AI in Accounting: Adapt or Get Left Behind
Most accountants are sleeping on the biggest opportunity of their careers.
And it’s not more of everyone’s favorite CPE credits.
It’s AI.
This isn’t hype. It’s not “coming someday.”
It’s here. Right now.
The efficiency it creates is already driving bigger productivity and profit gaps between the groups who will and won’t use it.
The Gap Between Winners and Losers
Gartner says 58% of finance teams used AI in 2024.
But only 36% of those projects actually worked.
The difference?
Losers treated AI like a toy.
Winners treated it like a teammate.
What Winning Looks Like
Here’s what forward-thinking accountants are doing:
Automating mail: A nonprofit controller scans every piece of postal mail, runs it through AI, and routes it into their workflow. Four hours a week — gone.
Drafting memos in minutes: A Memphis firm trained an AI bot on their technical memos. Four-hour jobs now take thirty minutes (with human review).
Turbocharging Excel: Tell ChatGPT-4o to “find every transaction with X and remove the rows above it,” and it spits out perfect VBA code.
Audit at speed: AI tools like Trullion scan 80-page PDFs, extract key points, and tie disclosures to balances.
These aren’t experiments.
They’re billable hours turned into strategic hours.
The Next Wave: Agentic AI
AI that just answers questions is yesterday’s news.
The AI of today, Agentic AI, takes action.
Imagine an AI that:
Detects a compliance gap
Updates the doc
Emails the client
Schedules the follow-up
No prompts. No back-and-forth. Just done.
It’s early days, but it’s coming fast.
Why You Should Care
AI isn’t going to “steal your job.”
It’s going to steal your excuses.
Clients will expect faster turnarounds, deeper insights, and proactive advice.
If you’re still manually foot-ticking spreadsheets in three years, you’ll be the slowest person in the room.
Your Move
Pick one process this week that drains your time.
Ask, “How could AI do 80% of this for me?”
The accountants who ask that question now will own the next decade.
The ones who don’t… well, there’s always another spreadsheet to reconcile.
If you want the exact tools, prompts, and workflows top firms are using, Maadii has you covered.
