David Marquis: AI Can Do More Work but Auditors Must Make the Call | The Disruptors
A five-layer “AI trust stack” helps auditors put AI to work while keeping professional judgment at the center.
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Karen Reyburn: Use Your Creativity as a Competitive Advantage | The Disruptors
Curiosity, problem-solving, and creative habits help strengthen marketing, improve client experiences, and bring more humanity to an AI-driven profession.
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Karen Reyburn, managing director of We Are PF and author of the new book Accountants, You Are Creative, wants accountants to embrace their innate creativity.
Reyburn’s first book, The Accountant Marketer, laid out the building blocks of marketing for accounting firms based on what worked for the firms that she and PF worked with. She noticed that just having a playbook and structure for marketing wasn’t enough. “The accountants who were seeing the greatest success, the greatest transformation for themselves and their clients, were the ones that either knew that they were creative human beings, they knew they had creativity within them, or at least they were open and curious about what that looked like, and willing to try,” she explains.
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As she watched AI’s rapid advancements over the last few months, she nearly shelved the manuscript. “Is this even relevant anymore? With all this stuff about AI, does anyone care about this mindset of creativity?” she wondered. But as she thought about AI and talked to accountants, she realized she was seeing a “both, and” moment. “You’re seeing leaning into AI to help you with tasks and repetition, and you’re seeing people want more humanity, more opportunity to trust you, more case studies, more in-person events,” she explains.
Logan Graf: Build a Modern Accounting Business, Not a Job | The Disruptors
“People don’t want to work themselves to death for a third of the year.”
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Logan Graf, owner of The Graf Tax Co and founder of the Counter community, is proof that there’s a better way to run a tax firm. Last tax season, after restructuring, hiring a manager, and implementing a tax scheduling system, neither he nor his manager worked more than 40 hours a week. He believes accounting firms should operate like modern businesses. “We don’t have to look at what’s been done in the past and copy them,” he says.
Graf, who launched his own firm in 2020, took mental notes of what he liked and what he didn’t like at the firms he worked at. At his last place of employment, Scott & Aderholt near Austin, TX, he was given an unusual level of autonomy. “I was basically running a firm within a firm,” he recalls.
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In addition to technical work, he also handled client onboarding, return preparation, review, billing, workflow design, and documentation, all of which made going out on his own easier. “It was like a seamless transition,” he says. The extra money as a firm owner was a welcome surprise. “I was basically making double the amount of money and working the same amount of hours, if not less,” compared to his prior jobs.
Rachel Anevski: Next Leaders Won’t Develop by Accident | The Disruptors
Replace informal succession practices with trained mentors and measurable opportunities for growth.
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For decades, accounting teams have assumed future leaders would emerge through the normal progression of the ranks. The best seniors would become managers, and the best managers would become partners, ready to step into the shoes of retiring leaders.
According to Rachel Anevski, that approach is no longer sustainable.
Anevski, president and CEO of Matters of Management and managing director of leadership and people at Winding River Consulting, says we must become far more intentional about training, mentoring, and retaining their next generation of leaders.
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As she describes in her book, Train Your Successor, the greatest weakness in the traditional model is its lack of deliberate preparation. The book’s title, inspired by her doctoral research on training and retention, comes from advice given by her first mentor, Ted Dudek.
“His talk to everyone was that retention and the future perpetuity of the firm were solely reliant on whether or not you could successfully train your successor,” Anevski tells The Disruptors host Liz Farr.
Kenji Kuramoto: When AI Does the Work, What Are Firms Selling? | The Disruptors
Intelligent agents will reshape accounting workflows, pricing models, employee development, and the value firms deliver to clients.
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Kenji Kuramoto says accounting firms will be changing how they work — and even who does the work.
“The future of accounting firms,” Kuramoto says, “is going to be made up of a workforce that has two components. It’ll have people and agents.”
His current company, Basis, where he serves as managing partner in residence, is building those agents. Kuramoto says approximately 30% of the top 25 accounting firms are using them across client accounting services, tax, and audit. The agents perform multistep workflows such as reconciliations, account categorization, and first-pass tax return preparation, including work on complex partnership returns.
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By the end of the year, Kuramoto expects some practice lines to achieve efficiency gains of 60% to 80% by using agents. Within a year, “we should probably be able to see agents working and collaborating together, overall, being directed and architected by people,” he says.