Every so often, a piece comes out in the industry press that puts its finger on exactly the problem we set out to solve. A recent article on Accounting Insight News — Accountex's official publication did just that, and it's worth unpacking.
The article opens with a striking statistic: AI adoption among accounting firms has jumped from 9% to 41% in a single year. Yet, as the piece points out, most firms running pilots won't feel any difference on their P&L.
That gap between adoption and impact will sound familiar to anyone who's sat through a vendor demo, formed an "AI working group," and then watched six months pass with nothing changing. The Accountex piece notes that around 70% of digital transformation initiatives never hit their objectives and AI projects in accounting are following the same script.
The diagnosis? The problem is rarely the technology. It's where firms choose to start.
We couldn't agree more. It's the same conclusion we reached working with firms: "we need to adopt AI" is a mandate, not a plan.
The most useful idea in the article is the question that high-performing firms are asking: which single workflow costs the most time relative to the judgment it actually requires?
The examples cited will resonate with almost any practice:
What links them is the mismatch the article identifies: expensive people spending high-volume, rules-based hours on tasks that need none of their expertise.
The article makes a second point we think is underrated. Speeding up one step in a ten-step process by 50% improves the whole process by roughly 5%. It's an improvement nobody notices, and one that quietly kills momentum for the next project.
The firms seeing real change, the piece argues, ask a bolder question: what if the entire workflow ran in the background, with the team simply reviewing the output? In other words, turning people from doers into reviewers.
This mirrors how we've designed The Gap. The Gap's AI is built on over 20 year of advisory expertise this feeds into every touchpoint within the meeting workspace from the AI summaries, notetaker, meeting minutes and outputs right through to the coaching reports.
A firm that frees up 200 hours of compliance work and lets them dissipate has gained nothing.
A firm that redirects those hours into advisory, which bills at two to three times the rate, has changed its business.
This is the conversation we have with every firm we work with. Automation isn't the goal; the goal is the capacity it creates and what you deliberately do with it.
The article closes on a point about competitive advantage: any firm can buy the same software, so the tool itself isn't the moat. The durable advantage is the repeatable ability to spot a workflow, automate it, and ship in weeks — a muscle that compounds, making the firms building it now harder to catch every month.
The industry conversation is catching up to what the early movers already know. If you'd like to see what this looks like in your practice, why not book a demo with our sales team to understand more.
Referenced article: "Why most accounting firms are adopting AI in the wrong place", Accounting Insight News (Accountex), 30 June 2026.