Insights, guides, and updates
Intuit just connected QuickBooks directly to Claude — your clients can now build AI agents with their own financial data, no accountant required. Plus every AI company is converging into every other AI company, Jeff Bezos is raising $100 billion to rebuild manufacturing with AI, and 81,000 Claude users just confirmed what we published on Wednesday.
98% of accounting firms use AI. Only 21% have a policy governing it. Your staff is already putting client data into tools you haven't vetted — and the line between safe and dangerous isn't where most practice owners think it is. Here's what's actually risky, what's safe right now, and the one thing you should implement this week.
Before every coaching call, I check with my bookkeeping team to get current on the client's status. That's not preparation — it's a tax. Every CAS practice pays it dozens of times a day: the invisible cost of moving context between people so someone can do the actual work.
Sequoia Capital says tax advisory is 80-90% intelligence work — rule-following, not judgment. Nate Jones argues most of what we call judgment is rules we've internalized so deeply we forgot they were rules. If they're right, the moat accountants keep defending on LinkedIn is real — but much narrower than the profession assumes.
AI matches experienced professionals 70-83% of the time. The profession's biggest complaint — that AI gets things wrong — is actually a description of where your professional value lives. The 17-30% where you catch the error, push back, and explain why? That's judgment. And it's the one skill nobody in the profession is developing deliberately.
The research was valuable. What happened next was more valuable — a 10-minute reflective conversation with the AI that turned a one-off project into a reusable methodology anyone in the firm can follow. That's context engineering. And it's how you stop losing what you learn.
