ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Agentic AI Needs Guardrails, Not Hype | ARC

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Accountants should demand systems that reveal their work, respect boundaries, and produce results humans can verify.

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Optimize Profits, Delight Clients, & Build a Top-Value Firm!

Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto, Liz Mason, and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

Agentic AI does not have to replace an accountant to transform accounting. Its more  practical role may be far less dramatic — and far more useful.

In this episode of Accounting ARC, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA; Liz Mason, CPA; and Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, explore how narrowly focused AI agents can help professionals retrieve information, analyze data, navigate systems, and make better-informed decisions.

MORE Accounting ARC: AI Isn’t Erasing Tax Careers. It’s Rewriting Them. | Accounting Internships Need an Upgrade | The CPA Career Nobody Talks About | Conference Season Exposes Accounting’s Knowledge Gap | The Feedback Mistake That Costs You Your Best People | Is Your Boss Really the Problem? | Most Accountants Are Missing This AI Shift | AI Can Fix Your Workflow—or Break It in Seconds | Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal for AI | Accounting’s Hidden Talent Risk: The Sandwich Generation | Built Fast. Sold Faster. Broken Later? The Truth About Accounting Tech | Recognize When You Need to Recharge Before You Burn Out | Valuing More Than the Balance Sheet

Their conversation challenges one of the dominant narratives surrounding agentic AI: that firms should build autonomous digital employees capable of handling everything a staff accountant does. Instead, the hosts envision specialized agents that operate within structured systems, perform clearly defined tasks, and show users how they reach their conclusions.

“If you have agentic AI that’s built into an architecture that already exists, there’s a whole lot more that has to happen from a training perspective,” says Mason, CEO of High Rock Accounting.

That architecture, she explains, can include multiple agents working together rather than one agent attempting to handle an entire assignment.

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AI Isn’t Erasing Tax Careers. It’s Rewriting Them | ARC

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Firms must build new pathways that develop reviewers, judgment and client-facing skills.

 

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Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto, Liz Mason, and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

Artificial intelligence may not eliminate the entry-level tax professional. But it is dismantling the job that many firms still use to train one.

That’s the conversation driving a new episode of the Accounting ARC podcast featuring Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation; and Liz Mason, CPA, CEO of High Rock Accounting.

The conversation begins with a small tax firm that hires six interns each year and teaches them to prepare returns much as earlier generations learned: working from paper documents, identifying relevant numbers, mapping those figures to tax forms, and entering the data into tax software.

MORE Accounting ARC: Accounting Internships Need an Upgrade | The CPA Career Nobody Talks About | Conference Season Exposes Accounting’s Knowledge Gap | The Feedback Mistake That Costs You Your Best People | Is Your Boss Really the Problem? | Most Accountants Are Missing This AI Shift | AI Can Fix Your Workflow—or Break It in Seconds | Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal for AI | Accounting’s Hidden Talent Risk: The Sandwich Generation | Built Fast. Sold Faster. Broken Later? The Truth About Accounting Tech | Recognize When You Need to Recharge Before You Burn Out | Valuing More Than the Balance Sheet

The firm owner sees the process as an apprenticeship that helps students bridge the gap between an individual tax course and real-world preparation. Shimamoto sees value in teaching interns how information moves from source documents to a completed return. Mason agrees with the objective but challenges the method.

“From a holistic learning exploration, sure, yes, that is a way to learn,” Mason says. “From a where-we-are-today perspective, I think that’s a giant disservice to these interns.”

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Rillet’s Raise: Betting $100 Million on Fewer Accountants

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$1 Billion Valuation Puts AI at the Center of Accounting’s Next Software War

By CPA Trendlines Research

Kopp: Accounting for ‘what happens next.’

Rillet’s new financing round values the accounting software company at $1 billion as AI-native ledgers, accounting agents and incumbent ERP vendors compete for control of the accounting workflow — and investors fund competing answers to the profession’s labor problem.

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Rillet’s $100 million Series C gives the market another heavily financed challenger just six months after Basis raised $100 million at a $1.15 billion valuation. Around them, Ramp, Digits, Puzzle, Light and SoftLedger are pushing into different layers of the finance stack while Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Workday and NetSuite defend systems already embedded in corporate accounting.

The fight is over where artificial intelligence belongs in accounting software – inside the system of record, in agents operating across existing systems or in a new layer that sits around the ERP and performs the work.

“What stands out to us is how customers actually run on it — multi-billion-dollar businesses operating with finance teams a tenth the traditional size, closing their books continuously,” says Seth Pierrepont, an ICONIQ general partner and Rillet board member.

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Randy Johnston: Accounting’s Brave New World of MCPs | The Disruptors

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If MCPs are the infrastructure, agentic AI is the workforce.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Randy Johnston has been in accounting technology longer than many of today’s practitioners have been alive. With more than 50 years in the field, and a hand in designing everything from IBM ThinkPads to Excel’s PivotTables, he has seen more technological revolutions than he can easily count. He even wrote AI code in 1975 in Lisp. Through it all, he has remained true to a singular ideal: “My personal mission has always been to help as many people as possible do the things they want to do with technology.”

MORE DISRUPTORS: David Cristello: Growth Breaks Things – and That’s Normal | The Disruptors | Blumer, Vacin: What Only 5% of Firms Get Right | Disruptors | Ira Rosenbloom: PE Forces Firms to Pick a Future | The Disruptors | Doug Slaybaugh: How to Define “Values in Motion” | The Disruptors | Nancy McClelland: Bookkeepers Need a Safe Space to Collaborate | The Disruptors | Chase Damiano: Good Operations Means Defining How the Hand-Offs Happen | The Disruptors | Jeff Seibert: Digits Software Moves Toward Real-Time Accounting | The Disruptors |

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Yet Johnston, executive vice president of K2 Enterprises and co-founder of Network Management Group, says the most significant shift is happening right now with Model Context Protocols (MCPs). MCPs are a technical layer that allows multiple systems to be connected and queried through AI. Though he’s spent decades watching technology evolve through mainframes, databases, graphical interfaces, and SaaS, he says MCPs may be the most consequential development he’s seen in years.

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