Accountants Race to Tame AI before AI Outruns the Practice
Barely 1 in 5 firms have an AI strategy, leaving other firms in various degrees of chaos.
By CPA Trendlines Research
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Supkis Cheek: Most Accountants Are Missing This AI Shift | ARC
The profession is changing in ways that go far beyond automation.
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Originally published May 7, 2026
Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation
In a profession often defined by structure, standards, and well-worn career paths, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, opens a different kind of conversation in a recent Accounting ARC episode—one that challenges assumptions about what it means to build a career in accounting.
His guest, Danielle Supkis Cheek, embodies that challenge.
As senior vice president of AI, analytics and assurance at CaseWare, Supkis Cheek operates at the intersection of technology, methodology, and human judgment. But her path there was anything but linear—and that, Shimamoto suggests, is exactly the point.
MORE Accounting ARC: 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 | Accounting’s “Untalked-About” Frontier | Why Happiness is Hard-Fought for High Achievers | The Fastest Way to Lose Talent Is “Dick Leadership” | Post-Holiday Fatigue Isn’t a Failure; It’s a Signal | OCR, Research Bots & Meeting Assistants: What Actually Helps Now | Return Season is the New Stress Test | Small Firms May Have the Biggest Advantage in 2026 | Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting |
Supkis Cheek describes her role less as a technologist and more as a translator. “I like to think of myself as someone who translates across domains,” she says, explaining how she helps software companies understand how accountants actually work—and how technology can reshape those workflows.
Private Equity’s Big Bet Faces an AI Shake-Up
But scale may matter more, not less, in the accounting and legal markets.
By CPA Trendlines Research
The same technology that promises higher margins could weaken the billable-hour economics that made professional services so attractive.
MORE Private Equity | What $1 Billion Buys in Today’s CPA Market
Private equity’s rush into law and accounting is running into a new question: What happens to a roll-up strategy built on professional labor when artificial intelligence starts doing more of the work?
Jeff Seibert: Digits Software Moves Toward Real-Time Accounting | The Disruptors
Dovetailing finance and product engineering can transform accounting.
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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines
When Jeff Seibert, CEO and founder of Digits, was at Twitter, he was astonished by the difference in data quality and timeliness between the product engineering and the finance sides of the business.
On the product engineering side, testing tools, dashboards, and analytic tools provided real-time data on “exactly what your users are clicking on, what your servers are doing every second.” At the same time, “I was waiting two to three weeks for our accountant to give me a black and white P&L,” he recalls, even with “100 people in corporate finance.”
MORE DISRUPTORS: Candy Bellau: The $350 Pricing Mistake that Nearly Broke this Boutique Firm | The Disruptors | Poe: What P.E. Really Wants from Firms | The Disruptors | Blake Oliver: Build a Biz that Runs Without You | Daiber: Use Succession as a Growth Strategy | Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm | Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road’s Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time |
That experience led him to start Digits in 2018, an AI-native accounting platform, which is going “head to head with QuickBooks and Xero.”
Three Tech Priorities with Rapid ROI
Build advisory capacity without waiting for outside capital.
By Hitendra Patil
The technology gap between private equity-backed and independent firms is real, and it is also smaller than it appears from the outside.
Here is something I have consistently observed: PE-backed firms invest heavily in technology during their first 18 to 24 months post-acquisition because they have to. They are merging systems from multiple firms, migrating client data and standardizing workflows across a larger organization. That investment is substantial, but a meaningful portion of it solves problems that independent firms do not have, because they were never acquired in the first place.
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The independent firm’s technology challenge is different: deliberate modernization at a pace that does not disrupt client service. That is a more tractable problem than integration at scale, and the firms that treat it as a sequenced project tend to close the gap faster than they expected.
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