Firm Is Probably Breaking at Least One State Law Right Now

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The accounting profession scored a rare bipartisan win this week and simultaneously confronted a growing compliance nightmare that’s hitting firms across the country. On this episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary tackled both stories, along with Deloitte’s terrible week, new research on why accountants flee public accounting, and a special guest segment on the hidden complexities of CPA mobility.

A Rare Win for Government Transparency

Blake kicked off the episode by celebrating legislation he actually supports. The Fiscal State of the Nation Act, a bipartisan bill from Representative Andy Barr (R-KY) and Representative Scott Peters (D-CA), would require the Comptroller General to deliver an annual presentation to Congress on the federal government’s financial statements.

“We need to deliver an annual report to the board of directors, to the investors, to the people,” Blake said. The bill has broad support, with 81% of Americans backing the idea, according to a Harris Poll conducted on behalf of the AICPA.

The AICPA’s strong endorsement marked a rare moment of agreement between Blake and the organization. “I don’t think that’s ever happened before,” he joked, noting he was supporting two AICPA positions in one episode, the other being new independence standards for alternative practice structures.

The CPA Mobility Crisis

The episode featured Lindsay Patterson, co-founder and CEO of CPA QualityPro, who joined to explain how the profession’s victory on alternative pathways created an unexpected compliance minefield.

Twenty-five states adopted alternative pathways to CPA licensure, allowing candidates to pursue certification with 120 credit hours plus two years of experience instead of the traditional 150 hours plus one year. While this addresses the pipeline crisis, it’s shattered the “substantial equivalency” that made CPA mobility work.

“After going through every single state’s laws and rules, if a firm operates across state lines now, I bet they’re breaking at least one law,” Lindsay warned. “There are so many little nuances.”

The problem is that the old system worked because every state had basically the same requirements. Now, state mobility laws have wildly different rules about which credentials qualify. For example, a New York firm doing an audit in Oregon might discover too late that team members licensed through certain pathways can’t legally sign off on the work.

Lindsay outlined what firms now need to track for every CPA: whether they completed 120 or 150 hours, if they had an accounting concentration, whether their experience was supervised or just verified, and if they had one or two years of it. Most firms have never collected this data.

“Do you know any firm that asks their employees, ‘Was your experience verified or supervised?’” Lindsay asked.

The penalties are real. Lindsay has seen fines from $1,000 to $15,000, with some states being particularly aggressive. She once received an email from a state board because she had “CPE” in her email signature and had emailed someone in their state. “I’m like, who reported me for this? First off, we’re planning a birthday party, so calm down.”

David pointed out that this problem existed before alternative pathways, but Lindsay agreed it’s gotten worse. The pandemic made it even more complex, with CPAs moving states and assuming mobility provisions cover them when they actually need local licenses.

Deloitte’s Very Bad Week

While firms grapple with mobility rules, Deloitte faced a different kind of scrutiny. A viral Twitter post viewed 43.5 million times called the firm “a $74 billion cancer metastasized across America,” highlighting failed government IT projects and cost overruns.

“They take on a project like the California payroll system, and the project never gets done. And they just keep charging for changes and overruns,” David explained.

Making matters worse, Deloitte announced plans to hire 50,000 employees in India right after conducting layoffs. “The narrative out there now is Deloitte’s taking billions of dollars of taxpayer money to hire people in India,” David said. “Is Deloitte trying to get in the crosshairs of the Trump administration?”

Lindsay offered a philosophical take. saying, “Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity.”

Why Accountants Really Leave

A new report from researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Clemson University confirmed what many suspected: work-life balance, not money, drives most exits from public accounting. The study found poor work-life balance is the primary reason people leave, and they’re skeptical of empty retention promises.

“It’s the hours, the deadlines, the pressure, the unending timesheets, and the inability to take PTO,” Blake summarized.

The research also revealed that leaving is usually a long, social process with warning signs, meaning firms have opportunities to intervene if they’re paying attention. But as Lindsay noted, this isn’t just an accounting problem. “I think a lot of companies, not just accounting” struggle with retention.

Reasons for Optimism

Despite the challenges, accounting undergraduate enrollment rose 7.3% this fall—the third straight year of growth. One in eight business students now major in accounting, up from one in nine two years ago.

“We said it was going to happen,” Blake said, crediting alternative pathway reforms. “Get rid of that extra year of unnecessary, expensive education and more people will want to be accounting majors.”

Lindsay mentioned another positive indicator. “We have so much private equity investment in CPA firms right now. They are not looking to invest their money in an area that they think is about to go extinct.”

When a listener asked whether AI would eliminate accounting jobs, the panel was reassuring. David maintained his position that AI won’t replace bookkeeping entirely, though he admitted QuickBooks’ new AI-powered reconciliation features were “slick.” Lindsay was even more direct: “Get your CPA, you’ll get a good job.”

The Bottom Line

The accounting profession is navigating a period of significant change. Alternative pathways bring in new talent, but create compliance headaches. Technology is advancing but not eliminating jobs. And while firms like Deloitte face public scrutiny, the fundamentals of the profession remain strong.

For practitioners, Lindsay recommends auditing your compliance to understand how each employee got licensed and prepare for a more complex regulatory landscape. The enrollment numbers suggest the profession’s future is bright if it can manage the growing pains.

To hear the full discussion, including Blake reading Jerome Powell’s statement about standing up to political pressure and a truly bizarre story about a Florida gubernatorial candidate proposing a 50% tax on OnlyFans content, listen to the complete episode of The Accounting Podcast.

The Manager Paradox: Why AI Agents Need Just as Much Oversight as Human Employees

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David Leary had something to confess at the start of The Accounting Podcast episode 471. He needed an employee health insurance survey for his company, and the whole thing, from blank page to finished Google Form, took him three and a half minutes.

“I started with nothing, and I needed a result, and end to end it did everything for me,” David told co-host Blake Oliver. ChatGPT created the survey questions first. When its implementation got clunky, Google Forms with built-in Gemini AI took over and built the entire form. No tedious field creation or manual option adding. Work that would have taken an hour vanished in the time it takes to brew coffee.

It’s the kind of AI success story that’s becoming common: technology wiping out drudgery and freeing humans for better work. But as the hosts dug deeper in this episode, they uncovered a reality check for accounting firm leaders.

AI’s Hidden Cost: Same Management Time, Different Headaches

The tools keep getting better at connecting dots. Blake pointed to Google’s new “Personal Intelligence” feature that links Gmail, photos, YouTube, and search into Gemini with one click. ChatGPT has similar workspace integrations that search your email history for client and project information.

“Once your firm gets big enough, you don’t realize three other people also have relationships with that client,” David noted. AI that surfaces that context before you act is a real leap forward.

But the success story gets complicated when you deploy AI agents across an organization. Jason Lemkin, who runs SaaStr (a community for software startup founders), has been tracking the results of such deployments. At SaaStr, about 60% of the team is now made up of AI agents. They deliver huge productivity gains, but also need about the same weekly management time as humans.

“The big mistake,” David explained, summarizing Jason’s findings, “is that you can’t treat AI as set-it-and-forget-it. You have to have daily management of AI.”

The reason you need that oversight is the accuracy rates. For five- to ten-minute tasks, AI hits near-perfect accuracy: 99.9%. But stretch those tasks to an hour or two, and accuracy drops to 80% or even 50%. And AI mistakes don’t announce themselves.

“The AI makes these small mistakes that compound into big mistakes,” Blake said. “Humans do this, too. If you don’t have proper oversight of people, they’re just doing their own tasks, and small errors can compound into disasters.”

When There’s No One Watching the Store

The IRS is an excellent case study for what happens without human oversight of AI. The IRS just lost more than 25% of its workforce through various reduction programs, according to the IRS Advisory Council’s annual report. Over 2,000 IT workers have left since January 2025 alone. More than half of the $80 billion allocated under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has been rescinded, totaling about $42 billion since 2023, including nearly all enforcement funding.

Now the agency faces implementing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which includes more than 100 tax law changes. They need new guidance, technology updates, and process changes—all with fewer people and less money.

The consequences of this skeleton crew approach became clear in the case of Attallah Williams, a former SBA and IRS employee charged with stealing more than $3.5 million from federal COVID-19 relief programs. Williams used insider access at both agencies to approve fraudulent applications, recruiting accomplices through Instagram and collecting kickbacks. The scheme ran for three years and touched Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) grants, and employee retention credits.

“If one person can approve fraudulent pandemic applications, there are no controls at the federal level,” David said.

Tax Season Reality Check

Against this backdrop, tax season readiness varies wildly. CPA Trendlines’ busy season survey found that only 44% of firms feel about as ready as they were last year. Larger firms with 25 or more professionals report greater stability thanks to deeper staffing and refined processes. Smaller firms with 1-10 employees face the most volatility.

“Late documents, absences, compressed review cycles. When you have fewer people, you have less redundancy,” Blake noted. “When problems happen, it hurts more.”

Tax-heavy firms feel particularly exposed since their entire season depends on client behavior. Firms with recurring revenue from bookkeeping or advisory work report more stability because their work spreads throughout the year.

One bright spot came from Brenda Cannon of Cannon & Associates, who shared an innovation on the CPA Trendlines podcast. Instead of letting tax work pile up, she gives clients calendar links to schedule when they’ll submit documents. Eight slots per day, Monday through Thursday. Fridays for internal work. No slots three weeks before April 15th (reserved for extensions). Clients who don’t schedule by year-end get marked inactive.

“Clients no longer complain about extensions because they basically chose to miss their self-imposed deadline,” Blake explained. Only about 5% of clients left after implementing the system.

The Vanishing Entry Level

But even successful adaptations can’t solve a bigger problem: what happens when AI absorbs all the entry-level work that trains future professionals?

“The quality burden used to fall on the senior staff and managers,” David said. “But now the managers are going to have to bear that weight.”

Blake expanded the concern. Managers used to trust that trained seniors had learned to review work through years of practice. With AI handling those training tasks, that trust disappears. “I have a theory that life is going to get harder for managers in public accounting because they’re going to be the only thing between the AI doing the work and the partner.”

A viewer captured the problem in the live chat: “You can’t get experience to become a manager without an entry level. Bots and offshore have absorbed entry. So how do you get new managers?”

Blake’s answer was sobering. If firms can’t develop managers internally, they’ll have to recruit from industry. But industry professionals who’ve tasted work-life balance won’t return to the grind of public accounting. “The people won’t drink the Kool-Aid after they’ve had a break from drinking the Kool-Aid.”

Testing for Yesterday’s Skills

This transformation raises tough questions about the CPA exam itself. The 2024 pass rates were:

  • Audit and Attestation: 46%
  • Financial Accounting and Reporting: 4%
  • Tax Compliance and Planning: 73%
  • Regulation: 63%
  • Business Analysis and Reporting: 38%
  • Information Systems and Controls:58%

“The hardest part of the exam isn’t the material,” Blake argued. “We’re not doing advanced math. We’re doing algebra. It’s not complicated stuff; it’s just a lot of memorization, and it’s a real grind.”

Blake’s theory is the exam filters for grinders because that’s what firms needed. “The exam is a grind, and public accounting is a grind so they lined up.”

But that’s not the job anymore. “We don’t need accountants to come in and do a bunch of boring, manual, tedious work,” Blake said. AI does that now. The profession needs people who can analyze concepts and direct AI agents, not memorize rules they can look up in seconds.

“You have all these AI tools where they have all the knowledge. You don’t need to memorize things,” David added.

Yet change comes slowly. “Even if the powers that be agree with you, Blake, it’ll be a decade before they change that,” David said.

The Bottom Line

David’s three-minute survey creation shows where we’re headed: routine tasks becoming instant. But efficiency isn’t freedom. AI needs as much management as humans, but a different kind of management. The cognitive burden shifts up while the entry-level work that trained judgment disappears.

Every knowledge profession will face the same questions. How do you develop talent when AI does the training work? How do you maintain quality when the middle layer of reviewers vanishes? How do you test for skills that matter when memorization becomes obsolete?

Listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast for all the details, including more on the IRS crisis, innovative tax season solutions, and a surprise supporter for millionaire taxes.

From Spreadsheets to Raids: What Happens When We Defund Financial Oversight

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Three years ago, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld warned viewers that 87,000 new IRS agents would create a “police state.” Today, armed ICE agents are going door-to-door in Minneapolis without warrants, investigating financial fraud. In other words, doing the work accountants would normally do with spreadsheets and calculators.

“We’ve replaced armed IRS agents with armed ICE agents doing work for the IRS,” says David Leary, co-host of The Accounting Podcast, still trying to process this turn of events. “I’ve lost sleep over this.”

In their latest episode, David and co-host Blake Oliver connect the dots between the 2022 fight over IRS funding and today’s reality in Minnesota, where billions in fraud have led to what they call a predictable but devastating outcome.

Minnesota’s Billion-Dollar Fraud Problem

The numbers coming out of Minnesota are staggering. On December 19th, prosecutors announced charges against more than 90 people across multiple public assistance programs. The fraud schemes read like a criminal playbook: daycares that collected $110 million through fake claims, the Feeding Our Future scandal that stole nearly $250 million in pandemic food aid, autism services billing for work never performed, using unqualified staff, and housing stabilization fraud.

A federal warrant has flagged 14 Medicare programs with significant fraud problems. The potential losses are in the billions.

“This is fraud that has taken place over many years,” David explains. The investigation has been ongoing for a while, but the political fallout came fast. Trump accused Somali immigrants of widespread fraud. A YouTuber documentary filmmaker went to Minnesota and started visiting these daycares, creating viral content that painted Minnesota as corrupt on all fronts.

In response, Trump sent 2,000 ICE agents to carry out what he called “the largest immigration operation ever.”

But here’s where it gets interesting for accountants. As Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin explained on a radio show, “Right now, on the ground in Minneapolis, Homeland Security investigators are going door to door to these suspected fraud sites. It’s daycare centers or healthcare centers and businesses around them as well.”

No warrants. Just agents showing up at doors.

Compare that to what happened just 30 days earlier at Taco Giro in Tucson. ICE and IRS Criminal Investigation spent years building a case, got proper warrants, then executed 16 search warrants as part of their investigation into immigration and tax violations. That’s how law enforcement used to work: investigation, evidence, warrants, then action.

“Raids have replaced audits and guns have replaced spreadsheets,” David observes.

The Time Machine: Back to 2022

To understand how we got here, Blake and David take listeners back to April 18, 2022. As explained in episode 292 of what was then called the Cloud Accounting Podcast, that’s when the IRS was set to receive $80 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act, including funding for 87,000 new enforcement agents.

The political response was fierce. They replay a segment featuring enrolled agent Adam Markowitz, whose tweet went viral and got him attacked on Fox News. Markowitz wrote, “All of my GOP friends who are worried about the 87,000 IRS enforcement agents coming after the little guy. How about just don’t cheat on tax returns?”

Gutfeld’s response on Fox was brutal, calling Markowitz a “schmuck” and warning viewers, “If you have an IQ higher than an artichoke, you must see that by now, this country is heading towards a police state.”

“The police state still happened,” David points out. “We didn’t avoid it.”

The hosts then shared a detail most people missed. In November 2024, a federal judge blocked the IRS from further record sharing with ICE. But the court documents revealed the IRS had already handed over tens of thousands of taxpayer records to ICE, including home addresses. ICE had requested more than one million records from the IRS.

“This might be the reason Billy Long is out,” David speculates about the departed IRS commissioner nominee. “He might have been pushing back on this.”

Following the Money (Or Not)

The pattern is clear to anyone who understands accounting controls. Over the past decade, Congress repeatedly cut the IRS budget while increasing funding for ICE. They shifted from investigation and fines to enforcement.

“Taxes dictate social policies,” David notes. “Budgets also do that. What you fund and budget is what the government is going to do.”

The result is less nonprofit oversight, slower detection of payroll and benefits fraud, and fewer audits. The absence of all those controls that seemed expensive created billions in fraud.

“We’re in the golden age of fraud,” David warns. “Maybe the new Enron is not one company; it’s just billions and billions and billions of small frauds because we’ve cut all of the controls that might catch it.”

Blake connects this to broader economic concerns. According to a Harris poll, 45% of Americans believe their financial security is worsening. Even 45% of Republicans think the economy is in a recession, despite GDP growth of 4.3% in Q3.

“If you’re the president and you don’t want people paying attention to the economy, what do you do?” Blake asks. “You start foreign conflicts or you create internal conflict.”

The Profession’s Own Control Problems

The accounting profession has its own control problem. The AICPA recently proposed major ethics rule changes for firms backed by private equity, worried that outside money could compromise auditor independence.

Under the new rules, firms can’t escape independence requirements by simply creating separate legal entities. If a CPA firm depends on a non-CPA entity for staff and infrastructure, they’re treated as one unit for independence purposes. PE-backed firms also can’t audit portfolio companies in the same fund.

“As CPAs, we stand for independence, objectivity, ethics,” Blake emphasizes. “Nobody else can do audits.”

But existing controls don’t always have teeth. The hosts discuss WH Smith, the historic British retailer. Their audit firm, PwC, missed profit misstatements that cost shareholders 600 million pounds. Yet the board recommended keeping PwC as their auditor.

“An auditor can cost a company half a billion dollars and they keep their contract,” David says, incredulous. “If anyone else failed that badly, you would fire them.”

The Lesson for Accountants

“Everything’s an accounting story,” David insists, and this one hits close to home.

The Minnesota fraud crisis shows what happens when you defund financial oversight. The 2022 IRS debate shows how fear of government overreach led to the exact outcome critics wanted to avoid. The profession’s own struggles with independence and accountability show these patterns repeat everywhere.

“If you have underfunded controls and you don’t have preventive measures, it always shows up as a very big expense,” David explains. “One time it was Enron. Now the expense is humans getting shot.”

Accountants talking to clients about taxes can do their part by explaining where that money goes and why controls matter. Because the alternative—as Minnesota shows—is much worse.

Blake and David dig deeper into these connections in the full episode, including their take on California’s proposed billionaire tax, why wars boost economies, and what Excel championship winners can teach us about efficiency. Listen to the complete discussion above or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Accounting Profession Has AI Completely Backwards

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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.