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  • AI Isn’t Replacing Your CPA. But It Is Changing the Job.

    AI & Automation

    AI isn’t replacing your CPA.
    But it’s changing the job.

    Larry Bernstein, CPA · CEO, Proseer

    Every week I see another headline about AI replacing accountants. Every week I think the same thing: they’re missing the point.

    AI isn’t going to replace your CPA. But the CPA who uses AI is going to replace the one who doesn’t.

    What AI Actually Does Well in Accounting

    After two years of building and deploying AI tools inside our own firm, here’s what I can tell you with confidence:

    Extraction

    AI is excellent at pulling information from documents, emails, and bank feeds, and putting it where it belongs. This used to be hours of staff time per client.

    Analysis

    Give an AI agent access to a client’s GL and it will flag unusual transactions faster and more consistently than a human reviewer.

    Drafting

    First drafts of management reports, client deliverables, and internal memos. The human reviews and refines, but the starting point is 80% there.

    Orchestration

    Connecting systems that don’t talk to each other. Sage Intacct to QuickBooks. Karbon to SharePoint. Tax organizers to CCH Axcess.

    What AI Still Can’t Do

    Judgment. Relationships. Creative problem-solving. Telling a client something they don’t want to hear in a way they can actually hear it.

    Every firm has staff who spend 70% of their time on tasks an AI could handle, leaving 30% for the work that actually requires their expertise. Flip that ratio and you’ve transformed your firm without hiring a single person.

    Why We’re Building in the Open

    Most of the AI tools marketed to accountants are black boxes with subscription fees. We went the other direction. Our framework, firm-stack, is open source and published on GitHub — free for any firm to use and adapt.

    Why give it away? Because the competitive advantage isn’t the tool — it’s how your firm implements it. And because the profession moves faster when we share what works.

    If you’re exploring AI for your firm, start small. Pick one repetitive workflow — document classification, bank reconciliation prep, client communication drafts — and automate it. See what your team does with the time they get back.

    That’s the real transformation. Not replacing people. Giving them room to do the work they went into this profession to do.

    — Larry Bernstein, CPA · CEO, Proseer

  • Advisory at Scale: Speaking at AICP Engage 2026

    AI & Automation

    Advisory at Scale.

    Speaking at AICP Engage 2026 · Larry Bernstein, CPA

    This June, I’ll be speaking at AICP Engage 2026 on a topic that’s been consuming my evenings and weekends for the past two years: how to deliver advisory services at scale using AI.

    The talk is called “Advisory at Scale” — and the core premise is simple. Every CPA firm says they want to move beyond compliance into advisory. Very few have figured out how to do it profitably for more than a handful of clients. AI changes that equation.

    The Problem

    Advisory work is high-touch by nature. It requires understanding a client’s business, synthesizing data from multiple systems, and delivering insights that are timely and specific. That doesn’t scale when you’re relying on senior staff to do all the thinking.

    Most firms solve this by either (a) only offering advisory to their largest clients, or (b) productizing it into something so generic it barely qualifies as advisory. Neither is a great answer.

    What We’re Building

    At Proseer, we’ve been building AI agents that handle the repetitive analytical work — pulling data from Sage Intacct and QuickBooks, generating variance analyses, flagging anomalies, drafting client-ready reports. The human advisor still owns the relationship and the judgment calls. But the AI does the heavy lifting that used to eat 80% of the time.

    The result: we can deliver meaningful advisory touches to more clients, more frequently, without burning out our team.

    What I’ll Cover at Engage

    The architecture behind our AI advisory workflow.

    Real examples of agents in production — not demos, actual client work.

    How we structured our tech stack so a CPA (not a developer) can maintain it.

    The open-source framework we’re releasing so other firms can do the same.

    Honest lessons from things that didn’t work.

    If you’re at AICP Engage this June, come find me. And if you’re a firm leader thinking about how to scale advisory without scaling headcount, check out firm-stack — our open-source framework, published on GitHub and free for any firm to use.

    — Larry Bernstein, CPA · CEO, Proseer