“AI creates capacity, but it does not create demand.” That’s how Echo Zhong, CPA, opens this episode of the Earmark Podcast, and it runs counter to Gusto’s pitch to let software handle payroll so your firm gets its hours back for advisory. Echo sees what happens after the hours come back. Gusto sponsored this episode.
Blake Oliver sat down with Echo at Gusto Next, right after her live demo of Gusto’s new multi-client MCP. She’s been a CPA for more than 15 years and runs Zhong & Sanchez, a full-service boutique firm in Cupertino. It’s across the street from Y Combinator and serves bootstrapped small business owners and VC-backed startups, including many YC companies. By her estimate, her automated workflow saves at least 80% of the time on routine payroll and forecasting updates. But she argues the freed hours don’t fill themselves. Firms have to find the demand, redeploy their people, and win on trust.
Below, we cover what the automation does, where billing goes next, what happened to her payroll manager, and the threat from AI-native startups.
What “AI runs payroll” looks like
This isn’t vaporware. Echo built a scheduled task in Claude that scans the firm’s inboxes and works out which clients sent in hours. It flags anyone who hasn’t, catches new hires who need to be entered, and flags approaching deadlines without the needed info. Then it queues up payroll for approval, which her team can grant in Claude or in Gusto, depending on their comfort level.
The workflow doesn’t stop at payroll. Her team downloads the payroll journal in Excel, and Claude uses it to update the client’s cash flow forecast. For her demo client, that’s a 13-month forecast. The client hired someone new on the same pay and schedule as an existing employee. Claude updated the forecast and called out the new assumptions for review. It doesn’t matter who at the firm runs it, Echo says. “It will just deliver consistent results.”
She’d like to think the workflow saves at least 80% of the time on these updates. A simple update used to take 20 to 30 minutes, longer if someone lost the forwarded email. Scenario analysis could take hours.
The multi-client piece raises the stakes. Blake describes MCPs as the way apps talk to each other. Echo says most MCPs on the market don’t support multiple clients, so each client needs its own connection. With Gusto, one connection covers every client she has access to. “If I’m running payroll for 50 clients… I can just run it one time.” Echo calls it “a pretty big game changer.”
Stop billing for filings, start billing for ownership
Blake pushed further. Gusto also handles state registrations, registered agent services, and annual reports. “This is all work that accounting firms have charged for in the past.”
Echo used to do state registrations manually about ten years ago. Now she points clients to Gusto. But clients still want “a point of contact who’s just owning the job of state registration, state nexus and things like that.” Dealing with the government is still a pain, and her entrepreneurs are “optimizing for peace of mind.” They’d rather offload compliance and not think about it.
So what does she charge for? For startups, her firm acts as a fractional CFO, and the cash flow forecast is “usually just the start of a conversation.” It leads to retirement and exit planning, lending or fundraising for liquidity, and resourcing an expansion. Clients come to her, she says, because they want “a trusted advisor” for the long term, not “a technology solution that’s only probably solving one of your problems.”
Blake wasn’t fully convinced. Charging for advisory “is difficult, at least for a lot of accountants,” he said. Echo’s pricing rule is simple. “If we’re owning the job, then I’m charging for it.” If a client would rather handle it in Gusto themselves, the firm hands over the tools and instructions so they can self-serve.
The payroll manager problem is a change-management problem
None of that happens if the people doing the old work stay stuck in it. “If I were a payroll manager right now,” Blake admitted, “I would be a little worried.”
Echo’s payroll manager was. She was anxious at first and pushed back on the move to Gusto. Echo reframed the conversation. “We’re not trying to get rid of your job, but hey, do you even enjoy doing data entry?” Then she asked where the manager saw herself in three to five years. Once it was clear nobody was being fired, the shift happened “more naturally.” The manager moved into tax advisory work.
Echo is candid that it doesn’t always go this smoothly. It depends on the person and on the trust between owner and staff. Some firms, she suggests, might find it helpful to bring in a change management consultant.
Blake sees a mindset shift underneath all this. In his twenties, the key skill was mastering interfaces like desktop QuickBooks. Now “the hard part is actually imagining a different way of doing the process.”
Echo added a caveat. Firms and software companies still need to work together on the ability to audit results and “the chain of events” behind them.
When startups sell the work, not the tool
The bigger threat may come from outside the firm. Blake laid out a theory he’d read that SaaS sold tools to professionals, but the new AI startups are “actually selling the work.” That now includes tax, accounting, and audit, delivered with “10% of the people or less.”
Echo bets that some people want to work with people, while others would rather self-serve. She’ll serve the first group. Her evidence is that conferences are getting bigger and community events keep popping up. People “will trust a person’s recommendation” even when that person uses software behind the scenes.
She’s not anti-AI, either. She compares her token spending against the cost of hiring. When Blake asked if she’d spend tens of thousands of dollars on tokens, she said that would mean “it’s still saving me an army.”
Capacity is cheap; demand is the job
In Echo’s view, AI will keep creating capacity. If your revenue depends on keying hours and filing state forms, that work is already being automated. As she sees it, what’s left for the firm is finding demand, owning outcomes, and earning trust.
Listen to the full episode for Echo’s demo details and Blake’s self-improving email skill, and earn free CPE while you’re at it.